by Chris Nwogodo

Radio Biafra is the opium of the historically illiterate, benefitting from the pervasive ignorance about Nigeria’s past that plagues the post-civil war generation. No one who actually witnessed the war or who has studied it diligently craves an encore.

A few weeks ago, I was on a trip below the Niger when I encountered Radio Biafra. It was a brief encounter in a taxi cab negotiating the streets of Enugu and the broadcast was a rambling angry monologue inveighing against enemies and calling down the wrath of the gods upon them. In the weeks since then, Radio Biafra has gained national infamy, confounded federal authorities, excited some people and alarmed others.

The question is why ‘Biafra’ continues to evidently resonate with a section of the population more than forty years after the civil war. This is all the more puzzling since Nigeria’s demographic profile suggests that 70 percent of the population was born after the war and therefore have no memories of the carnage. Secondly, Radio Biafra has been in existence for a while but has only recently entered the mainstream of national attention. Why now?

The angst and alienation that fuel Radio Biafra and which it feeds, in turn, are rooted less in the distant past than in our recent history. They stem, in part, from the structural inequities of a socioeconomic order that has nurtured too many disillusioned young Nigerians in a highly unequal and polarised society. Typical of cases of alienation in plural polities, those who feel excluded are responding to and with the narratives that best conform to their socio-cultural matrixes. In the far North, it is Boko Haram’s lethal extremist theology that rejects democracy and the nation-state as infidel contraptions; for Igbo discontents, it is Biafra.

Radio Biafra’s appeal is also explained by the emotional fallout of the ouster of a president, who possessed the symbolic value of being nominally the first president from the losing side of the civil war, although the Niger Delta had favoured their chances in the Nigerian federation over minority status in an Igbo-dominated secessionist state; who during electioneering emphasised his middle names “Ebele” and “Azikiwe” to signify his kinship with the Igbo. Under Jonathan, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) shrank from a national party to a regional party with its base in the South-Eastern heartland. The rhetoric promoted by President Jonathan’s camp tapped into the fears, insecurities and anxieties of that region, and while it proved a winsome strategy in the South-East and the Niger Delta, the blatant provincialism repelled so many Nigerians and ultimately cost Jonathan the presidency. His defeat in the March 28 poll has been (wrongly) interpreted as a defeat for both zones.

The suggestion in some quarters that the South-East erred in rejecting the All Progressives Congress and must now prepare to languish in oppositional irrelevance need not trouble anyone. For decades, the South-West was the base of the opposition tendency. There was neither weeping nor gnashing of teeth among its elite. Instead, new and more broadminded political leaders emerged from the zone and jettisoned the nativist irredentism of the past, built effective political machines and expanded their networks reaching across fault lines to forge new alliances and coalitions.

In contrast, the South-East has no clear political leadership that could do the same. Few politicians seem to have the stomach for opposition politics. The PDP has yet to regroup and redefine its future while the All Progressives Grand Alliance, the nominal partisan vehicle of the South-East’s regional aspirations (whatever they are) lacks leadership and direction. To be sure, a central leadership has never sat well with the Igbos’ fierce republicanism – a unique political heritage now scandalised by the emergence across the East of legions of self-proclaimed pocket satraps and monarchs of no consequence.

The added problem is that the days of having politicians with a guaranteed regional base of support on the basis of sectarian mobilisation are passing away – even in the South-West and in the North. Furthermore, an iron law of Nigerian politics that seems to have eluded the PDP and, which the recent polls only reinforced, is that even a guaranteed sectarian base of support cannot earn a national electoral mandate.

In this vacuum of political meaning, Radio Biafra’s simplistic and incoherent message of disruption, its one-sided and one-dimensional rendition of history, its manipulation of popular myths and grievances, appeal to some, especially given the Nigerian tendency to scapegoat other groups for individual and collective shortcomings. The pirate station is tapping into a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex which is the all-purpose narrative which various groups use as leverage for demanding concessions in Nigerian politics. However, no ethnic group is under attack in Nigeria; Nigerians are marginalised as citizens, and suffer as a result of a derelict state’s continuous failure to protect its citizenry. The villain of our national odyssey is not any one ethnic group but rather a very Pan-Nigerian and ecumenical parasitic plutocracy. The South-East is no more neglected than the North-East. The problem is that of civic insecurity which is universal in its afflictive scope.

Writing in the West Africa magazine of October 1982, the former Biafran functionary, Arthur Nwankwo warned his kin against entertaining “a chronic persecution complex.”

Victimhood has never suited the Igbo particularly well being Nigeria’s most visible and ubiquitous entrepreneurs. By every measure, the Igbo are actually a Nigerian success story having recovered from the extreme adversity of the civil war to regain geo-economic ubiquity. As exemplars of entrepreneurial wanderlust, they are the main actors in the informal economy which keeps Nigeria chugging along. This economic visibility accounts for their vulnerability and disproportionate suffering in class wars disguised as sectarian upheavals that erupt periodically. Radio Biafra’s hate messages merely intensify this vulnerability.

There is no indication that Radio Biafra represents the sentiments of the majority of the Igbo and we must always resist the temptation to judge whole groups of people by their extreme lunatic fringes. Clearly, some people see the pirate station as an enterprise in creative defiance and for them listening to it is their own private act of subversion. However, it is one thing to traffic in Biafran memorabilia – currency, flags and other such items; it is quite another to traffic in venomous hate speech, sow enmity between people and incite violence. For this, Radio Biafra should be bracketed along with Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, which infamously enflamed the Rwandan genocide.

In a democracy, the very meaning and worthiness of the nation-state will always be questioned by the citizens and they are well within their rights to peacefully advocate alternative political arrangements of any description. But hate-mongering, incitements to violence and the adoption of violence to further those aims are absolutely unacceptable.

Radio Biafra is the opium of the historically illiterate, benefitting from the pervasive ignorance about Nigeria’s past that plagues the post-civil war generation. No one who actually witnessed the war or who has studied it diligently craves an encore. It is also among this generation that Biafra is apt to be romanticised beyond reason, in part, because of our society’s failure to adequately memorialise its defining tragedies and to enshrine their necessary moral lessons in the national psyche. There are, for instance, no national monuments to the civil war, or totems of remembrance for the lives lost in serial episodes of internecine strife and thus no memorials with which to say ‘never again.’ Where clinical historical recollection is lacking, myth, falsehood, half-truth, revisionism and prejudicial innuendo flourish.

Arguments for Nigeria’s disintegration are undermined by the fact that her ethnically homogenous states are among the worst-governed. Separatist sentiments are a misappropriation of sociopolitical energies that are best deployed towards holding state governments accountable. In the South-East, such a movement could mobilise state governments to develop a regional economic agenda that opens up the zone and attracts sufficient infrastructural and fiscal investment to enable it realise its potential as Nigeria’s natural industrial hub. This will benefit the South-East far more than some federal appointments for some Igbo politicians. What is patronage for the elite is often symbolic and sterile tokenism to the people they claim to represent.

Biafra is infeasible today because the South-East is essentially landlocked, the bulk of Igbo-owned assets and investments are outside the zone, its soil is too poor to sustain demand by a large population and there is neither mainstream Igbo sympathy nor a regional elite consensus for a Biafra 2.0. In addition, like most of the rest of Nigeria, there are sufficient intra-ethnic antipathies to subvert the coherence of any potential Biafran identity construct. Like other parts of Nigeria, the South-East is best served by remaining part of a larger whole and the geo-economic synergy that is Nigeria.

Radio Biafra broadcasts out of the United Kingdom where its main voice, Nnamdi Kanu, is safely ensconced in sedate environs while seeking to ignite a conflagration that will consume the unwary, the angry and the malleable which he will doubtlessly observe from his remote perch. The cynical opportunism of his enterprise is obvious.

Biafra was a tragic exercise in quixotic futility, by turns, heroically defiant and catastrophically costly for millions. A year after its inception, a Biafra whose boundaries were coterminous with the Eastern Region had effectively ceased to exist. As Brigadier General Godwin Alabi-Isama noted in his civil war memoir, The Tragedy of Victory, by October 1968, Biafra had shrunk to less than a third of its original size and was struggling to accommodate half its population now crammed into that space with nowhere to go.

Despite Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s rebuff of a peace delegation in May 1967 with the boast that he possessed “the biggest army in Black Africa”, his vow to “wage open and total war” on the federation and turn it into a “desert”, Biafra was militarily unsustainable. Less than a year of fighting exposed these claims as delusional. Pro-peace elements in the Biafran establishment who favoured a negotiated settlement were marginalised or in danger of detention or execution as saboteurs. A number of such elements defected to the federal authorities or simply abandoned the doomed cause.

One of such defectors was the former president, Nnamdi Azikiwe who believed that Ojukwu’s intransigence would reduce Biafra to a “cemetery.” Biafrans had made their point. Their courage, resilience and the martial prowess had been proven above and beyond all rational measure and had careened into the path of collective suicide. Biafra’s collapse after Ojukwu’s flight into exile suggested that the war’s protraction stemmed largely from one man’s oratorical gifts and hubristic perception of his historical self-importance, as participant-observers like Raph Uwechue and Ken Saro-Wiwa charged.

Ojukwu returned to Nigeria after twelve years in exile, and went on to contest the senate and the presidency, served as the Abacha regime’s special envoy, and upon his death, received a state burial. His dramatic odyssey made him a success in Nigeria. The same could not be said for the many that perished during the war. That conflict was a tragically needless march of folly. It need not be re-enacted today.

 

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Chris Ngwodo is a writer, analyst and consultant.

 Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.