Monday, May 30 was the forty-ninth anniversary of the declaration of Biafra, a single action that sparked off a three year long civil war, which led to the death of more than a million persons.
Needless to say that the civil war was a watershed in the history of Nigeria, not only because of those that died, but because of the immense damage done to the structure of Nigeria, the psyche of Nigerians and the complete change of Nigeria’s course and future.
One would expect that Nigeria would mark the date not just to celebrate her fallen heroes but to remember a date that altered the present and future of Nigeria.
The country should, at the very least, set out a day to commemorate her biggest scar rather than hide underneath blankets of denial.
Instead, we have, for much of our history, gleefully pretended that Nigeria doesn’t have gangrene on several of its appendages.
Several years of avoiding Biafra, and all the attendant questions from the civil war, has created a mountain out of a molehill and made sacred a topic that should otherwise be open for public discussion and education.
Biafra has become the proverbial elephant in the room, that everyone is aware o, yet nobody speaks of it, out of fear or selfishness -or both.
This lack of discussion of Biafra in public domain is the genesis of the reason the Nigerian state, and her actors, are eternally bellicose when it comes to the issue of Biafra secession.
It would appear that there is a consciousness that the idea of Biafra must be killed or it will kill us, even when pro-Biafra agitators protest peacefully.
In its own way, the state’s quick recourse to violence has created an awareness in secessionists that government will most likely mete out high handed and undue responses to acts of secession.
So it creates on both ends -state government and pro-Biafra agitators- parties that are distrustful of each, poised for confrontation and ready to meet bullishness with bullishness.
Think of it this way. In recent times (that’s mid last year, when the latest call for secession became loudest), Biafra agitators protested in relative peace until their members in Aba were attacked, harassed, humiliated, beaten and killed by state security agencies.
This birthed several other similar attacks and disrespect of their fundamental human rights by security forces.
Having seen a growing pattern in the reaction of government, agitators are now conscious of attack by state agents and are equally ready to respond in like terms to government.
On Monday, protesters took to the streets with a consiousness that a clash will occur and they will either fight back for what they believed in or be treated with disrespect -or even killed- for what they believe in.
So yes, for the bloody attack in some southeast and south south states, government has a larger portion of the blame.
They created a cycle of violence -just as they are now doing in the Niger Delta- and people are looking, learning and adapting quickly.
And then there’s the problem that the escalating violence is creating martyrs to a divisive cause, burning bridges between the government and the governed, and increasing the level of emotional attachment to the issue of Biafra.
All these combined roughly translates that the call for Biafra will not be solved by violence neither will the injury heal anytime soon, instead it will keep rearing its head until it is dealt with in a more educated way rather than brute force.
But this is not a Buhari problem, as much as we will like to blame our taciturn President for every national disaster.
No, this is a systemic anomaly that has existed since the day after Philip Effiong surrendered and Nigeria decided to hide her fault rather than embrace it.
To solve it, we must embrace openness on several sensitive issues.
We must learn to talk rather than hide under the pretense of national unity.
Or one day, after years of bottling shit up, it will blow up in our faces, then we will learn the deadly lesson that avoidance has never solved a problem.
But talking can.
