Nigeria’s celebrated novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is an
interviewer’s delight, whether she is talking about Nigeria, novels,
feminism or hair. A few weeks ago, she was a guest of Stephen Sackur’s
HARDtalk on the British Broadcasting Corporation where she talked about
Biafra, ethnicity in Nigeria, the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War and the
censorship of the movie version of her novel about the civil war, Half
of a Yellow Sun.
“Nigeria as a country has never really engaged
with Biafra,” Adichie said in response to Sackur’s question about
whether today’s Nigerians had learnt enough about the important lessons
of the war. “There is a lot that is unresolved about that period of our
history.”
I agree with Adichie. Nigeria has not engaged with
Biafra and there is a lot that is still unresolved about the civil war.
But it’s not just Biafra and that tumultuous period of our history.
There is a lot that is unresolved about Nigeria as a whole and many
aspects of our existence as a country. Nigeria has not engaged with June
12, just as we have not engaged with Boko Haram, to mention only two of
the more recent episodic convulsions that threaten the very foundation
of the country.
In a sense, the Biafra experience could be a
metaphor for the many unresolved problems that confront us as a country,
whether we are talking about agitations by minority ethnic
nationalities, the upsurge in militancy across the country, the quest
for the balkanisation of the country by fringe groups that go by all
sorts of absurd names or the infernal resolve of a group to impose a
religious code on an otherwise secular country.
“How should we
make sense of Nigeria’s 21st century identity?” Sackur had asked in the
introduction to his programme. Interestingly, around the time of that
interview, there were rallies, amongst other troubling occurrences in
Nigeria, in London and a few cities around the world in support of the
Biafra renaissance.
A week earlier, some Biafra protagonists were
arrested after a failed attempt to take over a radio station in Enugu
and declare, or perhaps revive, the Republic of Biafra. It was in the
same city that pro-Biafra “forces” were arrested for a daring attempt to
take over the Enugu State Government House. Enugu was the first and one
of the three capitals of Biafra while the secession lasted.
How
do we make sense of all this? There are those who think that what we are
witnessing is a necessary and passing phase in the attempt to build a
nation. It may well be! But, it may also spell doom for a country that
has had more than five decades to forge a “perfect union”, but has
squandered each opportunity.
Clearly, as a country, we haven’t
learnt anything about the regrettable civil war of 1967-1970 or the
other tragic events that occurred before that war. We have also not
learnt from the dreadful upheavals that have taken place after the war;
events that have shaken the very foundations of our existence as a
country.
Nigeria will disintegrate unless we collectively do
something about it. Nations are not built on mere wishful thinking. No
country that is run the way Nigeria is being run survives for too long.
The hard truth is that there is nothing sacrosanct about Nigeria. A
nation is neither an eternal nor a divinely ordained construct as is
often delusively proclaimed, in the case of Nigeria, by our
exceptionally depraved ruling class and their sympathisers. It comes
into being at a historical juncture – through a combination of factors
and forces – and can cease to be by the same logic.
Nigeria was
an arbitrary creation of British colonialists who coupled disparate
ethnic nationalities for economic and other reasons. Of course, many
countries around the world were created through the same process and for
the same reasons. The problem in the case of Nigeria, however, was that
there were no attempts, at independence and subsequently, by Nigerians,
the new inheritors of the contraption the British left behind, to
remake the country in the image of a people who had broken the shackles
of colonialism and had to build an egalitarian society; a nation of
equity, social justice, the rule of law and all the fundamentals of a
modern state.
How then do we move forward from the boiling
cauldron – the outcome of a forced and dubious amalgam of different
ethnicities, religions and cultural beliefs – to a nation of equal
opportunity, shared vision and common future when we fail to learn from
our history and allow primordial interests and short-term gains to stand
in the way of a collective need for national survival?
Just as
the colonialists intended, we have managed never to miss an opportunity
to highlight the fault lines that have kept us perpetually at war with
one another. And just like the colonialists, our rapacious and thieving
ruling class, military and civilian, from across the country –
emphasising our fault lines – have succeeded in not only misruling us
but also dividing us.
Take the simple and harmless matter of
honouring the winner of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, Chief
M.K.O. Abiola, by the ongoing National Conference. That election was
wickedly annulled by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, colluding with some of the
vile creatures who today are the drivers of our so-called democracy.
Babangida and company have yet to explain the reason for that criminal
complicity.
That election showed that Nigerians could rise above
ethnic and religious divisions given a purposeful and selfless
leadership. Of course, it also showed that Nigeria’s ruling elite are
not interested in the unity of this country beyond what they can get
from it; never mind that they are always proclaiming that: “The unity of
Nigeria is not negotiable.”
June 12, 2014, marked the 21st
anniversary of that election. Sadly, when a motion, seeking to pay
tribute and give national recognition to Abiola and hundreds of
Nigerians who died protesting the annulment, was moved at the National
Conference by Orok Duke from Cross River State, delegates were
reportedly “divided along regional lines as those from southern Nigeria
favoured the motion while those from the North rejected it”. And this
fierce rejection of a legitimate quest for justice is recorded in a 21st
century Nigeria; ironically, in a gathering consecrated to banish
inequity and injustice and the multiple handmaids of Nigeria’s
stillbirth.
This was an election in which the masses of the
“North” ensured that Abiola from Ogun State in “southern Nigeria” beat
his opponent, Alhaji Bashir Tofa from Kano State in “northern Nigeria”;
an election in which Abiola and his running mate, Babagana Kingibe, both
Muslims, won across the length and breadth of the country.
It is
heartbreaking that a representative of the civil society at the
National Conference that aims to address the many flashpoints of our
distorted nationhood, Mallam Nasir Kura, from Kano State, was reported
to have led the chorus of voices from the “North” that opposed any
attempt to remember June 12, Abiola and Nigerians from all walks of life
who paid the supreme sacrifice during that upheaval. For Kura and
company, June 12, like its unfortunate victims, is “dead and buried”.
Make no mistake, while that rowdy session over honouring Abiola which
attracted the attention of security operatives and was going to turn the
confab into a WWE arena may have looked like an attempt to promote an
“ethnic agenda”, accusing people of being ethnic jingoists for that
action does not tell the whole story. After all, Olusegun Obasanjo,
former president, chief beneficiary of the June 12 debacle and Abiola’s
kinsman was – until his recent conversion, like Paul on his way to
Damascus – one of the most trenchant traducers of Abiola and June 12.
CHIDO ONUMAH
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