There are a thousand and one reasons why Nigeria as a matter of urgency must split up along ethnic/cultural lines as soon as today. (The emphasis here is on the now for very obvious reasons). We are going to discuss a
The absurdity of attempting to build a healthy nation or even a mere mumbo jumbo country of some sort out of the anomaly called Nigeria can only be compared to the vain attempt of trying to reverse an irreversible chemical reaction. A kind of trying to put back together, with the yolk and white albumin intact, an egg that fell to a bare hard rock surface from a 20, 30 foot height. That is an insane attempt and cannot work.
In the plastic industry there are mainly two kinds of plastics, the thermosetting and the thermoplastic plastics. The difference between these two groups of plastics is very fundamental and, like two worlds apart. In the case of the first group, once the curing process of the raisin has been completed you cannot recycle or reuse the material, so to say: The resulting product has undergone an irreversible chemical process. This is very unlike the thermoplastics which can be remanufactured and recycled for almost an infinite number of times. The implication in the manufacture of the two kinds of plastics is that in the case of one you cannot make up for any product deficiencies once the manufacturing process has been completed. Any faulty or bad product resulting from the production line can only be broken down and in most cases ground up and used as fillers in other fields of manufacture but never to be reused to reproduce any product in the form that the manufacturer originally set out to manufacture. While in the case of the other kind of plastics the manufacturer has the privilege of the near infinite capacity of being able to reuse the same original material over and over again.
To enable us understand further why there is this difference in the two processes is the fact that in the case of the thermosetting plastics they need very high temperature to cure such that reheating them in an attempt to reprocess them completely decomposes the different parts of the chemical makeup so the different components become impossible to bind together with one another in any one piece of a unified product anymore. Then the only choice left to the manufacturer is to break up the defective product completely. He will never be able to fix them together into a whole and useable unit. So, without stretching the mind we can say that such has become the fate of the Nigerian union as we shall show further in this discussion. It can never be put together in any workable piece.
But just before we go any further we cannot help to shout it out aloud now as we shall be doing throughout the entire writing; Stop this madness and divide Nigeria along the ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic lines as the natural divisions already exist. (People’s lives, Igbo/Biafra people’s lives have been wasted enough to maintain the madness and we Igbo/Biafra people shall take no more). It is self-mockery and utter delusion to continue believing that someday the very different peoples in Nigeria’s forced union will suddenly become one and start acting as a people. An irreversible social, cultural, religious, linguistic and political process has taken place between us (Igbo/Biafra) and them; Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani and we can never be put together in one space as peoples of the same country. Let every people go their own way. Enough of the hatred and bloodletting.
All advocates for Nigeria’s unity are rather feeble in their reasoning and beclouded with diseased emotions. It is particularly sad when such advocates are coming from the other ethnic groups other than Igbo/Biafra ethnic group. This is so because they are not the ones at the receiving end of the most dastard absurdity of Nigeria’s existence. When such advocates happen to be Igbo the naiveties are so apparent as the observer can hardly miss the pathetic display of the inadequate feelings and anxiety to belong and please their haters or the source of their hatred and oppression.
A society’s welfare and that of the human members of it is its ultimate end. The existence of any society can only be justified if it is preserving and catering to the wellbeing of the members. Basing the existence of any society on emotions does not make for a successful human society but rather an absurd distortion of human dignity. There must be methods that work, a people’s way of doing things on which laws and their enforcements are based. And every member must accept or easily identify with this way of the society for it to be considered as both legal and just. This is about the only way a society can set common goals for themselves and work at accomplishing them and actually do because there is mutual trust and agreement amongst the parties.
When all these very basic elements that should establish a society are absent from a society as in the case of Nigeria then under what basis do we continue to hope to maintain such a country. Actually at this point such insensitive insistence introduces a moral question to the equation as well. Worst of all is that there is no blueprint existing anywhere with which to forge a true nation out of the Nigerian failure and assuming such a thing exists there is no will anywhere to implement it. And experience has always proven that intention is never enough; it is the will that makes all the difference.
The continued advocacy for Nigeria’s continued existence can also be reasoned to border on stupidity as it is unreasonable and to say the least, lazy. Such preaching can only come from those who are unwilling to change the status quo and get down to true constructive, creative, progressive and sincere, honest act of realistic nation building. They do not want to dirty their hands by working hard to undo the dirty work the colonialists unwittingly did. Such is unfortunate and even pathetic that some people though may know the right thing to do but will be very unwilling to do it because they are afraid of change and would rather that women and children continue to pay with their lives. But they forget that change is part of this existence that we know and that we can also willingly be part of this positive change we are talking about. Change Nigeria, break it up into safe and workable parts and forget about the foolish pride in the fancy of a rotten and corrupted “giant” (most populous African country. A shame and a disgustful thought to contemplate).
Nigeria’s break up is actually for the good interest and wellbeing of all those concerned in the current dance of the absurd. We should stop wasting everyone’s time, progress and development and face the truth once and for all. Break up Nigeria today so that we can all move on in our separate ways and you will see how that one act will be the one cure that cures all. Break up Nigeria today and we will end corruption in the resulting societies and the polity. Break up Nigeria and nepotism will pass. Break up Nigeria and watch how patriotism will permeate every nerve and marrow of the citizens of all the resulting liberated nations. Break up Nigeria today and all vices that have bedeviled the present mortally diseased silliness and a disgrace called Nigeria will end.
Forget about the so much touted about “sovereign national conference” and all such half-hearted calls for referendums or plebiscites to find out if the various peoples that are currently held in bondage in Nigeria are willing to remain subjugated and held down forever or go their separate ways and become free and progressive. Such calls and exercises are pretentious and a waste of time and will amount to waste of resources. Forget about Ojukwu’s Aburi Accord. The time for those has past. The situation today is so obvious that none of the constituent members of the Nigerian union is interested in continuing with the Nigerian relationship. And this brings us to the inescapable question that keeps coming back to mind every so often; do we really have to copy other people and era at all times and in all things? Even when their circumstances and situations are not the same as ours? Do we really want to show the world that we are incapable of being creative and pioneering new ways of doing things and solving problems based on our own unique circumstance and experience?
Confederation or true federalism and all such things are actually anathema and abomination to mention in reference to the current Nigerian question. Right now as situations stand we had long past the stage of referendums and all those South Sudan, Scottish, Welsh, etc experiences. In our own unique case we do not need any plebiscites to determine if anyone still wants to remain in Nigeria. No one wants to. It will be a mockery of the human intelligence to subject our people, especially the Igbo/Biafra people to some kind of a kangaroo exercise of voting to prove that they want to leave Nigeria. They want to leave Nigeria now and have always wanted to. They already went to war once with Nigeria to prove it. Igbo/Biafra people are still prepared to fight again if there is a clique that still thinks that in today’s world and age they must continue to subjugate a people and force them to remain in a most destructive and retrogressive union against their wish.
For those who may want to ask why we are not being so diplomatic and sound so politically correct (compromising) in our demand, we have this for you, the truth is that it is easier to speak in a rigmarole, fanciful and long winded fashion and at the end leave the readers guessing at what we meant to say than to be explicit and unambiguous. This is not what we are out here to accomplish. We are suffering and getting killed by Nigeria and cannot afford that luxury that is mischievously known in some quarters as “balancing the argument”. We do not want to leave the reader in any state of ambiguity because such only benefits the so-called elite who are experts at fishing confused waters to their utmost advantage and to the detriment of the people who continue to pay with their lives and the future of their children so as to maintain for the elite the status quo.
As we are about to leave the reader to their thoughts and conscience we shall briefly itemize a few of those things we have talked about in this essay. Also, in parting, we must urge the reader that it is not enough to read or be informed. But every responsible member of the human race must actively do something about the destructive and disgraceful continued existence of the corporate Nigeria. Together we can all work honestly, sincerely and pragmatically to break up Nigeria into the naturally occurring nations. Every little act anyone can contribute will surely go a long way at saving lives and helping advance a people’s happiness and a life of fulfillment.
To every responsible member of the human race it will not be difficult to agree without equivocations that each of the reasons enumerated below is so fundamental and can be sufficient on their individual merit to base Nigeria’s break up on just anyone of them. What is needed at this point are men and women of goodwill all over the world who hate absurdity and the unnecessary destruction of fellow human lives for the ridiculous reasons of who they are and for worshipping differently from their neighbors. Or for the sheer demonic fancy of a jaundiced unity. On the whole, Nigeria is a failed experiment of piecing together a mish mash, incongruent and very dissimilar and eternally irreconcilable peoples with nothing in common in one space and call the devilish mix a country of some sort. We, the Igbo/Biafra people who bear the brunt, the pain and the shame of such a Nigeria refuse today to continue in this idiocy.
Let’s therefore break up Nigeria today because:
1. Nigeria as a third-party construct was put together without due consent of the actual members of the union or taking into consideration the feelings and cultural sensitivities of any of the people concerned.
2. The union from the onset is faulty because the fundamental ingredients that make any social contract or society work were lacking. Such a thing like religious/cultural affinity is just non-existent amongst the peoples of Nigeria.
3. It is believed that all successful unions, relationships, marriages, societies, etc are those in which members can communicate among themselves in a clear language that every party to the arrangement understands. Therefore the most important element in forming a union that works becomes the commonality of language. In Nigeria that is absent.
4. For a relationship or union to work there must be common objectives, goals, or destiny that everyone in it must subscribe to or aspire toward. The Muslim North and West of Nigeria surely have different agendas and goals from those of Christian and Animist Igbo/Biafra people.
5. It is only based on when all members of the society can have a common objective will they be able to work together, trusting one another knowing that they are all headed toward the same direction even when the details of their methods and minor views differ it is still understood and rooms or provisions are made for those diversities so that no one takes up arms to kill the others. Such understanding is completely non-existent in Nigeria. No tolerance of views that are unislamic is present in Nigeria.
6. There is mutual suspicion amongst the different peoples of the Nigerian union and no one is even making attempt at tolerating the other.
7. Islamic jihadist project against Igbo/Biafra people and the other non Muslim population of the failed Nigerian experiment is so overt and boiling over and it is continuous.
8. Historically, a heinous atrocity had been visited on Igbo/Biafra people. 45 years ago the greatest genocide on the African continent was committed by Nigeria and its citizens against the other supposedly fellow citizens, the Igbo/Biafra people and, they murdered 3.1 million of that group all because of hatred and intolerance.
9. The same Igbo/Biafra people were not only denied their right to life in the genocidal act but they were also dispossessed of their material wealth and possessions. After the killings, bombing and near-annihilation of the Igbo/Biafra ethnic group and total destruction of the physical structures of Biafran people and land, Nigeria took away ownership of all the real estate properties that once belonged to Igbo/Biafrans wherever they were located in Nigeria. In the same vein Nigeria also denied Igbo/Biafra people access to their bank deposits. Instead they handed to each Igbo/Biafran depositors 20 pounds of Nigeria’s money no matter the millions or thousands that they had in the banks prior to the time.
10. Like we earlier said, this list is endless but let’s just say that there is no compatibility and there will never be a time when there will between the Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani and the Igbo/Biafra people. There is no commonality of interests as a society, let each group go their separate ways. That is wisdom and that is the only truth.
-Osita Ebiem
An NIS Journalist, who have a profound interest in international relations and History.
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