What if Biafra had won?


‘IF Biafra had succeeded it would have created an imbalance in the African continent,’ a Ghanaian who I was discussing with said, ‘it would have been the most powerful and richest African country, thereby endangering Africa unity’. I come across people who have more than a passing interest in Nigerian history but this assertion was simply mind-blowing. The Biafran war reverberated around the shores of the world – I have read excerpts from people who confessed to hearing the name Nigeria for the first time when poverty-stricken Biafran children surfaced in their television sets, with pleas for aid, the thrust. Great faith was placed in Nigeria at independence but no sooner had it achieve nationhood than it plunged into a bloody war that claimed more than one million people and ensured the utter destruction of infrastructures in its three year duration (1967 – 1970) and solidified a country perennially divided along the basic fault-lines of ethnicity and religion.

I have read and heard participant versions of the civil war but I have still not come to my own conclusion: whether the war was a right step or was just a gratuitous gamble. But no matter how it is looked at, the Biafra war was indeed a shaping point in Nigeria’s history.

Some Igbo people rhapsodize about what a Biafra country would have been like given the many stories of technological creations - documented. A Biafran – during the war- is credited with the first attempt to seek nuclear materials in Nigeria’s nuclear history. It was a war whose passionate personality was in no doubt, whose human investment in blood was powered perhaps with hope of greater returns.

Whether the Eastern Region's military governor, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu left his Oxford degree, a life that appeared promising outside the shores of combat and largesse from his wealthy dad and plunged into servitude for the former Eastern region, was done with altruism is beyond my scope at this stage. I am still a lava waiting to develop enough conviction to state my position in this field. Yet 40 years on, Nigeria is haunted with the same dynamisms .The Nigerian country is a piece of oppression in the West African plate, a waste of space, a place where talent is unforgivingly punished and banished to pittance and mediocrity absorbed into the ever waiting wings of a relentless socialism with a pathological emphasis on mono-economy, wheeled by oil, accessed in the most deplorable condition. The Nigerian society is a fraud that must die and give birth to babies, able to wean into a generation outside the prejudices and failings of their progenies. By death, I mean reproduction into a just state even if it necessitates the literal death of the Nigerian nation.

The Biafra war stretches like a long bloodline in the Nigerian society. The first time I really came across the Biafra civil war was when a friend I had known for a very long time - as a matter of fact, we had grown up together - tried jokingly or seriously to make fun of Ojukwu’s Abidjan exit at the tale end of war. Looking back now I can only surmise that it was made known to him by his parents or his environment as his sudden transformation stunned me. He exit was relayed to me as a cowardly spectacle and a ‘comical crash of his vaunted empire’.

I was with someone I had known for sometime when he said with his head shaking, that Nigeria would never make it. At that stage I couldn’t understand his pessimism for the nation but issues like ethnically and religious motivated killings really spell red our country’s name. The Niger delta exposes the hypocrisy of the so-called democracy we practice. They have borne the brunt of the evils of incompetence. Put it quite simply: Nigerian democracy is a sham. A Hypocrisy designed to incubate impotents who lack any plan for advancement. I have had to come to the brutal realization of the Nigerian nation following deep research and interview. If you put a 10 year child in the seat of governor he may produce far better results than most governors in Nigeria. After all there are children who win chess competitions at very young ages. A world champion won the world chess championship 16 or under. Everybody knows that you have to build roads, supply water and power etcetera. There is no rocket science in them. It is breaching the threshold of fundamentals and transcending into the realm of harnessing potentials in a nation that makes a difference. There are societies that have little or no natural resources but have turned themselves into tourist hotspots, service hubs etc.

Biafra to me is certainly not the answer to Nigeria’s problem. Saying so is simplifying the problems on the ground. If anything Biafra would localize the national problems we have, but it does remind us of the fragility of our country.

Until justice rules, until leadership is reserved for the capable, then and only then - in any setting or country - can true transformation take hold.

If you meet a Nigerian for a job he is most likely going to ask for your paper qualifications. Because that is only what counts, your experience doesn’t. The government can suck you in and pay you salaries and pensions till you give in to the grave. But in industrialized societies you are asked for experience. I have read company reports criticizing poor ‘performance of students and a preference for other nationalities of better performance’.

They operate on a private plain and they recognize the import of experience. I have experienced it many times in my search for jobs. They were not so much interested in my papers as they were in my actual experiences .That is why you can find corporate managers who have little or no formal education but have under their command vast responsibilities: experience is gold. To understand why societies like these bred the Sir Isaac Newtons - here is the rub. This is how it might typically take shape: somewhere along the line a brother, a friend or a relative takes you on a tutorial in a field and thereafter you acquire the requisite knowledge required and work your way up the ladder.

The sole reliance on oil welcomes mountainous debris of laziness, an apathy to surge high and pitiable admission of impotence. Perhaps there can be no better way of self–expressing a nucleic paralysis.

Add this to perennial infightings and you get a mad house. When I meet a Nigerian I always have fun. They tag along with me thinking I am not Nigerian - something I find rather surprising - and when they do find out that I’m Nigerian the question turns to: ‘which part of Nigeria are you from?’ I have in the past seen this as just an innocent inquiry but after studying the Nigerian society I have learnt it is a quiet invitation to prejudice. I have recently begun revising my automatic replies to one of caution: my revelation would be extremely limited. Since they find it hard to make out my nationality then I guess I would let them hold it that way.


The story of the Nigerian war ignores the whole human firmament involved in the war occasioned by the ethnically induced strands Nigeria rests on. The war had a holistic effect on the Nigerian nation- it involved everyone in the former eastern region as well as the entire nation.

‘Broken brothers,’ a Chinese workmate of mine said in reply to a question I asked about the relationship between the China and Japan. The Nigerian society might just be a case of broken brothers, where the concept of brother’s keeper mashes under the weight of tribalism. Where downright stupidity and incompetence are rationalized on ethnic and sub-ethnic grounds. That’s why I hate any claim to ethnic leadership in whatever form, anywhere, at state, local and federal levels. Trouble in any part is seen as the problem of locality as opposed to universality. People turn a blind eye to the Niger delta because they imagine it has nothing to do with them as has every epoch in our history(tainted with ethnic summations): Civil war, June 12, Jan coup 1966,July coup,1966,1999-2007 etc.

This year marks 40 years since the civil war ended but secessionist pangs still run deep among Nigerians. The challenge is to construct an edifice foundationed on justice. Anytime we grant amnesty to the Nigerian state we are reminded of the paucity of our claim to territoriality. Ms Oluwatoyin Olusesan needless death at the hands of raving underage fanatics questions our national existence and confronts a continuous helplessness to this ruinous routine.