BIAFRA is not one of the issues plaguing Nigeria. Those not able to welcome this may require a dosage of imaginative considering. Nigeria's obstinate thistle in the substance is its resolute revocation of the undeniable idea of the immutability of progress, whereupon sits a disabling unwillingness to draw in that same consistency of progress. There are two arbitrary however popular assertions – one little recalled today, the other something of a mantra – that flawlessly wrap up the national antiparty to inflexible change and its administration.
On January 15, 1970, there was a function at Dodan Barracks, Lagos, the then seat of political force. Biafran acting Head of State, General Philip Effiong, Colonel David Ogunewe, Colonel Patrick Anwunah, Colonel Patrick Amadi and Police Commissioner Patrick Okeke had gone to present Biafra's archive of surrender, which formally denoted the end of the common war. "The alleged rising sun of Biafra has set always," announced Head of State General Yakubu Gowon, on that event. In the jumps and plunges of Nigeria's turbulence, it is normal to hear government officials of changing influences pronouncing, as a method for "aiding" to balance out the posting boat of state, that "Nigeria's solidarity is not debatable."
Between Gowon's assumption of Biafra's conclusiveness, which rode on the peak of triumphalism and was hailed as judicious by numerous, including Gowon's biographer Professor Isawa Elaigwu, and the perpetually voiced avoidance of terms on Nigeria's unity, lies the nation's tricky. General Gowon is alive and skipping. Were he to genuinely remark on his 45-year old announcement today, he would promptly confess to not having completely viewed as all sides of everything. For it is unmistakably outside the limits of political power to announce the irreversible removal of human inclination and proclivity. The present hoopla around Biafra loans assurance to the statement.
Presently, there is something confusing in the oft-rehashed articulation on Nigeria's solidarity not being debatable. The announcement does not imply that Nigeria's solidarity is a fait accompli. It basically demands an angry criticism of any considered mapping out a practical street on which the expected or foreseen national solidarity must travel, free from injustice and calamities; a system for mastering the goals of national solidarity which is, anyplace on the planet, an especially overwhelming suggestion. It is on the grounds that Nigeria has held its back stubbornly swung to change that even the smallest molehill on its uncharted street perpetually turns into a sharp mountain.
Why is Nigeria unequipped for gaining from history? At the point when Biafra came in 1967, it was path relatively revolutionary. Since January 15, 1970, the world's political guide has kept on being redrawn. Ruler Haile Selassie would have begun, and marked any fantasy in which Eritrea was specified a bad dream. Eritrea increased universal acknowledgment as a free state in 1993. South Sudan was just an anecdotal build in 1970; it turned into a free country in 2011. Bangladesh was non-existent in 1970; it proclaimed its freedom from Pakistan a year later. The Soviet Union broke up into 12 free states in 1991. By 1992 Yugoslavia had cracked into around seven free nations. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia split into Czech and Slovak Republics. Scotland held an Independence choice early this year that fizzled. There is an effective Catalan development pushing withdrawal from Spain. Separatist propensities are not on the melt away in Cabinda.
What to shoulder at the top of the priority list is that the majority of the severances or disturbances for withdrawal on the planet are along ethnic lines. For an ethnically composite nation like Nigeria, the best approach to stay away from potential split props is not by blocking examination on argumentative issues, and it is not by expeditionary restraint of serene dispute. All things considered, contradiction is not and ought to never be understood as a wrongdoing in a popular government. A nation of different people groups must be held together in peace and concordance by the pastes of visionary authority listed on attempted and tried political structures of value, reasonableness, equity, advancement and common sense. This can't be said of Nigeria.
Take a gander at neighboring Ghana, which, similar to Nigeria, is multi-ethnic. Who ever known about secessionist fomentation in that nation? Here is a point made in a June 28, 2012 Memorandum submitted to the House of Representatives Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution by the Ohanaeze Ndigbo: "In our socio-political and monetary intercourse all gatherings (huge or little) must be permitted free-play and impartial access to our nation's assets and vital political order posts, including especially the administration. Maintained unevenness in sharing obligations and the 'national cake' could possibly incite in those units abused a reevaluate of the quality to them of our greatly vaunted national solidarity."
One conceivable method for checking wariness on Nigerian solidarity is the usage of the report of a year ago's National Conference. Tragically, chameleons, who all through their questionable political professions had lifted the National Conference bulletin, turned up on the eve of the last presidential vote to repulse the thou
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