Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Okey Anueyiagu, Professor of Political Economy, public policy analyst and author of the book ‘Biafra, The Horrors of War, The Story of A Child Soldier’, is a contributor to USAfrica.
When President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rename the body of water which is bordered by the US, Cuba and Mexico, the Gulf of America, from the centuries of its originally known name; the Gulf of Mexico, my mind immediately drifted to the Bight of Biafra, which today bears a different name. Even as this obnoxious action by Trump was not binding to the world, it portends a significant level of animosity towards the Mexican people and their pride as an independent nation.
The Bight of Biafra is a part of the western African coast between the Niger River and Cape Lopez, encompassing the coasts of eastern Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and some parts of Gabon. This region formed major trade and economic hubs for the many major towns and Islands that were around the coast.
When the Biafra war ended in 1970, something hauntingly dramatic happened. The Nigeria military junta coming off a brutish and genocidal war, hurriedly changed the name of the Bight of Biafra, to the Bight of Bonny, a new name that held no significant value except for the purpose of obliterating the memories of the fratricidal and senseless war that took the lives of well over 3 million citizens of Biafra. The Nigerian military government was determined to remove that name Biafra from many existing or living vestiges of the Nigerian State. Donald Trump adopted the same playbook for one of his many angst against his many perceived and real enemies.
The aim of this short essay is to examine a few of the insidious actions of the victors over the vanquished in the war, and to peruse the reckless treatment that those that lost that war received in the aftermath of the debacle of Biafra. The essence of doing this, is to advocate and advance a proposition that will suggest a return to sense, justice, equity and fairness to all citizens of the
country – at least, even if we pretend to mimic General Gowon’s “no victor, no vanquished” mantra that many considered to be fake and a deceitful bag of lies.
It will be painfully laborious to begin to list all or even some of the systemic and systematic barriers placed before the Igbo and the other citizens of Biafra right after the war ended. From all manners of marginalization; social and economic inequality, political disenfranchisement, insecurity and extra-judicial killings, and other inhuman treatments, the people of the former State of Biafra have seen them all.
I do not write this essay as the last word about the unspeakable atrocities and brutality of that war, or about the imminent abundance of the transcendent persecution that continued thereafter. I write it because I want to start a genuine conversation about ways to heal the deep wounds that the war inflicted on those who lost that war, and to further explore how they have managed up till this moment to survive and still keep themselves together without losing their sanity. As I constantly concern myself with the duty of giving voice to victims of that war, I wrestle with questions about Igbo dignity and longanimity in a country filled with ethnic and tribal hate and deprivations.
The periods that were characterized by plagues and afflictions of ethnic and tribal disturbances directed mainly at the Igbo, signified the mendacious and quisquous pollution of the togetherness and tranquility of our country.
Since the end of the civil war, our country has witnessed a well-organized enthronement of a systemic, vile, and far-reaching tribal discrimination against the Igbo in many facets of their lives, from depriving them of infrastructural development to not giving them key positions in government. This is despite the provision of a Federal Character doctrine in matters relating to equitable distribution of materials and positions in our national affairs. These anomalies have taken a toll on our society. When we wonder why our country for decades has stagnated and lacked in meaningful development, I direct that we look no further at the practice of tribalism, nepotism, cronyism, and the many other forms of discrimination. My guess is that monumental aggregate economic growth and development would have been achieved if tribal gaps had been
closed to a significant level by providing equal opportunities for Nigerians regardless of tribe, religion, or the many other inconsequential affinities and considerations.
From inception, most of our rulers have practiced various types of tribal discrimination, with a host of them openly boasting about how they are only accountable to their own tribes and will only patronize them over others. Recall that President Buhari directed this ungodly charade at the Igbo, promising them hell, and ensuring that they did not benefit from his government’s appointments. Today, those that inherited power from Buhari, have unfortunately followed in his footsteps by locking the Igbo out of the affairs of government. Many other rulers have been known to pledge allegiance to their tribes before their loyalty to the country.
What became very concerning about our country right after independence, and throughout its history, was the very deepening account of how our ways of life and our cultures rapidly became so decadent, when almost everything about our country began to fray and fall apart, and remained anchored in hate, ethnic prejudices, dirty politics and other blinding timidities that destroyed a once prosperous country. The wicked impulses of our people and the resultant repulsiveness steeped deeply in petty envy, hatred, covetousness, and the lust for domination of certain tribe(s) by others, became the order of the day.
The reality of the absence of equality, equity and fairness in our country is a tragedy of no small proportion. I have had my moments of lapses and retrogressiveness; moments of questioning my allegiance to a country that has refused to be a nation of love and peace. And then, I have also had my moments of national ebullition and of deep patriotic upliftments. However, these conflicting modes and the swings of our country’s ponderousness with its tribal insipidity, drag us all down to the gutters and invalidate all the dyspeptics of our own existence,
When a country and its people after fighting a devastating war that brought and inflicted much suffering to the people from the East, continue to deal in injustices and travesties against its own citizens, I must predict that we have not
learnt any lessons, and lack the courage to challenge our country’s insidious past and the iniquities that came with it. With the strength and resilience of the people of the former Biafra remaining consistent in the face of the tragedy of the persecution they encountered, we must worry about the shame that overwhelmingly continues to destroy our country. It is difficult not to observe the enormous missed opportunities that have unraveled before our eyes.
Many misguided Nigerians embrace, and encourage negative actions taken against the Igbo as they are targeted at Killing Biafra. How many times will they kill that Biafra? History has shown that such wicked actions toward the Igbo, will do them no irreparable harm. Instead, it will continue to damage and erode the growth and development of Nigeria, and speedily hasten its fall to infamy. This fact is evident in the way the Igbo bounced back into contention after the war that nearly exterminated the entire tribe. For this, and for many other reasons, it is in our collective interest to reflect and capture the resilience and ingenuity of the Igbo, and bring them back into the fold of governance, imbibing their spirit of hardwork, and using these attributes to forge a united front that will liberate Nigeria from disintegration and disunity.
The sufferings of Biafrans during the war are too deep for words. That suffering, subject in my detailed book; Biafra, The Horrors of War, The Story of a Child Soldier, did not end with the war. The violence and oppression against Biafrans took different forms and dimensions that pointed only towards the complete subjugation of the Igbo who were predominantly members of the Biafran State. It is difficult to explain from the perspective of history and faith how life was reduced to meaningless ventures by other fellow human beings as the most potent symbol of the suffering in Biafra that many do not talk about because of the excruciating pain of remembering or recalling it. These abhorrent treatments of Biafrans represented the worst in human behavior with its unquenchable ontological thirst for Igbo blood with its ceaseless drizzle, fetid breath and punishment.
Even after the war ended with the unimaginable devastation, when Gowon introduced his elusive Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction and the other bla, bla, blas – the dream of freedom for the barely surviving Biafrans turned into a nightmare. I was part of the survivors who returned home from the war to witness a grotesque nightmare worse than anything comprehensible – my hometown of Awka completely looted, burnt down with all living things destroyed. To behold that all homes including mud houses were set on fire deliberately, was most barbaric, wicked and senseless. The aftermath of the war, and what followed, can be best described as “war by another name”.
To write about the troubles that have followed the Igbo everywhere and about the existential agony, is very disturbing. These troubles from time, have followed them everywhere and like a shadow, have become very difficult to shake off. The argument that the Igbo are principally the creators of these troubles are far-fetched. It is a lie conceived and created by the enemy and infused in the heads and psyche of some self-hating Igbo. Imagine that many believed and upheld the lies that the Igbo came together and planned the January of 1966 coup, despite many historical evidence to the contrary. Only recently, General Ibrahim Babangida, a former President, and a man who should know, came out in his book to state the known fact; absolving the Igbo of this intentional fallacy. Nobody but God knows the troubles the Igbo have seen in a country they were in the forefront of its creation and nurturing. They have, however, refused to be defeated by the tragedy called Nigeria. There is no Killing Biafra.
I must confess that I am unable to claim complete ownership of the title of this essay. The original ownership was subscribed to the late Agwu Okpanku, a celebrated Classicist and journalist who was trained at the University of Ibadan and Cambridge. It was the brainchild of this brilliant writer in his column, “The Third Eye”, published in the now dead and defunct, Enugu-based postwar newspaper, The Renaissance. Okpanku became the hero of the Igbo, when using his masterful writing skills, became a fierce critic of Gowon and his military junta who did everything within their reach to muscle and mistreat the surviving Igbo, even to the silly points of erasing all evidence of Biafra from national memory. Gowon and his administration, in what many considered a sustained hate for the Igbo, chose to destroy even the good aspects of Biafran ingenuity from the war.
From the day this war ended until today, the Nigerian State has become a wasted opportunity without any bright future. It has become a kleptocratic state that is divisively dysfunctional. Its political structure is not inclusive and is devoid of equality for all component units. Nigeria now lacks equitable distribution of power, resources and accountability, and is being populated with incompetent leadership and tyrannical leaders. Contextualizing, this country Nigeria – within the axiom of the Biafran crisis, its causes and the outcome – exposes the level of evil, inequality, monstrous corruption, religious and tribal bigotry and violence and, above all, the adulation of envy and hatred for the Igbo.
It is common knowledge that the collective hatred and subjugation of the Igbo is the common unifying strength of the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba and their other willing and unwilling collaborators. When they claim that what unifies us is our diversity, the evidence shows that what unifies them, is the persecution and hatred of the Igbo. This unfortunate parody has deprived Nigeria of benefitting from the human, material and natural assets that the Igbo could have brought not only in mentally decolonizing the people but also in bringing economic and technological advancement not only to Nigeria but to the entire continent of Africa.
Nigeria’s strong propaganda slogan during the war; “To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done,” has been constantly debunked by the level of disunity and injustice in the country. How can Nigeria claim to be interested in uniting and bringing to cohesion all warring factions while the basic principle of equity, which is synonymous with justice and natural equilibrium, is deprived the Igbo? In a country where a particular tribe is singled-out and deprived of its rightful position in governance at the center, there are only victors and the vanquished are banished, awaiting an opportune time to sublimate. As Wole Soyinka put it: “To keep Nigeria one, justice must be done.” Until this is done, the unity of Nigeria will continue to be a huge mirage and an elusive dream.
Killing Biafra did not start with the advent of the crisis of the pogrom, the massacre of innocent civilians through the length and breadth of the country, or with the genocidal war, nor did it end after the imbroglio. It continued thereafter in many forms ranging from punishments of the losers of the war, to deprivations of all sorts.
In 2023, JAMB (the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board) began a surreptitious mass-failure of students from the Southeast (Igbo) zones. This abnormal pattern aroused the inquisition of some experts to investigate the anomaly. This trends of mass-failure of the otherwise good and brilliant Igbo candidates continued in 2025, prompting a revealing interrogation of this new pattern of results. It was discovered that there was an orchestrated and an evil plan engineered by the enemies of the Igbo in the system to single-out Igbo candidates where ever they may be, and deliberately fail them. The exposition of this act is so disheartening and difficult to handle. When will this pattern of killing Biafra end? When will the planners and executioners of these hate-filled nonsenses have enough?
With JAMB admitting that there were “shortcomings and glitches” in their systems and processes, their culpabilities are evident in the wicked ways they single-out only Igbo candidates in their engineered errors. This has become yet another weapon in the killing of Biafra that invariably appears not to be finding any end in sight. Again, we must all join hands and lend our voices in asking: “when will this humiliation, the intimidation, this marginalization, and all the evilness and wickedness against the Igbo end…?”
Just imagine these facts: That the South East, since after the war, remained the most disadvantaged in terms of appointments to federal posts. That the South East is the least in Federal cash transfers and benefits, and the least amongst the other zones in the NELFUND program and many other Federal Government funded programs. That the Federal Government Renewed Hope Housing policy is nearly absent in the South East. That the Federal Government made an Appropriation for a N383 billion Irrigation Development program, wherein a Zone within the same country got N66 billion, and the South East was excluded. That there is not a single South Easterner (Igbo) in the recently appointed Census Committee. That despite the turnout of highly qualified South East (Igbo) graduates, most of them remain unemployed and despondent. That the list of the deprivations is very long, and shamefully, cannot all be listed here.
For many who think that the lgbo are quietly enjoying these long-standing baleful and pharaonic treatment that they have continuously received from their fellow citizens, may they be reminded of the tale of the man, the floormat and his dog. The dog owner, a very benevolent man had for years been promising his dog that he would purchase a floormat upon which his dog would sleep for better comfort. When this promise failed to materialize, the dog looked up at the owner, and reminded him with such coyness, that he, the dog, had gotten used to sleeping on the bare floor for years, and that the floormat meant nothing to him. The Igbo, recognizing the positive effects of meritocracy and the need for government and our leaders to inculcate the social impact of equalization, without robbing others of their rightful and legitimate place and position in their inordinate quest to enthrone tribalism, nepotism and cronyism in our land, have continued to bear the injustice and the unfairness by which our rulers have treated them with quietude and equanimity. Like the dog, the floomat means little or nothing to them.
Perhaps, President Bola Tinubu, coming off the much criticized lopsided ethnicization of this government, has discovered a balance in his establishment of The South East Development Commission through which he has promised to correct the ills of the past by tackling the many problems of the Igbo since the war ended. If Bola Tinubu will comply with his plans to reactivate the Gas Plan, tackle erosion, rebuild the dilapidated road and other infrastructural decays, integrate the region into the national rail systems, amongst fixing the many problems that have bedeviled the zone, he could be starting a new beginning in building a sustained and united nation of equal partners in nation building and development.
Killing Biafra has become a metaphor for Nigeria’s crucifixion of the Igbo. It is clear evidence of how we have refused to accept our fate as one people that must learn that while being created differently, we must live peacefully together. The Igbo people had no choice in being Biafrans, and they had no choice also in the pains and agonies of that war. The only choice and remedy for these sins of Nigeria, is to obtain the courage to confront its evilness, repent of them, and embrace God for forgiveness.
