#Biafra: Don't allow Biafrans remove their shirt (2)

During my boyhood days in the village, there used to be these recalcitrant he-goats that roamed about the village space, wreaking nui­sance and havoc on anything on their way. With their acrid and unpleasant smell, the he-goats would wander from farm to farm, from compound to compound, gnawing and chew­ing at every item of food that was left exposed. They would stroll into farms and gardens, from courtyards to heaths, indiscriminately chewing at young shoots of vegetable and maize. Men, woman and chil­dren would chase after them with clubs and sticks, to obviate their nuisance.

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They were very much hated, because they caused so much frustration, especially when they caused destruction to treasured plants and food items, and the frustration is even made worse by the fact that their owners were not eas­ily identifiable. The normal thing in an Igbo village would have been to report to the own­er of a recalcitrant goat, dog or sheep, and seek reparation or usually, sympathy. Nobody seemed to know the owner of the roaming he-goat, the mkpi, which was often claimed to be­long to the shrines of the differ­ent idols that dotted the rural landscape.

However, on the fateful day that someone would get too angry, and fatally injure any of those he-goats, its owner would immediately materialise, stak­ing a claim and spoiling for a vengeful fight.

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The moral of this story is that everybody belongs to some­body or a community in Igbo­land, even when that somebody constitutes some nuisance to other people. No amount of nuisance should warrant or jus­tify the killing of a culprit that had not set out to take life. A day you kill that mad man or woman that walks around na­ked along over the village paths, chewing at odds and ends, you will automatically realise that he or she has relatives.

One hopes that these analo­gies are clear enough to explain the state of affairs as it concerns the on-going and frequent une­ven-handed encounter between the pro-Biafran agitators and the security agents of the fed­eral government. The way it has been going on, it has appeared that the youths that have been protesting for Biafra and the release of their leader, Nnam­di Kanu, had been shot and killed at the least provocation by the security agents of the federal government, as if they have been a bunch of homeless prodigals, who fell down from the outer space. It cannot be so, and it is important that this message is conveyed with all the force that is required to the authorities concerned; as these young men and women that are routinely shot down, are not mere trees. They are the sons, brothers, nephews, inlaws, etc., of some of us who are daily working round the clock for the progress and unity of our coun­try, Nigeria.

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It is clear that the percentage of the population that is in­volved in this pro-Biafra thing is almost infinitesimal in com­parison to the population of the other people who claim Nigeri­an citizenship and work assidu­ously, day and night, to ensure that Nigeria becomes a great nation. To that extent, over 90 per-cent of the people who live in the Biafra endemic parts of the country, have no interest, whatsoever, in what the pro- Biafrans are doing. If anything, rather than seek a geopolitical Biafra, there are many of us, who, though fed up with the incompetent ways things are run inside Nigeria, would still wish that the Biafran spirit be injected into every xylem of the Nigerian national life, to ma­ture Nigeria.

Yet, while most of us do not support those that campaign for Biafra as a geopolitical enti­ty, we cannot deny the rights of those who hold contrary views from doing so. Nobody has the right to deny anybody the right to hold opinions and to express them non-violently. It is only in a brutish Hobbesian society that you seek to kill someone because he disagrees with you.

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We can only convince them to become persuaded when those of us that have cast our lot with one united Nigeria, are better off than them. The joke would be on us, if, after strug­gling so hard to build and de­velop Nigeria, as most of us are doing daily in Nigeria, we are still treated like outsiders, who should not have the same stake inside the country in which we have invested more than the others.

One of the most urgent and on-going tasks of some of us has been the efforts to convince the pro-Biafran youths not to carry arms as they are threaten­ing to do. The federal govern­ment and the security officials must, therefore, help us and the system to make these efforts yield dividends by not getting trigger-happy whenever they have to deal with what they see as the nuisance of the pro-Bia­fran agitators.

It would be foolhardy to call the bluff of the ‘boys’ when they say they would carry arms in self-defence, in face of further provocation. From what is happening all over the world, in face of the prolifera­tion of small arms everywhere, it would not be very hard for the pro-Biafrans to live true to their threats, if provoked un­duly.

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More importantly, is it not time this culture of blood-letting in Nigeria be made to abate. It seems that the fuse of human tolerance is running very short in most aspects of our lives, nowadays. Nego­tiations and dialogue seem to have taken the back seat, as arm-flexing has, once again, taken the centre stage. Ironi­cally, it seems the government of the day is giving impres­sion that the military is the one ‘cure-all’ solution to all the is­sues in the country, even where and when dialogue and social justice would have fared better.

With such proposed a policy option like stationing an army command in Aba, obviously to stem the tide Biafra, it is clear that the government has no inkling that no army on earth has ever crushed what is in the mind. The Biafran agitation is in that realm; that is why its protagonists do need not to carry arms. The federal gov­ernment can only exorcise the genie of Biafra with the force of love and social justice, not with stomping booths and military arsenal.

After all, as Fela sang, “uni­form na cloth, na tailor dey make am”.