Beware of Soon Coming Uprising

Evangelist Ernest Uzoho

Men will rather fight to be free than live in palaces as slaves. The free Biafra agitation is not because the Biafra land is impoverished, that is a fat lie. There is no Nigeria region that is not impoverished, and the worst hit is northern Nigeria. That is why the soon coming people’s revolution against tyranny will start from the north, when every corrupt politician or leader in Nigeria will become a victim of the people’s uprising.

The free Biafra agitation is a consequence of the deliberate political alienation of the Biafran people by the powers of the government of Nigeria since after the civil war. It cascaded to the every now sudden killing and in most cases mass murder of the Biafrans in mostly northern part of Nigeria. Somebody loses election, Biafrans pay with their blood, two quarrel over religion, Biafrans pay with their blood in mass murder, somebody burns a page of the Quran in Asia, Biafrans bear the punishment in Kano, a terrorist is killed in Pakistan , Biafrans die for that in Kaduna. That is not the characteristics of one nation under God, but rather divided nation under one currency. It may be a country, but not a nation.

The complete failure of past and present leaders to stop this reoccurring decimal fuels the agitation for a free republic of Biafra. Biafra land felt a bit at ease with Obasanjo and Jonathan because these two made conscientious and sincere efforts to emotionally and politically integrate Biafra region into the mainstream administration of the Nigeria state.

If a man is not welcomed in a sphere, it is a moral burden on him to create his own sphere, no matter how tiny or unceremonious it is, and no man has the right to prevent him, because freedom is an instinct we are born with.

If Biafra is created, will there still be infighting in the midst? Yes! There will surely be. Because the domineering Anambra man will want it’s lion share, the scholastic Imo/Abia man will want to control administration, and the delta man will want to control his oil, but be it as it may, it will be a brotherly understandable quarrel, because we all agreed to be one free nation.

Ojukwu fought for Biafra for two major reasons: 1. To control the oil in its land, which oil naturally belongs to the Ijaws, except for the pockets found in Abia and Imo, core Biafran lands, which pocket quantity is enough to make Biafra land a First World nation, like Israel that developed a wilderness into a First World civilization in less than seventy years.
2.Ojukwu fought hard but without success to create a sanctuary for the then oppressed people of eastern Nigeria.

However, the current reason for the agitation of sovereign state of Biafra is not anchored on hydrocarbon, but on creating a distinct and dignified identity of the man of the east, with full assurance that he can aspire by merit, hard work or election to any position in his new found nation, and will not be disfranchised based on his tribal identity.

The Biafran movement has become a philosophy and religion to about 80 percent of the young Igbo boys, and that is a bad news for Nigeria with a wobbling central government, managed over time by drunken masters whose avarice for self-enrichment and nepotic misbehaviour has long killed the spirit of one Nigeria.

It is easy to get Biafra if the Biafrans should learn more international politics and friendship and stop this unsavoury vociferous vulgar of abusive language. Biafra also needs some people within even northern Nigeria to actualise its dream.

However, the worrisome part of the misbehaviour of the Federal Government of Nigeria is that it behaves by its utterances and body language as if it has forgotten that United Nations (UN) chatters, and Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) of which Nigeria is a bonded member has it that emerging people’s groups have a sacred right to self-determination and governance. Instead of the various unqualified but privileged people given access to govern to address the core matters of the agitations, they kept making irrational and controversial statements to insist that the selfish Amalgamation of Nigeria, without the referendum of the Nigeria people and regions, to dubiously enrich the business empire of the queen of England should remain sacrosanct. The Amalgamation of the regions of Nigeria into one fragile entity, without the referendum from its constituencies was the first kidnap of the future political and economic liberty of its regions, of which Biafra is the worst hit.

Finally, if this current tribally myopic administration did not reform it’s attitude towards other tribes, and this agitation becomes an arms struggle, it will be a very protracted wearisome and bloody struggle that will never cease until Biafra is achieved.

Any day Biafran agitators decide to go for arm campaign, the Niger Delta will be polarised, the Middle Belt that is every day invaded by Fulani armed militias will NEVER opt to be with the north, and the aristocratic Yoruba nation will of course create it’s own federation.

Boko Haram does not have in its entire campaign an insurgent army of one hundred thousand fighters, and that rebellion of theirs has taken Nigeria seven years and still counting to crush. It is not disputable that Biafra will readily amass an army of one million guerrilla fighters owing to their tremendous rallies and youth support. If that army decides to fight a guerrilla warfare as against conventional war, then that war will become an everlasting war, and Africa’s greatest malady. It’s dimension will be near- nuclear- fatal if Niger Delta is drawn into it.

It is incumbent on government to create a system that will make us all feel comfortable in Nigeria by restructuring it, and do it now before it is too late, because when the patience of a freedom seeker elapses, he will surely seek to go violent and die in it than remain subjugated.

Seven years before now, no body in Nigeria could believe that a Nigerian can consciously volunteer for a suicide mission, until Boko Haram announced that their young men have returned from radicalization to fight the Nigeria state. Since then, suicide attack has become strangely normal to the Nigeria system.

There is currently this philosophical radicalization of the Biafran child, (killing and imprisonment of a people over an idea make them more devoted except you kill them all at once).Nigeria should be discussed, except if we have bought it’s casket. Remember that those who make peaceful changes impossible make violent changes inevitable.
Many blessings to you.

*Evangelist Ernest Uzoho is a minister of the gospel and missionary.