By John Campbell Soldiers fighting for the breakaway Republic of Biafra march during the Nigerian Civil War, fought from 1967 to 197...
By John Campbell
Soldiers fighting for the breakaway Republic of Biafra march
during the Nigerian Civil War, fought from 1967 to 1970.
Soldiers fighting for the breakaway Republic of Biafra march
during the Nigerian Civil War, fought from 1967 to 1970. Wikimedia Commons
On June 9, following a closed-door meeting, the Northern
Elders Forum (NEF) issued a public statement that the Igbo-dominated southeast
should be allowed to secede from the Federal Republic of Nigeria if it was
necessary to avoid a civil war. NEF spokesman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed said “the Forum
has arrived at the difficult conclusion that if support for secession among the
Igbo is as widespread as it is being made to look, and Igbo leadership appears
to be in support of it, then the country should be advised not to stand in the
way.” His statement continued that secession was not in the best interest of
the Igbos or of Nigerians. Rather, all should work to rebuild Nigeria. But,
blocking secession “will not help a country already burdened with failures on
its knees to fight another war to keep the Igbo in Nigeria.” The statement also
suggested that northerners subject to harassment in the southeast should return
to the north. There was no reference to secessionist sentiment in Yorubaland,
in southwest Nigeria, to which former President Olusegun Obasanjo has referred.
The former president said that Yoruba secession, too, would be unwise, but that
maintaining unity should not come “at any cost.”
Though there is no specific reference to it, clearly
animating the NEF statement is the memory of Nigeria’s 1967-70 civil war,
successfully fought by Nigerian nationalists to keep Igbo-dominated Biafra in
the federation; it left up to two million dead. It, too, involved massive
population movements, with Igbos fleeing to the south a northern pogrom and
fewer northerners leaving the southeast. In the civil war, northern elites
strongly supported the nationalists. Current Igbo disgruntlement has its roots
in defeat in the civil war and the belief that they are marginalized from the
upper reaches of the Nigerian state. (There has never been an Igbo president of
Nigeria.) Such feelings of marginalization are exacerbated by Nigeria’s
nationwide epidemic of violence and economic malaise. The NEF, for its part,
has responded to rising insecurity in Nigeria by calling for President Buhari
to resign or to be impeached. Resignation or impeachment is a reversal of the
NEF’s support of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential candidacy in 2015.
It should be noted that the NEF statement in support of
allowing secession had two caveats: that there be widespread support for it
among the Igbo but also among their “leadership” (not further defined). While
secessionist advocates will argue to the contrary, prima facie evidence for
both either way is thin.
Do the views of the NEF matter? How representative is it of
northern elite opinion? Buhari’s Special Adviser on Media Femi Adesina
responded to its June 9 statement by dismissing the NEF as “a mere irritant”
that hardly exists beyond its convener, Ango Abdullahi—a distinguished, former
vice chancellor (president) of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. According to
Adesina, the former vice chancellor is a general with no troops. Indeed, the
influence of the NEF is hard to judge. But, its public statements attract
widespread media attention. As with former President Obasanjo’s comments on
Yoruba separatism, at the very least the NEF statements is an indication that
rising insecurity is leading at least some of Nigeria’s elites to rethink the
basis of the Nigerian state—and of the consequences of its civil war.
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