One glaring indication that Nigeria has failed as a country is that 50 years after the civil war, Biafra is still on the air. If after 50 years, the people of the defunct Biafra have not been fully integrated into the mainstream of Nigerian politics, can we say they can ever be integrated? Th e question that Nigerian successive leadership has failed to answer is: why is Igbo people a threat to the rest of Nigerians? Achebe made us to understand in his short masterpiece ‘Th e trouble with Nigeria’ that “Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo.
Th ey would all describe them as aggressive, arrogant and clannish.” A cursory foray into the Nigerian history will show that no ethnic group has contributed and sacrifi ced so much to the development of “one Nigeria” that our northern brothers are now singing today than the Igbo people. Igbo people are not just living in all the nooks and crannies of this country but also developing them as their homes because of one Nigeria philosophy-so where have they wronged their Nigerian brothers? Th e problem with Nigeria and the Biafran question can be seen in the Igbo adage that says: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down’. Nothing will work in Nigeria so long as the notion that Ndigbo are ‘defeated people’ still hold water in the process of authoritative allocation of resources.
To wake up the sleeping giant that Nigeria is, we must look to the direction of restructuring and fi scal federalism. Th at said, the governors of states that made up the defunct Eastern Region should bury their faces in shame for not recognizing the sacrifi ces made by all that were either killed or died in the war especially those that fought on the Biafran side. My greatest epitaph for them is to be found in the words of Robert Laurence Binyon who in his poem-For the Fallenwrote: “Th ey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. Asikason Jonathan, Enugwu-Ukwu, Anambra state