Britain has always supported the idea of one indivisible Nigeria in its opposition to the Biafran people’s quest for self-determination. But the same Britain has no problem breaking away from the European Union after more than four decades. Or recognizing the right of the Scots to go their way after three centuries of their union.

The Igbo cannot possibly be a part of the proposed new Nigeria, no matter how attractive the idea is made to look by its advocates. On 29 May 1966, the Igbo renounced forever their Nigerian citizenship. While wishing Nigeria and Nigerians well in their quest for a workable solution to their national problem, the Igbo have unequivocally opted for a separate Igbo identity and the separation of their territory from Nigeria.

The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. The genocide has been studied most expansively. Thus, to understand the politics of the genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 51 years.

It is an unconscionable tragedy of incalculable historical consequences that Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-descent president of the US republic in 233 years ended up with a dreadful presidential legacy supporting the Igbo genocide – executed on the ground by Nigeria, an Islamist-led state, and its suzerain state Britain.

Britain will have no problem explaining to the world why it accepts 5 million Scots to exercise their right to self-determination which could cause the collapse of a union of 310 years of willing partners, but is unrelentingly instrumental in supporting a 51-year-old genocide campaign against 50 million Igbo people, forced into a conquest agglomeration of a “state” created and called Nigeria by Britain, but who, equally as the Scots, want their freedom.



Buhari’s outrageous outburst on his wife in Berlin at the end of his Germany visit completely overshadowed the import of whatever was the original reason for this trip. Quite clearly if ever there was an incontrovertible link between congenital misogyny and genocidist depravity, psychologists and geneticists would have at last found a case study here.

Deeply hurt by Britain’s overwhelming support for Nigeria to crush the Republic of Biafra, Dr Ibiam renounced and returned to the British head of state the three insignias of knighthood that both she and her father, King George VI, had earlier conferred on the esteemed missionary physician for services to church and state.

What might be there in the Igbo gene to account for the dialectics of Igboness in Nigeria: the unchallenged warriors of the Nigerian space in territorial terms but the quickest to get sucked into homeland insularity at the slightest provocation? How could so educated, so successful in business and so globally mobile and established an ethnic group misread the Nigerian text every now and then?

Nigeria is an artificial country that was put together by non-Nigerians.  No one sought the consent of the people that were literally gaveled into existence as “Nigerians” when the state was originally constituted. With the resurgence of demands for secession of the Igbo nation to form the Republic of Biafra, the time has come for a candid discussion about the future of Nigeria.

What sort of intellectuals would write a book about a genocidal war in which more than three million lives of their own brothers and sisters were wasted without even acknowledging in the index that the word ‘genocidal’ was used in the text by some authors to objectively describe the atrocities?

For over a century, Europe has been involved in the mass murder of millions of people across Africa in connivance with local elites. The only way to stop these mass murders by empire is for African people to construct for themselves a civilisation where African life is fundamentally sacrosanct. 

Regardless of where in the world Black people are killed or brutalized, the violence is rooted in the white man’s diminution of African life. With their long history of struggle, the people of Biafra who seek to break away from neo-colonial Nigeria want to build for themselves a new civilisation where African life, all human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct.

Isn’t it an interesting coincidence that Britons have voted to leave the European Union exactly 50 years after the British government helped ruthlessly crush the Biafra secession in Nigeria? Aren’t all people, whether Biafran or British, entitled to the same right of self-determination?

There seems to be consensus that Nigeria is not working for Nigerians. This is not because Nigeria is unworkable, but because it has been rigged to fail. Forty-six years after the atrocious Biafra War, low-intensity conflicts by state and non-state actors are raging across the country. Nigeria needs to be renegotiated.

US President Barack Obama expresses pride in his African heritage, but his regime over the last seven years has not demonstrated any substantial commitment to the wellbeing of the African people. He has merely continued the imperial interventions and militarism of his predecessors.