UNDERSTANDING MAN AND SOLUTION TO THE BIAFRA CONUNDRUM - Episode 1

The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a Universal Civil Society Founded on the empire of political justice.



Those were the exact words of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in his lectures on the idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo political plan. The establishment of this universal civil society is the final political purpose of man. As such, most human endeavours, most scholarly discourse, most pragmatic approaches, most actions and inactions often have their centrifugal force in man. In certain epochs, the problems of man have been debated while in other era, man himself has been discussed as a problem. What is evident is this;
• We cannot extirpate man from existence because in every rational and in some irrational actions, man is involved.

The movement towards the actualization of the universal civil society is neither bereft of difficulties nor full with roses. Nature has made it quite difficult for man to attain the highest degree of political stability. The consequence becomes that man, from the difficulties and thwarting’s of his own situation, will toil in an upward manner to move away from being a savage to attaining a culture. By so doing therefore, man will not live in pleasure but by strenuous wrestling with the difficulties, he might make himself worthy of living in pleasure.

The agitation for the creation of a Sovereign State of Biafra debilitates the creation of this Universal Civil Society. It is therefore, not less pertinent that a discourse of the Biafra saga in the light of man becomes expedient.

Man is a complex animate being, composed of the body and the spirit. Man has therefore been defined through many dimensions and prisms:

• Spiritually
• Politically
• Socially
• Emotionally
• Rationally

But these dimensions of man are distinct in their roles. Justice then entails the moderate and a well harnessed performance of these dimension of man. This justice in question is most often feasible via the powerful tool of the rational aspect of man-reason. This reason becomes then a tool not just for the development of a particular ‘man’ but a tool used to obtain the destined development in the species of ‘men’. Such a faculty is illimitable in its plans.

In Kantain sense, it works not instinctively but tentatively, by means of practise, through progress and regress, in order to ascend gradually from one degree of illumination to another. Hence, this discourse would employ the tool of reason as against the power of emotions. This academic enterprise will explore the political, sociological and ontological dimensions of man and then juxtapose it with the current Biafra agitation.

The origin of communities, at least we know from the theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rosseau, was a gradual process that could be likened to the Hegelian Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, of paramount importance is the fact that no human society existed abinitio with a common ideology. Humanity evolved and is evolving like the whiteheadian actual entities, man is in a process of concrescence where he lives, communes, inhabits, with his fellow men to form novel togetherness in the sense of communities. Communities further evolve to further merge with communities to form states, nations, continents and the world.

If we believe that in the Hobbesian state of nature ‘man was a wolf to his fellow men’, then it follows that the existence of chaos in communities is not a conventional problem but a universal and an ontological one that that can be ameliorated not by disintegration but by taming that wolf in man. For driven by this personal idiocy and crave for self-preservation, conflicts of interests arose amongst men, hence the need for Hobbesian Leviathan or the Lockean Commonwealth. Politically, communities are found on the paradigms of principles, standards, codes, stratagems and frameworks. These framework are what become the fundament and he backbone of a solid-peaceful community.

It is the non-existence of such body or rules or rather its non-application that causes upheaval in certain human communities. These cracks have their positives, they depict clearly what Kant calls the unsocial sociality in man’, a trait which causes antagonism but inspires development. The call for Biafra should not be only for secession but to keep the present government on their toes to always transcend every point of arrival because the enmity and jealous spirit of envious competition are all admirable tendencies of discord, with concord, man would live in ease and passive content, but with discord, man becomes propelled to participate himself out of the luxury of indolence into labours and hardships, in order that he might devise remedies against them, and thus raise himself above them by an intellectual conquest, and not sink below them by an unambitious evasion.