UNDERSTANDING MAN AND SOLUTION TO THE BIAFRA CONUNDRUM - Episode 3

If we advance in our postulations supra, it becomes evident that the existence of an inter-relationship among the different ethnic groups in Nigeria, despite their distinctive ideologies might actually be possible. To be fair, the agitations for the creation of Sovereign state of Biafra might have some plausibility therein. The claims of marginalization and undistributed justice are all there. It is the marginalization of the Igbo and Southern Nigerians, when we look at it from the memories we have of Nigeria that is the terminological norm and the point of reference.

This is mainly on account of and thanks to poor governance and corruption that have eaten deep the fabrics of our political set-up, and we must also add the political hegemony of the Northerners. In historical terms, Biafra could be said to another name for a process liberation. That’s, it is the product of a resistance to tradition that has failed to allow its members to fulfil their human potentials because it was beholden in an ethnical hierarchy.

It is such resistance and opposition that was the cradle of what has developed today as Biafra. But history should be relieved in an imaginative sympathy as Hans George Gadamer proposes. To say that the secession of Biafra, on the basis of antecedents, is the solution to the problem of Nigeria in general and Igbo man in particular, might be premature conclusion to the existential problems of man.

Much can and is achieved through unity. It is actually a being-in-the-world that characterizes man in the Heideggerian definition. This means that man in order to realize his full potential ought to relate with one another in a process of concrescence. This concrescence is a process of growing together, in which the universe of many ethnic groups acquires and individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the many to its subordination in the constitution of a novel ‘one’.

What this means is that, we can either eternally call the Lugard amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates a mistake or we can make a metal shift and adopt a life style that opens up the possibility of a better Nigeria. There have been unfulfilled promises, unfair distribution of the national Cake (whatever is meant by this), subjection of a particular race to the lower cadre, but there is also Nigeria.

To have survived a Hundred and One years old is not an indication that Nigeria should disintegrate. It rather calls for a reflection into what Thomas Edison recounts as ‘how not to do it ‘. Francis Fukuyama offers us a guideline in his book, The End of History and the Last Man that we should guard against ethnic chauvinism, religious fanaticism, unequal social structures and total dependence and reliance on the state.

If in the end, the Independent People of Biafra chooses to secede, I propose that it be done not on the basis of hate but on the basis of economic, social and political stability and sufficiency. In such a manner there will be a sustained relationship with her parent country and the desire for human interaction which is embedded in the configuration of man will not be hurts and thus, the aim of reaching novel togetherness ( dynamic unity ) will be achieved