Last week, I praised Mazi Nnamdi Kanu for raising the consciousness of the Igbo to the nature and forms of injustices that they live with, sometimes without knowing that they do. I also did say that the hurricane dust he raised with his incendiary rhetoric has blinded a lot of folks, including those who otherwise have been shielded from the discriminations and denials that fuel his agitation. I belong to the latter group. I can only point to one case where I didn’t receive love and encouragement from northern Muslims that I have encountered or worked with. Most of the sad experiences I’ve had along my career journey came from encounters with southern Christians. It is also a fact that, despite occasional outbreaks of hostility and violence from Islamic zealots, more Igbo have lived, intermarried and conducted businesses in the North than in other parts of Nigeria. Millions are still there, even now, doing their thing, despite the dangers that all residents face.

However, it is in the nature of things for self-serving individuals every once in a while to seize religion or public policy decision advantage to disturb society’s elemental order. This is the case and the reason why Nnamdi Kanu’s doggedness in selling his message, and poor communication of policy from succeeding governments, everybody in Nigeria is awake and some up in arms. All fingers point at one source of inherent disorder, especially given the current weight of insecurity pressing heavily on us all. Terrorists masquerading as bandits. Cow rustlers. Kidnappers. Ritualist murderers. And, of course, the itinerant Fulani cow hands contesting land and water spaces with local farmers in places where they pass through, or others where they decide to settle for a while.

IPOB’s message is not resonating with some people and groups because of the security threats. It does because, over time, the public has been sold on suggestions that government agencies and officials are either powerless or indifferent to people’s anxieties on the threats. Like a dying man clutching at straws, people needed assurances of security and comfort wherever they could find them – including from non-state actors. Every policy misstep or action by the government only added to mounting “evidences” that critics and opposition seized upon to prove that the Buhari government was not living up to its campaign pledges or was intentionally discriminating against people from certain parts of the country. Skewed public appointments solidified the perception, even among otherwise discriminating folks.

My problem with the IPOB message is, however, one: of strategy, or, rather, my ignorance about what this strategy is and how it will help IPOB folks attain their objective of leading the Igbo into the promised land of Biafra.

As journalists, we write history in a hurry – and also research history in a hurry. To make sense out of the IPOB strategy and MO, I went back into history of freedom movements in the last 100 years.

A quick scanning of these struggles suggests that a united labour movement struggle has the best chance of attracting local and international support. The shortest and most successful struggle among them that I could find happened in Poland in the 1980s. It involved a trade union movement called Solidarity. Through this movement, much like our Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), workers of Poland united to mount a social struggle that led to the dethronement of an oppressive Communist regime. Historians record three major factors that led to their decisive victory: a dedicated attempt to woo and enlist all classes of workers until the movement grew to over 10 million-strong and unbreakable membership, and the active support of the Vatican and of the United States in the struggle. In other words, both religious and international support and pressure helped the union to be strong – after Solidarity built a cult of committed followership.

I also found that armed struggle was the longest route to freedom, if they ever succeeded. A ready example is the old Irish Republican Army (IRA), formed in 1917 to press for independence from British rule. Like Biafra, the effort was first defeated in the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). But the struggle was never totally subdued. Rather, it has continued under different sets of freedom warriors who operate under the same IRA brand name to continue to press for Irish independence. A successor IRA lasted for 47 years before it split into two groups in 1969. Eventually, a rump of the movement transformed in 1982 into a political movement called Sinn Fein, now better known as the Workers Party of Ireland. This transformation, however, did not diminish the zeal to fight and there continues to be a wing of the IRA that came into existence in 2012 to continue with the struggle. Unfortunately, the Workers Party has not fared well in elections either; it has only a local council seat to show for all of its efforts.

I also found an example of a combination of a social and political movement for independence in the Catalan effort to split from Spain. This struggle gathered steam when a nationalist party known as Estat Català was founded by Fancesc Macià in 1922. The Catalan struggle will be 100 years old by next year, 2022. It is yet to succeed in its objective to break away from Spain and become an independent nation. Compare this to the social and political movement launched by Nigerian nationalists, led by Herbert Macaulay and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1944. The nationalist struggle, however, began much earlier in 1922. Their goal was to wrest freedom from Britain, the colonial ruler. This nationalist agitation gathered traction when Azikiwe returned from his studies abroad and teamed up with Macaulay to eventually form the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1944. And, like the Polish solidarity, the original NCNC was an amalgamation of workers, students, traders, and the new intelligentsia. Youths who got over-excited and impatient, and sought to launch a violent struggle, were kept firmly in check by the leaders who preferred to rely on their skills as orators, lawyers, as well as on the cult-like following they engendered through their mobilization efforts, using their various mass media organs. They bored inexorably into the colonial edifice and brought it down in 1960, “on a platter of gold,” as they magnanimously named it. The national consciousness that the oratory and mass media propaganda engendered appears to be what IPOB seeks to replicate through high-spirited pirate radio broadcasts and social media insurgency.

Related News

Another interesting struggle that I noted is the long-drawn-out non-violent social struggle for freedom and equality by blacks in the United States. This movement relied on non-violent social protests and the law to press its case. This seed of discord was sown in 1896 when the Supreme Court, in a 7-1 ruling, formally recognized segregation as legal between Caucasians and other races. It took almost 58 years before the law was revisited and struck down in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education by the same court on May 17, 1954. History noted the effort of civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and legal icons like Justice Thurgood Marshall, which eventually affirmed the equality that the Constitution decreed. There was nothing in the U.S. constitution that enabled white settlers to solely confiscate the advantages they enjoyed while oppressing others. Justice John Marshall Haran who gave the minority judgement in 1896 said the same thing, prophetically telling his colleagues that it would be a matter of time before their judgment would be overwhelmed by history.

“Our constitution is colour blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” he pronounced.

The one freedom struggle that appears to mirror what IPOB has started doing is the African National Congress (ANC) movement that liberated black South Africans from the infamous Apartheid policy. Again, this struggle lasted all of 82 years before black South Africans were allowed to vote. The first nationalist party that mounted this struggle, known as the South Africa Native National Congress (SANNC), was formed in 1912, six years before Nelson Mandela was born! It took the successor ANC decades to persuade and bring all indigenes together as one people to defend their rights and freedoms. Its tipping point was 1960 when government forces murdered 69 black protesters in Sharpeville. A wearied world took notice and began to apply economic sanctions that brought white rule to an end. The 1960 massacre led to violent revolts, including the formation of ANC’s military wing (Umkhonto We Sizwe) to bring pressure on the regime through guerilla warfare and economic sabotage. The guerilla warfare and economic sabotage pricked world conscience but was not the catalyst. World social, political and economic pressures did. Without this world pressure, the struggle would probably have continued, as it has today with the Irish in Northern Ireland.

At the end of this historical excursion, herein lies my source of confusion about IPOB and its modus operandi. Which of these models, or combination of strategies, is Biafra 2.1 struggle built on? Is the MO a violent military struggle like Biafra 1.0? A political struggle like the Nigerian nationalist movement? A social struggle akin to the Polish Solidarity Movement? A legal and constitutional challenge like the Black American struggle freedom and equal rights? Is IPOB a mishmash of some or all of these strategies?

From a cursory examination of contemporary conflicts that occurred within the past century, it appears that violent struggles record the least success in terms of sustainability of the freedom that was achieved, if at all. Freedom struggles succeeded when they are focused on ameliorating injustice within the commonwealth, rather than through breakaway agitations. And, finally, all struggles ended up on the political negotiation table – because all such struggles were political in the first place. Politics, after all, is the struggle by groups for their comfort and inclusion at the table where commonwealth resources are shared.

•Next week, I shall return to Nigeria and delve deeper into how

contemporary Nigerian actors that prosecuted national and group struggles succeeded or failed, the clear intellectual pathways and

strategies they outlined, and factors that led to the successes and failures recorded for history