Biafra and the morning after

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Sometimes good things come from the strangest places. In the course of going through the ridiculous Nairaland thread in which Akpabio blamed the South-West for disturbances in the rest of the country, I discovered this video in which an Igbo lady raised a very good question, one I have not seen the IPOB boys even try to give an answer to.

www.facebook.com/naijagbedu1/videos/1006085909434119/

The question is this: supposing Biafran independence were to magically be granted some day, what would come the morning after? After all the jubilation about being "free" has died down, how exactly would the Biafrans use their new freedom to make life better than they had it in Nigeria? Who would rule the country, and how would that person be chosen? What would the political system be like? What about the economic policy? What sort of development plans would be in place for the short, medium and long term? What would the Biafran foreign policy agenda look like?

If there's somewhere the IPOB youths have been carrying out discussions on such topics, I have yet to find it; they seem to content themselves with merely blaming and insulting "Yorobbers" and "Foolanis" for all of their problems, rather than thinking of any concrete solutions for their difficulties. Yet if one looks at those independence movements which have given birth to successful nations, one will discover that a tremendous amount of prior discussion and intellectual groundwork has gone into laying the foundations for the developments of the states. This is very clear by looking at, for example, the United States, where the discussions of what shape the union should take have been immortalized in the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers.

Going through these essays by America's founding fathers, what stands out is that just how carefully the design of the American government was put together, how the discussion of what shape it ought to take was animated by universalist principles, rather than mere parochial self-interest, and how much care was taken to build a system of government that would endure in the face of human weakness, instead of pretending that patriotic idealism would magically abolish all conflicts of interest.

Even with those countries like Australia and Canada which do not have America's history of constitutional deliberation in their progress to independence, the cultural, historical and legal inheritance they received from Britain meant that they had all of British constitutional history to fall back on, and the process of switching from being "British overseas" to being "Australian"/"Canadian" was a very gradual, almost imperceptible one. What changes there have been in these two countries from the British way of doing things has mostly been to adopt a few American practices regarding federalism, reflecting the vastness of the two countries in question. What has never been in dispute in any of the former British "dominions" is that the original British principles of law, government and economics should continue to prevail.

Now, you may be tempted to ask "Why should we care that the IPOB/MASSOB agitators have shown no interest in doing any of the hard thinking about how to build a better country than the one they currently find themselves in?" My answer to this is that their way of going about things is a surefire recipe for failure, and if/when they are granted the secession they claim to want, the new Biafran state will be a total failure; I can say this with certainty because they have not built the necessary foundations for anything else, and none of them seem to have the slightest clue that doing so is even necessary, from "Dilector" down to the jobless youths on the street who allow themselves to be slaughtered by the Nigerian army. The very first thing that will happen in any new Biafran state is that a civil war will break out as different factions struggle to rule the roost, and the ordinary Biafrans picking sides based on nothing more than whether this one is from Anambra, that one is from Onitsha, or that other fellow is Mbaise/Ngwa/blah blah blah. In short, Biafra will be another South Sudan.

As frustrating as it may be for us on this forum sometimes, when we suggest new ideas to improve education, agriculture or something else, only to run into the Nigerian realities that make many of such proposals impractical, at least we are thinking constructively about making such positive changes; we aren't simply wasting our time feeling sorry for ourselves and blaming a conspiracy of everyone else against us for our failings. Above all else, this difference in attitude from the "Biafrans" is why I am so confident that we would be the only part of the country that would actually thrive if Nigeria were ever to be dissolved.