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Operation Python Dance, Road to a More United Nigeria or a Deeply Divided One? -By Jeff Okoroafor

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Jeff Okoroafor

Jeff Okoroafor

 

On September 13, 2017, President Muhammadu Buhari took one quick, ill-advised step further to materialize Biafra by his gut wrenching brutality against unarmed, peaceful protesters. By radicalizing the Biafra struggle, Buhari has probably perhaps unknown to him, drawn a battle line between the Caliphate and the emergent State of Biafra that may forever change the relationship between the two entities, for not only shall they eventually be separate and independent states, they shall be hostile neighbours perpetually locked in mutual enmity.

In all we have seen and read or been told about the agitating group known as IPOB, especially before the commencement of the first and second phase of the operation python dance, I did not see any instruments nor instrumentalities of violence on the part of IPOB. The violence we are referring to was 100% asymmetrically on the Federal side.

On IPOB, especially with its leader Nnamdi Kanu, I saw loquaciousness – bounded by lips and propelled by anger and despair at a country that has abandoned them in all aspect of democratic dividend and platitudinal likeness. If being loquacious is considered an instrument of violence, then President Muhammadu Buhari should have long since been killed for threatening violence in his famous threat to soak baboons and dogs with blood if he lost elections. And he did soak baboons and dogs with blood in 2011. Here is a man who condemned former President Goodluck Jonathan’s attack of Boko Haram as an attack on the North. The days of political correctness are over, we must tell ourselves the frank truth about the realities of our time.

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Let’s not be fooled by the dress rehearsal…Mr. Buhari is the President of a section of the North by a section of the North and for a section of the North. His actions and inactions as thus far exposed, was not an incursion to preserve the interest of Nigeria but to preserve the interest of a section of the North. If Buhari cared about Nigeria, he really cannot tell us that not even one resolution made by Nigerians in the NGN5bn 2014 National Confab was worth looking into. Had he been taken rational steps to reform Nigeria in accordance with the wishes of the generality of Nigerians, none of this would have happened.

Everything about Buhari including his well promulgated “body language”, remains catatonic as the Nation burns. The attack of September 13 was a subliminal message to the entire South that as long as the North controls the entire instrumentality of State power in Nigeria, that they will not hesitate to deploy said power in preserving the kind of Nigeria that the North prefers. This isn’t the way to live in a country we all profess ownership to. We indeed must call a desperate despot by his name and the truth is, in all my studies of tyrants in power, I’ve not seen anything like the one that confronts us today. It threatens our unity. It threatens our very existence as a people.

Unfortunately, and this is what you get when you are surrounded by people but live in your own tiny and unexposed world, his zeal to squash the Igbo agitation for a just and equitable Nigeria, has done more for Biafra than even Nnamdi Kanu could have done in his wildest imagination. I cannot tell you how long it would take but I can assure you that radicalizing the Biafran struggle as he just did, took one giant step further in making violence an instrument of the struggle… a just and necessary struggle to end the structural inequities and hostilities deeply welded into what is clearly looking mire and more like a state tottering on the brink of utter collapse under a President who has a totally different agenda, namely the preservation of the estates of his forefathers.

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Not even nuclear bomb can kill a spirit. Biafra is the Igbo spirit of freedom from neoimperialism in the hands of Western proxies. Nnamdi Kanu is only a mockingbird. To kill a mockingbird is not the same as killing the spirit of the movement. Nnamdi Kanu is like a mockingbird, amplifying the cries of many of his brethren. Would killing a mockingbird silence the cries of the forest? So at the end of Python Dance, would we have a more united Nigeria or a deeply divided one?

Vice President Osinbajo in the absence of Buhari, did well in uniting everyone on a common front. We saw him visit regions where Federal presence for the past couple of years was completely and utterly absent. And we felt that breathe of a united air. The dangers of continuing on the path toed by Buhari is huge and implosive, and I think this is the right time for those who think he listens to them should reach out to him and advise him on a different path, the path of dialogue.

Nigeria’s population is huge and still growing, no nation can take us all as refugees. War will cost us everything and so we must do all in our power never to get there. Justice, equity, fairness, rights etc are the instruments that will ensure that we don’t. If there is ever a time to consider the RESTRUCTURING OF NIGERIA, that time is now.

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Follow him on Twitter @JeffOkoroafor

 

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3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Kennedy Udoka

    September 18, 2017 at 4:07 pm

    Deep, very deep reflection. That keg of gunpowder Nigeria has been sitting on just got exploded. Things are indeed not looking good but I guess everyone already know this.

  2. Aliyu

    September 18, 2017 at 4:09 pm

    You are stupid for writing this nonsense. You all should thank your God that Baba Buhari brought out his time to rule Nigeria. Ungrateful elements.

  3. Opeyemi Olatunde

    September 18, 2017 at 4:11 pm

    When Nnamdi Kalu was threatening everyone where were you with a fancy write up to condemn him? The Nigerian state now rose to deal with him and you are here speaking big English. This is just the beginning o

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