Like some of you, I have read today with mixed feelings of envy and glee, about the emergence of Africa’s newest state in south Sudan. What the world just witnessed in that part of Africa is the outcome of decades of hard work by the distinct nationalities and groups that inhabit it, to achieve self determination from a unitary contraption that masquerades as a state. Each of the several media reports on the event that I have read so far includes testimonies from joyful ordinary citizens of the new state who recounted their agonies and the incalculable toll in blood and treasure that the struggle took on them and their society. I haven’t read anywhere about anyone amongst them who said that the outcome of their struggle is not worth the trouble and hardship they went through to throw off the yoke of oppression that unitary Sudan represented in the lives.
Like some of you, I have read today with mixed feelings of envy and glee, about the emergence of Africa’s newest state in south Sudan. What the world just witnessed in that part of Africa is the outcome of decades of hard work by the distinct nationalities and groups that inhabit it, to achieve self determination from a unitary contraption that masquerades as a state. Each of the several media reports on the event that I have read so far includes testimonies from joyful ordinary citizens of the new state who recounted their agonies and the incalculable toll in blood and treasure that the struggle took on them and their society. I haven’t read anywhere about anyone amongst them who said that the outcome of their struggle is not worth the trouble and hardship they went through to throw off the yoke of oppression that unitary Sudan represented in the lives.
No two quests for self determination are the same. My attempts to contrast south Sudan’s struggle for self determination with the on-going desire and quest by us, the Igbo to achieve our own freedom from the unjust contraption called Nigeria, which exists and acts true to type, reaffirms the evident truism that the immediate assertion encapsulates. We have fought and lost a war in our quest to achieve the same feat as the inhabitants of south Sudan. I blame our defeat in that war partly on the schizophrenic character of the leadership that guided its prosecution. However, even in defeat, aspects of our experience fighting that war constitute proof of our ability to run a modern state. It gladdens my heart even further when I remember that leaders of the Nigeria project lack similar ability. Granted that nothing shames them, Igbo accomplishments for the duration of the war— while were subjected to a chocking blockade, we refined our own petroleum, fabricated some of our own functional battle hardware, compounded some of our won effective pharmaceutical products without external assistance—are enough to shame them especially when it is evident that Nigeria under their hold, has proven itself incapable of achieving similar feats. When I look at the failures of a united Nigeria, the Republic of Biafra, which will rise again, is proof that the wealth of nation is its intellectual property.
The late Chief Anthony Enahoro once told me that the current century, which he aptly called the Century for Nationalities, will witness the achievement of self determination through statehood by most of the world’s distinct nationalities, especially those of them that were carved into aberrant supra-national states by external intervention.
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There is wisdom and logic in Chief Enahoro’s prediction. Some of the events that have unfolded so far in the British Isle, where the British are being compelled by hard facts of history to continuously loosen their imperial shackles on the Irish, and the Scots have given credence to the Oldman’s prediction, which was part of his analytical responses to some of the incisive questions I often asked him in those days. Although it is too early for anyone to predict the direction of the uprisings that began this spring in the Arab and Muslim world, it is only a moronic cynic who will make bold to assert that the peoples involved haven’t carved a unique path to self determination on the sandy and dusty lands in that part of the world.
Closer home, some of us join the resilient inhabitants of south Sudan to herald the birth of their new state. Nothing trumps history and the justice it ultimately holds for victims of the political oppression and injustice. At the flag lowering/raising event that marked the sunset of unitary state control and the birth of a new state in south Sudan yesterday, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the man who went to great length in his use of illegal violence to perpetuate the absurdity similar to the unity that has been used in the Nigeria project to dehumanize the Igbo especially, to hold inhabitants of south Sudan down, admitted defeat. He was quoted to have said in a New York Times story that: “Sudan’s unity would have been better,” but “I convinced myself that unity shouldn’t be through war.” Are his likes all over the continent who sustain unity through violence and dehumanization listening?
Notwithstanding that Igbo quest for self determination is yet to attain the status of a struggle, it still encapsulates all necessary ingredients for an outcome similar to what just dawned in south Sudan. There is no iota of doubt in my mind that our own turn will come. Time will prove me right on that.
● E. C. Ejiogu, PhD, is a political sociologist. He is the author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria, published in March by UK-based Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
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