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Showing posts from September, 2021

The Biafra of My Dreams (Revisited)

  On the 30th of May 1967, the late Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu declared the Republic of Biafra as a secessionist state from Nigeria. This sparked off the Nigerian civil war that lasted from the 7th of July 1967 until January 1970. Fortunately or unfortunately, at the end of the war, Biafra was not to be. It is no news that Nigeria, as it is, was born out of the selfish desires of the British for easier control of their interests across the different regions of the country with oil being the most important, and as it were the Nigerian Government was backed militarily by the British in their quest to retain the oil-rich Biafran region. The truth is that if Nigeria had no oil, or if the bulk of the oil was found elsewhere but the southern region, or if the southern region had made Shell/BP a better deal than they had with Nigeria, Biafra would have been in existence today. The agitation for Biafra in Ojukwu’s time was mainly as a result of the massacre of Easterners in