The Round-Up 015: Blame games not to die for
Intro Words: Toye Sokunbi
On the 31st of May, the five major states of Nigeria's southeastern region were transformed into ghost towns in commemoration of Biafra Remembrance Day 2021. The recommendation to stay-at-home to observe the day, was by Nnamdi Kanu, the controversial leader of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a separatist group that has been loud in demanding that Nigeria's five eastern states be granted independence.
Kanu himself has been absent from public-eye, since his house was raided back in February 2018, but the total compliance to yesterday's IPOB stay-in order across the five eastern Nigerian states gives an indication for his scale of influence. Earlier in the week, IPOB spokeswoman, Emma Powerful, echoed Kanu's sentiments in a statement suggesting enemies of the Igbos may take advantage of the day to raise tensions and wreak havoc in the region, especially as reports of insecurity have shot up in recent times.
Nnamdi Kanu's IPOB, rose to infamy in the late 2000s to early 2010s, after Kanu revived Radio Biafra, an internet and shortwave frequency broadcasted to Nigeria from the UK. Radio Biafra itself is believed to have been founded by the late Odumegwu Ojukwu, a Nigerian military officer who led the first secession attempt to separate Nigeria's oil-rich eastern region from the rest of the country in 1967. This was following an allegedly Igbo-led coup in 1966 that led to the deaths of Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and many senior Nigerian politicians, by another group of mutinous army officers led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu.
In those years, Nigerian governance and political party system were divided along ethnic lines. There were no parties with a national spread, so political representation was done on the basis of population. The northern region counted slightly more people than the other two regions combined after the 1952 census, had more parliamentary seats as designed by the British colonial administration. Over the years, this northern majority leadership began to fracture the country.
After Nzeogwu's 1966 coup, Major General Aguyi Ironsi, an indigene of the southeastern city, Umuahia became head of state. Ironsi suspended many parts of the constitution, with the exception of sections on press freedom and human rights violations. He began setting Nigeria in motion for a centralised federal government, through Unification Decree No. 34. Sadly, Ironsi, only ruled for 194 days before he was ousted and brutally murdered in a counter-coup that saw the emergence of Yakubu Gowon, a northern army General.
Colonel Ojukwu, who was the military governor for Nigeria's eastern region in 1966 was not having it. Along with a few other Igbo leaders who felt they could no longer trust the leadership of Nigeria, he decided to break away. They called the new country, The Republic of Biafra to natural resistance from Nigeria's General Yakubu Gowon led regime. Igbos were persecuted in Northern parts of the country and for months tensions rose, steamrolling a series of events that culminated Nigerian civil war lasting between 1967 and 1970. Eventually, Biafra surrendered after 30 months, but by then, up to 5 million people had been murdered, tortured or starved to death. (Finance Minister, Obafemi Awolowo, reportedly signed off on a starvation policy that stopped food from being sent to eastern Nigeria. In Awolowo's chilling words: “So I decided to stop sending food there. In the process, civilians would suffer, but soldiers suffered the most”).
Nnamdi Kanu's popularity has grown all over the world by driving sentiments around this bloody watershed history. In 2014, Kanu began calling for Igbos to take up arms, evangelising a referendum to once again demand Biafra's freedom from Nigeria. The Nigerian federal government labelled him a terrorist and arrested him on charges of treason the following year. He was held for 19 months without trial before he was released on bail. In that time, news of his persecution had spread around the world, and he assumed a sort of martyr status amongst Igbos— even amongst youths who should be far removed from the events of the civil war.
Ideologically, Kanu is no less different from Western far-right conspiracists who have mastered the art of riling up conservative cultures with separatist propaganda—often about religion and (or) divine ancestry. Many misguided intellectuals like him, exist around the world, often commanding the same level of cult-like reverence, except they are more likely to be extremists, on the side of their home country. What makes Kanu different, however, is a Nigerian system that encourages denialism of war crimes and publicly commits atrocities without consequence.
How else are you to explain the deaths of nearly 150 pro-Biafra activists who were killed by the army in 2016? Or more recently, the raid of IPOB's militant arm, the Eastern Security Network (ESN) that led to the death of seven people? Such brazen acts of human rights violation have served as grounds for allegations that Nigeria's federal government, has been negligent of Igbo people. When you add that to grumbles that the geographical landmass of Eastern Nigeria has progressively shrunk since the end of the civil war, all it takes a good historian with a bit of charisma to agitate an entire tribe towards insurrection. This is how a man like Nnamdi Kanu is created.
The buck of military and environmental horrors meted on south-eastern Nigeria during and after the civil war have been passed from one Nigerian leader to another, but despite overwhelming evidence, none have apologised or truly followed up on reparations. And after a similarly unjustified massacre of mostly pro-Nigeria protesters during last year's #EndSARS movement in Lagos, you start to get the sense these continued extra-judicial killings were never really about allaying national security concerns but silencing valid criticisms about years of government failures. As a reminder that nothing good ever comes from the repression and exclusion of silenced voices, this week's Round-Up is dedicated to the memory of the lives lost to the Biafran war and subsequent tensions in the region ever since.
Here are 3 other quick stories you may need this week:
In all my 20-something years on earth, I have never, by choice, woken up thinking, "I want to fight for Nigeria today", but let me tell you something, e fit be you.
Last month, Nigerian activist Yele Sowore, started making news headlines, after the former presidential aspirant began calling for an Independence day protest. Ten months ago, local and international media covered Sowore’s series of recurring arrests by Nigeria’s special ops covert agency, D.S.S. He’d first been arrested from his hotel on the 3rd of August 2019, while he was planning for an announced protest. His arrest was the start of five-month-long detention that became the stuff of nervous anxiety for Nigerians who had long feared the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari, a former military general, would lead to gross abuses of human rights and crackdowns on freedom of speech. Those fears were further exacerbated when Sowore was suddenly rearrested on the court grounds where his release had just been ordered on Dec 6th of 2019. Read full feature here.
The memes and viral tweets saying “This app should not be free” have probably made it around the internet a million times and over. Well, someone at Twitter has taken a hint, and now the social media platform is rolling out a bunch of new paid features.
Back in February, Techcrunch reported early details of Twitter's first paid subscription service called ‘Super Follow’. Super Follow is actually a bundle of sorts aimed at giving users increased access to revenue generation tools through products that can help Twitter maximise its community. Tech Crunch's Lucas Matney gave vague details of products similar to Discord, Substack, Patreon and Clubhouse. In the same month, Twitter announced its Revue integration, a newsletter product that allows publishers to quickly set up paywalls. And to complete the rollout, last month, Spaces was announced, with news that Twitter was also testing a Tip Jar feature to will allow users to attach their PayPal, CashApp or Patreon donation links to their accounts. Another paid product Twitter is preparing for roll-out is Twitter Blue, a native paid subscription service that will offer users customisation features, the ability to organise tweets into collections and a timer that will give users a brief window to undo tweets. These continuing product announcements come after repeated reports that Twitter's user growth has stagnated in recent years. And amidst increased pressure on CEO Jack Dorsey, to find new innovative ways to tap into Twitter's dedicated user-base. In February Twitter told Bloomberg 85% of its revenue came from ads. Now the social media company will be looking to break new grounds by tapping into creator community trends in content creation, curation and monetisation.
The coronavirus pandemic, amongst other factors, has caused drastic changes to popular work culture in Nigeria. The civil service structure of organisations, in which workers are at the office for 8 hours or more, Mondays to Fridays, suddenly became obsolete as the pandemic made proximity a threat. The response to this was, at first, the shutdown of offices, then the gradual reopening of organisations that could not afford to remain closed with new structures in place, like remote work.
Before this period, remote work was a highly criticised concept. In 2013, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo ex-CEO said, “People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.”1 Working from home is usually met with disdain because it suggests the idea of working away from supervision, breeding a lack of incentive, and these views are mirrored in Nigerian workspaces. Read the full story here