{"id":23807,"date":"2020-01-21T18:17:35","date_gmt":"2020-01-21T18:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=23807"},"modified":"2020-01-21T18:17:35","modified_gmt":"2020-01-21T18:17:35","slug":"50yrs-after-civil-war-nigeria-is-still-about-sharing-of-resources-not-building-unity-by-max-siollun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=23807","title":{"rendered":"50yrs After Civil War: Nigeria is Still About Sharing of Resources not Building Unity By Max Siollun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Fifty years ago, on Jan. 15, Nigeria\u2019s civil war ended. Fought between the country\u2019s southeast region, which seceded and called itself Biafra, and the rest of the country, which Britain supported and armed, the war was brutal. Over a million people died during three years of conflict. After being starved into submission by a blockade, the Biafrans surrendered and their leaders promised to be \u201cloyal Nigerian citizens.\u201d<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Half a century later, the war\u2019s legacy continues to hold Nigeria captive. It simultaneously brings the country together and pushes it apart.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">In the early aftermath of the war, the country appeared to be unified. Despite the war\u2019s shocking human tragedy, reconciliation was remarkably rapid. War and partition ironically created a consensus: The country, now united, should never be allowed to break apart again. The government declared a general amnesty for wartime combatants, refused to punish either those who led the secession or those who suppressed it and did not give medals to any soldiers who fought in the so-called Brothers\u2019 War.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">The country was re-engineered to prevent another secession. To find a way for Nigeria\u2019s more than 250 ethnic groups to live together peacefully, the country was split into 36 states, most of which coincided with the location of a major ethnic group. The federal government, whose power was increased, provided the states with funds \u2014 which created a financial deterrent against secession.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Postwar leaders found another way of building national unity: the concept of \u201cfederal character.\u201d A new Constitution required the composition and conduct of government to \u201creflect the federal character of Nigeria.\u201d Its purpose was to ensure that no ethnic group would monopolize leadership of the government or be excluded from national economic and political opportunities. Still in place today, it in effect operates as one of the world\u2019s biggest affirmative action schemes. Nigerian law even bans political parties if they adopt names, logos or mottoes with ethnic, geographic or religious connotations, or if their membership does not satisfy constitutional diversity requirements.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">But these efforts to ensure national unity, however well intentioned, froze Nigeria in time-bound assumptions about what the country should look like. The postwar desire to prevent another secession generated a near obsessive ethnic micromanaging of national life \u2014 and created a nation that exists almost simply to share money and jobs. \u201cFederal character\u201d became the most controversial two words in Nigeria\u2019s Constitution. An ethnic quota regulates almost every facet of public life: Admission to the government and the Civil Service, schools and universities, the military and the police is decided by regional origin.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Rather than working as a glue for unity, the fixation on ethnic sharing of national opportunities and resources made Nigerians more aware of their ethnic differences. Resentment rose in parts of the country badly served by the quota system. The irony is plain: To prevent the recurrence of a war fought at least partly on ethnic lines \u2014 Biafra was populated mainly by the Igbo ethnic group \u2014 Nigeria\u2019s rulers solidified ethnic identities.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">What\u2019s more, instead of ensuring the country\u2019s unity, the postwar settlement generated conflict. For much of the past 20 years, Nigeria\u2019s military has been engaged in fighting insurgencies in the north and south of the country. The long-running insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, in the country\u2019s south, has indirect links to the postwar settlement. By controlling revenues from the country\u2019s lucrative petroleum industry and requiring them to be shared nationwide, the federal government stripped control from local communities.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">The postwar settlement created another profound division: between Nigeria\u2019s people and their political leaders. For much of the past 50 years, Nigeria has been governed by the soldiers who won the war. For three decades, the form of rule was direct: Nigeria was under military dictatorship. But the passage to democracy, undertaken in 1999, did not dispel the military\u2019s hold on the country. Military rulers were reluctant to cede power to, or accept the demands of, civilian opposition groups that called for national restructuring and the devolution of power to state governments. Instead, the generals engineered what the civilian opposition criticized as an \u201carmy arrangement\u201d and ceded power to one of their own \u2014 the retired general Olusegun Obasanjo, to whom the Biafran Army surrendered in 1970.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">The generals\u2019 reluctance to dismantle the postwar system mummified Nigeria, ushering in a kind of gerontocracy. In a country whose population is overwhelmingly young \u2014 two-thirds are under 30 \u2014 the distorting effects of such generational asymmetry cannot be understated. Even now, the officers of the civil war continue to rule the country. Muhammadu Buhari, a 77-year-old retired major general, is Nigeria\u2019s current president.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Even one of the seeming successes of the postwar period \u2014 the speed with which the country moved on \u2014 brought difficulties. In the rush to \u201cforgive and forget\u201d after the war, Nigeria skipped key questions about its purpose, its form and its destiny. There was no official narrative of what happened, nor an appraisal of lessons learned from it.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">The absence of official accounts led others to fill the void. Denied the chance to articulate their grievances through formal channels, such as a war crimes trial or a truth and reconciliation commission, the Igbo ethnic group, which spearheaded the secession, has richly chronicled its suffering and sense of injustice. Barely a year goes by without an Igbo author publishing a book about the war. One of the most successful African novels of the past 15 years, \u201cHalf of a Yellow Sun\u201d by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, tells the story of the civil war from a distinctly Biafran perspective.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">The history written not by the war\u2019s winners but by its losers has become yet another means of division. The parts of the country that won the war want to stop talking about it \u2014 and view the Igbos, with their memorializing habits, as something of a fifth column. Ironically, the Igbos, who may be Nigeria\u2019s most widely dispersed ethnic group, are found in every corner of the country. With substantial nationwide business and trading interests, polyglot and intermarried with many other groups, far from a group set on secession, they show how much Nigeria has changed in the past 50 years.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">But Nigeria remains haunted by the ghosts of its civil war. It simply stopped the war without addressing its root causes. And by refusing to discuss the war\u2019s legacies, the country\u2019s rulers bred a deep, dangerous disenchantment.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">The war may have ended 50 years ago, but its effects are far from over.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Max Siollun (@maxsiollun) is a Nigerian historian and the author, most recently, of \u201cNigeria\u2019s Soldiers of Fortune &#8220;<\/div>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fifty years ago, on Jan. 15, Nigeria\u2019s civil war ended. Fought between the country\u2019s southeast region, which seceded and called itself Biafra, and the rest of the country, which Britain supported and armed, the war was brutal. Over a million people died during three years of conflict. After being starved into submission by a blockade, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[358,125],"class_list":["post-23807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-biafra","tag-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/ojukwu.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-6bZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23809,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23807\/revisions\/23809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}