Biafrans Have Vainly Paid With Their Ingenuity, Subjected To Shame In The Quest To Get Nigeria Working

 Biafrans Have Vainly Paid With Their Ingenuity, Subjected To Shame In The Quest To Get Nigeria Working

The Biafran people are one of the three most populous ethnic groups in Nigeria. Without doubt, Biafrans are adjudged one of the most technically enclined race on earth. This is a fact established beyond argument, accurately demonstrated through all the 30-months of bloody genocidal war that could have wiped off the entire race. 

As Biafrans fought for survival in a war of existential threat orchestrated by Britain, they were cut off by the rest of the world, the inventive and innovative talent in them was put on display through creative constructions of monumental proportion such as Uli airport, including its repair in record time as it came under heavy bombardment multiple times and the ingenuity of Biafran engineers stretched under the most challenging conditions.

Biafrans are the most business adept tribe in Nigeria or possibly in Africa. They are renowned for taking the lead in entrepreneurial endeavors. The saying “a Biafran can turn a desert into a gold mine”, is an effort at explaining how productive Biafrans are. You must acknowledge that the Biafran people are indeed unique and positively, progressively different from other ethnic groups in Nigeria, with a predisposed commitment toward commerce and entrepreneurship. This is because Biafrans appear to have a higher tendency for taking the kind of risk that businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors present.

Aside God, excellence is the next thing Biafrans worship. This behavior is common in every field trip they make – whether it is commercial trade or academia, they exhibit great accomplishments in Nigeria or diaspora that cannot be attributed to chance. This serves as main reason why Anthropologists, after numerous investigations, conclude that Biafrans are culturally goal-oriented, individualistic and flexible people.

The Biafran people’s ‘live and let live’ mindset is wholly responsible for the developmental stride invested across Nigeria, to the detriment of their own region and in total lack of appreciation from the guised fellow citizens. It is common to find fellow countrymen torching the businesses owned by Biafrans, and taking the lives of Biafrans in some scenarios for no reason other than for being able to set a goal, accomplish it and being successful.

There have been several spontaneous crisis in the northern hemisphere of Nigeria leading to the loss of many Biafran lives before the war. And, after the over 3.5 million deaths in the genocidal war, religion has continued to be used as a guise to spill Biafran blood; sometimes it is caused by something as negligible as a joke or comedy about Prophet Muhammed. 

What the founder and leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra(IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is going through in the hands of Federal government of Nigeria is the last straw that broke the camel’s back in the series of shameful treatments meted out to Biafrans.  And this begs for the question, ‘if Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is from Oduduwa or Arewa and the court gave order that he should be released and compensated, would the Nigeria government still have ignored as in Kanu(the Biafran's) case? Same question goes for the docile silence of Nigerian politicians of Biafran origin, who have failed to come out en masse to condemn the disobedience to an order from courts of competent jurisdiction.

What is clear is that by such treatments to Biafrans, Nigerian worsening existential condition has grown irredeemable. 

Written by Obulose Chidiebere

Edited by Chibueze Daniel

For Family Writers Press International