Biafra Day passions should infuse the Igbo political playbook, but purged of secessionist praxis. Strategic pragmatism is required as the 2027 presidential poll approaches.
By Chudi Okoye
If the smart researchers and data analysts at SBM Intelligence got it right – and I can’t think why not – the coerced weekly sit-at-home ‘protest’ in the South-East of Nigeria, started by the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2021, enforced by its armed wing Eastern Security Network (ESN), and now seemingly hijacked by stochastic local gangs, has, in its four-year duration, caused 332 violent incidents and 776 fratricidal fatalities. It has also cost the region about ₦7.6 trillion in economic damage. SBM converts the economic cost to $4.6 billion using today’s depreciated exchange rate, but the figure would be significantly higher if calculated using historical exchange rates prior to the naira’s steep devaluation.
The economic loss, annualized, exceeds the GDP of some small African countries, and is equivalent to the combined budgets of all South-East state governments in 2024. Rather steep!
This is to say nothing of the disruption of governance and the humanitarian toll (young children missing school, job losses and impact on families, etc). Or the social fracture it fosters, with a generational divide emerging between the secessionist agenda sold to Igbo youths and the purposive restructuring agenda of the political elite. It also does not compute the psychological trauma engendered by the sit-at-home order, driven by the fundamental illogicality of a coercive protest allegedly meant to compel the release of a separatist leader who claims to fight for his people’s ‘freedom’.
The spectacle evokes Rousseau’s chilling paradox of forcing men to be free, but here grotesquely inverted: freedom pursued not against the oppressor, but inflicted upon the oppressed. Franz Fanon, in his seminal Wretched of the Earth, defended revolutionary violence against colonial domination, but he explicitly warned against the danger of that violence turning inward in acts of self-harm. Likewise, Albert Camus, in The Rebel, rejected any revolutionary project that sacrificed human dignity or became an end in itself.
The Igbos are paying a hefty price, truly, for a posture of self-determination. This is the internal cost of unreflective radicalism and the perverse logic of harming one’s own region under the banner of defending it. It’s why, in a poem I wrote earlier decrying the sit-at-home imposition, I called it “Spit-At-Home”.
At the four-year mark, the sit-at-home campaign has already lasted longer than the 1967-1970 Nigeria-Biafra war – another calamity visited upon the Igbo homeland, other than slavery and Western colonisation. The traumas of sit-at-home may not match the devastations caused by Western or Nigerian assaults on Igboland, but they are probably more invidious for being self-inflicted. These facts may be worth contemplating as the Igbos commemorate Biafra Day today, May 30, 2025.
Biafra Matters
Biafra Day stands as an imperative act of remembrance, no less potent than America’s Memorial Day or the Jewish Yom HaShoah, dedicated to victims of the Holocaust. It took only six years after World War II ended in 1945 for Yom HaShoah to be established. Yet in Nigeria – which declared June 12 as Democracy Day in 2018, twenty-five years after the 1993 presidential election was annulled – the federal government has yet to formally acknowledge, let alone memorialize, the millions who perished in the 1967–1970 civil war. The government does celebrate Armed Forces Remembrance Day, honoring Nigeria’s fallen soldiers, including those who fought on the federal side during the war. But nothing exists to memorialize or expiate the Igbo genocide. It thus falls to the South-East to claim this duty of remembrance.
May 30, 1967 is an indelible date in the annals of Igbo history. It was on this day, after Nigeria’s First Republic had collapsed, that Lt. Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, then military governor of the Eastern Region, proclaimed the sovereign Republic of Biafra, amid deepening national turmoil following the 1966 coups. It was in direct response to Igbo massacres in northern Nigeria, as an imperiled and politically exposed people fled parts of Nigeria seeking refuge in their homeland. The Biafra Day memorial is not to re-litigate the war; it is merely to honor the dead, remember the ordeal, and mark the resilience of a people who persevere despite the pains of post-war discrimination.
Though the war ended in 1970, its political fallouts linger. Despite being one of Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups, the Igbos remain locked out of true federal power. Since independence in 1960, no leader from the core Igbo region has ruled Nigeria – save for Aguiyi-Ironsi’s chaotic 194-day stint, cut short by his brutal assassination. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s ceremonial presidency in the First Republic carried no executive weight, and Alex Ekwueme, as Shehu Shagari’s Second Republic vice-president, had limited authority. Occasional Senate presidencies and House of Reps speakership, none in recent time, offer scant consolation. Electoral forays by Azikiwe in 1979 and 1983 mustered less than a fifth of the vote. Though Obi improved on this in 2023, capturing a quarter, he still fell short. Federal appointments to Igbos are sporadic, often symbolic, and rarely strategic – granted at the discretion of Nigeria’s enduring duopoly: the North and the South-West.
Activism vs. Exitism
Persistent marginalization has induced diverse Igbo attitudes toward Nigeria. In an earlier essay, I delineated five distinct dispositions: Ardent Nigerianistas, who accept the status quo; Dauntless Devolutionists, seeking power redistribution to the states; Restless Restructurists, who want greater devolution to constitutionally designated regions; and two separatist strands – Ethnic Separatists, desiring a sovereign nation comprising only the core Igbo states, and Linguistic Separatists, envisioning a broader conglomerate including Igbo-adjacent states.
It is within the separatist strain that a most troubling tendency has emerged – what I call exitism: a radical posture of defiance and disavowal, with a combustive instinct of disengagement or withdrawal. Unlike classical separatism, which is anchored in a structured vision of self-determination, exitism is nebulous, nihilistic, insurgent, and often self-destructive. While conventional separatist activism seeks change through engagement – be it legislative, diplomatic, or strategic mobilization – exitism thrives on raw grievance, animadversion, and emotional agitation, often verging on violence and even criminality.
The exitist tendency offers no specific path to Igbo self-determination. Deriving from the acerbic rhetoric of the IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, it has – since his arrest, detention, and ongoing trial – metastasized into self-terrorism, manifesting in actions that harm the very Igbo homeland that it pretends to defend. Exitist militants impose a weekly sit-at-home diktat that undermines the regional economy. They deprecate fellow Igbos as ‘saboteurs,’ a term with roots in the civil war. And they sow insecurity in their own homeland: murdering, kidnapping and extorting their Igbo compatriots; destroying property and shops; and even on occasion preventing children from attending school or taking national exams.
This is not principled resistance; it is criminality and self-sabotage masquerading as self-determination – a tragic distortion of our historical struggle. Let us be clear: this is not how a people ascend to freedom or federal power. Rather, it is how they descend into chaos and marginality. As an Igbo voice speaking to fellow Igbos, I use strong language deliberately – not to condemn, but to awaken us. We must confront the painful paradox: that in trying to avenge our historical injuries, we are inflicting new wounds upon ourselves.
Exitism corrodes Igbo politics, deepens internal fractures, and erodes the legitimacy of the political class, casting them as complicit and weak in the eyes of a radicalized base – in all, draining the region of strategic energy. Worse, it ends up de-marketing the South-East, so it’s increasingly marginalized in the national arena, despite its rightful place in Nigeria’s majoritarian triad. Far from fortifying Igbo bargaining power, exitism erodes political cohesion, alienates allies, and undercuts broader Igbo political objectives. In fact, exitist pathology conduces to a reactionary entrapment of Igbos. One could argue that the continued incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu is a strategic provocation aimed at baiting segments of the Igbo population into impulsive, exitist responses that are then pathologized – framed as evidence of political irrationality or dysfunction, reinforcing negative stereotypes that undermine the region’s credibility in the national arena.
All of this has serious implications, as the South-East prepares for the 2027 presidential election.
War Pain, Political Gain
The question is no longer whether Biafra Day should be commemorated. That is settled. It should be – at the very least institutionalized in the South-East, much like how various U.S. states, and indeed regions around the world, mark their distinct histories. The real challenge now is to purge exitist toxicity from Igbo politics: to leverage Biafra consciousness while shedding the drag of secessionist praxis. The task is to harness its potent symbolism in service of the Igbo political agenda, especially as the South-East prepares once again to bid for national power in 2027.
History offers instructive precedents. In the United States, a Confederate southerner, Andrew Johnson, rose to the presidency in 1865, the very year the civil war – sparked by Southern secession – came to a close. In another instance, Israel emerged strong from the Holocaust, transforming collective trauma into global legitimacy and strategic power. Other peoples have turned war pain into political gain. The Igbos can do the same.
The South-East’s near-term window for national power is narrow. With incumbency advantage, Tinubu could probably win re-election. Indeed, should Atiku and Obi again split the opposition vote, as I argued in my most recent essay, 2023’s outcome may repeat, this time likely with a larger APC margin. A failed 2027 bid could defer Igbo aspirations until 2039, by which time today’s frontline figures, including Peter Obi, may be politically obsolete, their bases dissipated. In that scenario, the North/South-West power duopoly will harden, with a rising South-South, while the South-East is further sidelined.
In the 2023 presidential election, Peter Obi was forced to flee to the then marginal Labour Party, a move which risked sidelining Igbo politics. However, Obi worked hard to turn Labour into a veritable third party, though it has yet to become a true ‘third force’, having lost some momentum since the election. There’s even a question whether a third force strategy is sustainable in Nigeria. Nigerian politics exhibits a persistent duopolistic dynamic, which I demonstrated in a previous analysis of Fourth Republic elections:
“We’ve had seven presidential elections so far in the 4th Republic. Results from the first six indicate a persistent duopolistic tendency, with two political conglomerates commanding a disproportionate share of votes, as seen in the following tallies: 1999 – 100% (there were only two parties); 2003 – 94.1%; 2007 – 88.3%; 2011 – 90.8%; 2015 – 98.9%; and 2019 – 96.8%.”
Peter Obi disrupted this in 2023 with Labour polling 25.4% of the votes, while the two leading parties, APC and PDP, secured a combined share of 65.7%. But indications are that APC may have gained strength since that election. A potential opposition coalition ahead of the next election will restore the bipolar political architecture that had characterized earlier electoral cycles. With the ensuing scramble for 2027, Igbos have a chance to re-insert ourselves into that duopolistic framework, if Obi emerges to lead a coalition ticket. But this would be complicated by a persistent exitist disposition.
Most Igbos revere Biafra as a symbol of resilience, not a blueprint for exit. Returning to my Igbo attitudinal schema, I daresay there’s little patience for the gradualism of the Nigerianistas and Devolutionists, likely even less for separatist absolutism. What remains then is pragmatic radicalism: restructuring Nigeria, not abandoning it.
Biafra consciousness, properly articulated, is not separatist nostalgia but a critique of national stagnation and a call to fulfill Nigeria’s long-delayed promise. As 2027 approaches, the Igbos must suppress exitist impulses and present a united, pragmatic front. The lesson of Biafra Day is not only to remember the dead, but to choose life – and a future – within a re-imagined and restructured Nigeria.
Harnessing Biafra consciousness means channeling its deep symbolism into pragmatic strategies: building stronger internal currents between separatist leaders and the mainstream political class to contain exitist tendencies; forging cross-regional coalitions to push for meaningful constitutional reforms; and articulating a vision of regional autonomy that resonates nationally. By doing so, the Igbo political class can transform historical memory into a unifying force – one that strengthens bargaining power and positions the region as an indispensable partner in shaping Nigeria’s democratic future.
