IRIN Focus on the call for confederation

In the aftermath of the religious violence that rocked the northern city of Kaduna last month, the new buzzword in southeastern Nigeria is ‘confederation’, a concept that has a powerful association with the country’s slide to civil war more than 30 years ago. Last week, a pan-Igbo socio-political group, the ‘Ohaneze Ndi Igbo’, backed a demand by governors of the five Igbo-speaking states for a new confederal structure in which the regions would have greater autonomy at the expense of the central government. The Ohaneze, headed by Igbo elders including Biafra secessionist leader Odumegwu Ojukwu, said that the Sharia crisis in Kaduna was yet another excuse for Igbo victimisation, which could no longer be tolerated. Igbos, one of Nigeria’s big three ethnic blocs, declared a short-lived independence in 1967 following similar violence in the north. They form the vast majority of the people of the five southeastern states of Enugu, Anambra, Imo, Abia and Ebonyi. “If one Nigeria means at every slight provocation you kill thousands of Igbo, that is not one Nigeria,” a member of the Ohaneze said. “If one Nigeria is at the cost of wanton killings, wanton destruction of Igbo lives and property, it is unacceptable to us.” The implications of confederation do not appear to have been clearly thought through, analysts told IRIN. Rather, it appears to be a new affirmation of Igbo unity and purpose in response to the Kaduna violence - a political answer to the Sharia challenge to national unity emanating from the north. But the federal government, concerned over renewed tensions, has attacked the demand for confederation as it has the Sharia movement. Abuja successfully prevented southeastern governors from meeting their counterparts from the so-called ‘south-south’ states on 11 March, where a common position looked likely to have been forged by what, before Biafra’s secession, was known as the Eastern region. There has also been pressure for greater self-determination in the ‘south-south’ states, also called the southern minorities states: Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Cross River, Edo and Rivers. Last week the Ibibio, an ethnic group covering two south-south states, called for confederation as a solution to the strains of coexistence. In adding their voice to the growing populist agitation for a rethink over Nigeria’s political future, a pan-Ibibio umbrella group warned, after the Kaduna violence: “From now on, the North will pay for every head of a southerner lost in any Northern crisis.” The breakup of Nigeria is now openly discussed, but nowhere with such passion as in the southeast. The 1967-70 civil war left Igboland destitute. Igbos picked themselves up, turned to trade and spread throughout Nigeria, but they have become easy victims of the religious and ethnic disturbances that have erupted with unnerving regularity in the north over the past two decades. The carnage in Kaduna from 21-23 February over the planned introduction of Sharia hit Igbos especially hard. “No Igbo business is left standing, all have been burnt down and looted,” Festus Okoye, a Kaduna-based human rights lawyer, told IRIN. But this time Igbos retaliated, attacking Muslim Hausas in Kaduna and in Igbo towns in the southeast. “Every crisis in the north and the west affects Igbos, and they have never retaliated until now. But they can no longer tolerate being the butt of every crisis. When they retaliate like they’ve done now, the other side pauses to think,” a senior Igbo government official told IRIN. “There is a new generation of Igbo leaders who can’t accommodate the psychology of being defeated (in the civil war).” But he added that despite the new-found self-assurance, it was a mistake for the southeastern governors to demand confederation. “They’ve boxed themselves into a position where they can’t moderate the more radical views coming from their followers,” he said. Like most of Nigeria’s professional classes, the government official regards the breakup of the country as one of the worst possible solutions to the crisis of national identity. “Yes we are facing a dangerous situation, but I don’t think we’ll get to the point of splitting up,” he said. “There are so many things holding us together that a breakup would be very traumatic. A lot of the people talking of breaking up did not experience the civil war.” Okoye pointed out that, ironically, the retaliatory violence against Muslims in southeast Nigeria after the killings in Kaduna demonstrates the strength of the linkages within Nigeria. “Nigeria is so integrated,” he said, “that Kaduna has shown that nobody can start any nonsense anywhere in the country as it will rebound on them.”