Alternate history. What would have happened had Biafra won the Nigerian civil war?

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If Biafra Had Won the War
January 2014 marked the 44th anniversary of the end of the Nigerian civil war, and
the end of the short lived Republic of Biafra. Biafra did not live long enough to see its
third birthday.
Although the war ended 44 years ago, wounds from it still fester. Many eastern
Nigerians still wonder and ask what would have happened had Biafra succeeded.
What if the federal government had agreed to “let Biafra go?” Or if Biafra had hung
on long enough for a United Nations resolution calling for the establishment of a
new independent state in eastern Nigeria?
Ostensibly, Biafra had the ingredients to succeed and become a successful nation. It
had an educated and skilled workforce, a charismatic head of state, a citizenry with
a messianic zeal for their country to succeed, natural resources, a coastline, and
perhaps most crucially of all – billions of dollars worth of crude oil flowing
underneath its soil.
BIAFRA – A WORLD SUPERPOWER?
With oil wealth and a vibrant citizenry, Biafra could have become Africa’s first world
superpower. With citizens of the calibre of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sir Louis Mbafeno,
Matthew Mbu, Chike Obi, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, Christopher Okigbo, and Michael
Okpara, it had men of foresight, intellect, and vision to rival any nation in Africa.
Academics, civil servants, diplomats, doctors, judges, mathematicians, professors,
scientists, soldiers…Biafra had them all. When Biafra seceded, it took not only a
portion of Nigerian territory with it, but also a massive part of Nigeria’s brainpower,
army officer corps, and wealth.
The remarkable ingenuity of Biafra’s engineers during the war proved the old adage
that “necessity is the mother of all invention”. Had the short‐term technical
ingenuity which led Biafra to refine fuel, manufacture everything from armoured
vehicles to soap, and land mines encased in milk churns, been allowed to continue
long term; it may have led to an industrial and technological revolution in west
Africa. A country full of people that could create, invent, lead, teach, think, and fight.
Surely nothing could stop such a country. The sky was the limit for a country blessed
with so much talent, motivation, and patriotic intensity to succeed. Biafra could have
been Africa’s answer to Israel; the little country that punches above its weight and
refuses to give in.
THE “JEWS OF AFRICA”
However as well as emulating Israel’s benefits, Biafra may also have mimicked
Israel’s problems. Igbos are often called “The Jews of Africa”. The title is not fanciful.
Had Biafra succeeded, it would have had similar demographic and geographic
challenges to the world’s only Jewish state. It would have been surrounded by

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hostile nations, while simultaneously facing an armed insurrection within its
borders by its own citizens.
Biafra faced many challenges within; including a Game of Thrones style cocktail of
conspiracies, internal rivalries, politics, and in‐fighting. Not all eastern Nigerians
approved of secession. The Efiks, Annangs, Ibibios, and Ijaws within Biafra were not
enthusiastic about swapping a Nigerian passport under a Hausa‐Fulani led
government, with a Biafran passport where they would be led by an Igbo
government. How would the ethnic groups on Biafra’s southern coast react to being
minority citizens of a country where most of the wealth is obtained from their land,
but where they did not have economic and political leadership? Probably in the way
they reacted when the same circumstances arose in Nigeria; MEND, Niger Delta
People’s Volunteer Force et al. The armed campaign of kidnapping and violence
which Niger Delta militants waged against the Nigerian federal government would
instead have been waged within Biafra’s borders – against the Biafran government.
Isaac Idaka Boro’s short‐lived Niger Delta Peoples Republic (and the fact that Boro
fought for the Nigerian federal army against Biafra) was a demonstration that Niger
Delta militants would have turned their guns on Biafra before long.
NOISY NEIGHBOURS
How would Biafra have related to its neighbours? To its northern border would
have been one or two landlocked northern republics awash with trained combatant
soldiers and guns. These landlocked countries would need would need deals with
Biafra to gain access to the sea. If Biafra refused or negotiations got difficult, their
demands for access to the sea may have turned violent. Would these northern
republics quietly tolerate the noisy, rich, and successful little nation to their south
without envy or rivalry? Unlikely.
THE MID­WEST
To Biafra’s western border would have been a diverse country of Edos, Esans,
Isokos, Itsekiris, Urhobos, Ika‐Igbos and others (modern day Delta and Edo States).
Would Biafra have closed its borders to its Igbo brothers living in the state next
door? Two options were open to Biafra. It could have encouraged the Igbos living to
its west to migrate to Biafra by granting them automatic Biafran citizenship under
an Israel style “law of return”. That of course would have presented its own
problems by inferring that Biafra was an Igbo ethnic theocracy. It would also have
fuelled fears among non‐Igbo Biafrans that Biafra was an Igbo project.
The other option would have been to enlarge Biafra’s territory by extending its
borders westward into Igbo speaking areas west of the River Niger such as Asaba.
Non‐Igbos living in such areas were unlikely to accept such territorial encroachment
peacefully. Any Biafran attempt to annex territory west of the Niger would have
been violently resisted. Even if successful, Biafran soldiers would have been viewed

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as an army of occupation in the manner of British soldiers in Northern Ireland and
Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
FORGIVENESS AND BEYOND
Nigeria’s existence today owes much to the “No Victor, No Vanquished” policy of
Nigeria’s leader General Gowon after the war. Had Gowon not declared a blanket
amnesty for all combatants and reintegrated some Biafran soldiers back into the
Nigerian army, there would likely have been a Biafran resistance army in existence
for several decades. Conversely, had Biafra won the war; the bitterness caused by
the 1966 pogroms and slaughter of Igbos would have made it impossible to treat
defeated Nigerians leniently. Biafran officer Colonel Ben Gbulie admitted that
Gowon would not have lived to tell the tale of a Biafran victory. Gbulie said
"Probably if we had won the war, we would have shot him." Biafran ‘pound of flesh’
reprisals against those who so badly wounded it in 1966 would have led to a
decades long tit‐fot‐tat war to rival the Israelis and Arabs.
Biafra’s army would have been kept very busy. It would simultaneously have to
defend itself from two potentially hostile northern republics (one of which was
likely to be Islamic), fight resentful neighbours to its west and/or maintain an
occupying army outside its borders to its west, and simultaneously try to suppress
an armed rebellion within its borders by Niger Delta militants. The military strain
may have compelled Biafra to introduce compulsory military service for all adults,
and would require it to spend a sizeable chunk of its budget on defence and military
expenditure.
WOULD OJUKWU HAVE BECOME A DICTATOR?
Biafra’s leader Ojukwu was every inch the revolutionary leader: charismatic, iconic,
and intelligent. He even wore the revolutionary’s trademark green fatigues and
intense beard. He was almost Fidel Castro‐esque or Yassir Arafat‐esque in that
regard. However would Ojukwu’s strong leadership have been able to resist a slide
into a personality cult or tyranny?
For all his articulation and intelligence, Ojukwu was no democrat. He himself
admitted that leaders do not voluntary surrender power. Instead power must be
wrestled from their hands. The execution of Alale, Banjo, and Ifeajuna demonstrated
that Ojukwu was not safe from his own people, and the lengths he would go to in
order to remain in power. He also fired, then arrested and detained, his army
commander Brigadier Hilary Njoku (who had disagreed with him and questioned
the wisdom if fighting a war against an army with vast superiority in manpower and
weaponry).
Biafra had several officers who were senior to, or had equal seniority with, Ojukwu
in the pre‐war Nigerian army. Many of these officers did not enjoy Ojukwu’s
arrogance or having to serve under a junior officer. Ojukwu would eventually have

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faced a coup or assassination. Even if he somehow managed to faced down coups or
escape the assassin’s bullet, it would have come at a price. Biafra’s paranoid “Sabo”
mentality would have led him to establish a KGB or Orwellian‐like secret police to
keep continual watch on his population and potential enemies within. Biafra would
not have been an oasis of freedom.
The defection of Ijaw air force officer George Kurubo demonstrated that some non‐
Igbo ethnic groups did not have their hearts entirely in Biafra. Several other non‐
Igbo officers were also likely to defect. The suspicion with which Igbos regarded
their ethnic neighbours such as the Efik, Ibibio, and Ogoni was likely to have led to
racial profiling of these ethnic groups by Biafran intelligence services (further
increasing their hostility to the Igbo leadership).
Biafra was not immune from corruption either. If some Biafrans could sell weapons
to an enemy that was resolutely determined to bomb them into the stone age, and
which continually bombed women and starving children in hospitals and markets,
could embezzle funds meant for the welfare of Biafran troops and the purchase of
weapons, imagine what heights corruption could have reached in peacetime in a
country awash with oil money...
Biafra may have been Nigeria in a microcosm.
Max Siollun
https://twitter.com/maxsiollun