Efik Monarch, Angry over Bakassi Cession, Seeks Independence from Nigeria

The Efik nation, a traditional monarchy in the southeastern corner of Nigeria which dates to pre-colonial times, has said that it intends to secede from Nigeria, mostly because of anger over last year’s cession of the Bakassi Peninsula to neighboring Cameroon, where Efiks also live.

High Chief Eyo Bassey Eyo-Cobham, chairman of the Eburutu Royal Fraternity Forum, made the announcement at a press conference in Calabar, Nigeria, on June 23rd.  He also cited “undue government interference in Efik kingship,” in the words of one press report, and suspicions that the central government in Abuja is planning on handing even more Efik land to Cameroon.  The current obong (prince or traditional ruler, sometimes translated king) of the Efik city-state at Akwa Akpa (“Old Calabar,” in Nigeria) is Basso Ekpo Bassey II (a.k.a. Ekpo Abasi Otu), who took the throne in 2008.  The larger Calabar (a.k.a. Kalabari) Kingdom, which includes Efiks but is dominated by the Ijaw ethnic group, is headed by Theophilus J. T. Princewill, who became King Amachree XI in 2002 (though Amachree’s rule has been in recent years troubled by competing claims).

Basso Ekpo Bassey II’s coronation in 2008

Nigeria’s Cross River State administered the disputed Bakassi Peninsula until the Nigerian and Cameroonian governments agreed in 2002 to abide by an eventual ruling on the overlap by the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (I.C.J.).  The I.C.J. decided in favor of Cameroon, and in 2006 Nigeria formally ceded the area, to the anger of Efiks who proceeded to declare a Democratic Republic of Bakassi.  In this, they had allies in both the Southern Cameroons National Council (SCAPO), a group fighting for the independence of the formerly British-administered parts of Cameroon—plus Bakassi—and an Ogoni autonomist group in Nigeria called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).  That declaration never got any traction, since the Cameroonian government cracks down much harder on separatist talk than Nigeria’s does.  In 2012, the Bakassi dispute was rekindled as the ten-year deadline for Nigeria to appeal the I.C.J. decision was allowed to lapse, prompting Efik activists to accuse Nigeria of abandoning their kinsmen in Bakassi to the Francophone-dominated Cameroonian regime.  In that same year (as reported at the time in this blog), the Efik obong openly advocated accepting an invitation to join Southern Cameroons separatists to push for an independent Ambazonia straddling the border.

This map shows the Efik ethnolinguistic group (included here with Ibibio)
in relation to the Igbo (here “Ibo”) and Ijaw peoples.

Regarding the Bakassi cession, High Chief Eyo-Cobham told reporters at the recent press conference, “With such developments and other oppressive acts and tendencies of the Nigerian State, we the Efik Eburutu people say, ‘Enough is Enough,’ and have decided to take our destinies in our hands peacefully by pulling out of Nigeria. Our peaceful aims and objectives of self-determination for full autonomy are in tandem with Articles 1, 3-21 of the United Nations Charter of which the Federal Republic of Nigeria is a signatory.”

Amachree XI, king of Calabar: is he as separatist as the Efik obong?

In an official statement, the monarchy said that the Nigeria has, in one way or another, “turned us [the Efik] into punching bags socially, economically, and politically.”

The Bakassi Peninsula, in the words of the statement, “was an integral part of Efik Eburutu Kingdom as shown in all available records” and “was secretly and heartlessly expunged from Nigerian map in October 1960, filed in United Nations and African Union (A.U.) secretariats and ceded in 1975 to Cameroun without the consent and knowledge of its owners—the kings and chiefs of Efiks of Calabar and Bakassi.  This action has demonstrated that our people are not wanted in Nigeria, and as a people, we do not want to belong to Cameroun.  The effect of this ceding has brought untold pain and sufferings to Efik Eburutu people.  With this, the spirit of our ancestors who were, as it were, buried in the now ceded territory are roaming, refusing to be appeased.”

Efik protesters angry about the Bakassi cession

It is not clear if King Amachree XI has taken a position on this latest statement—i.e., whether this latest move is an Efik initiative only or if it has the support of the larger Calabar Kingdom of which, in a sense, it is traditionally a part.  But it comes at a time of increasing fragility for Nigerian unity.  The Igbo-dominated Biafra separatist movement, which includes Cross River State and other traditional Calabar territories in its claim, has remained active in recent years, the Adamawa monarchy in east-central Nigeria—which also straddles today’s border with Cameroon, but farther north—agitated for separatism earlier this year (as reported at the time in this blog), and the radical Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has been waging a brutal insurgency for years, killing thousands, in Nigeria’s north and has in recent weeks managed to control a large part of Borno State.

A proposed flag for “Bakassi Free State”

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Related posts from this blog:

• “Nigeria’s Adamawa Kingdom Invokes Sovereignty, Hints at Unification with Kindred in Cameroon” (March 2014)
• “Biafra Bikers Rejoice: Igbo May Not Have Their Own Nation, but They Have License Plates” (Feb. 2014)
• “Nigeria’s Boko Haram Warlord Abubakar Shekau Reported Dead from Gun Battle” (Aug. 2013)
• “Bakassian Border Survey Team Scatters; More Boko Haram Carnage: Nigeria Update” (Nov. 2012)
• “Nigerian Troops Massacre Civilians, Boko Haram Church Suicide Bombing, Kalabari-Bayelsa Border Row, Biafra Abductions: Nigeria Separatism Update” (Nov. 2012)
• “Hundreds Arrested as Biafra Zionists Declare Independence, Former Dictator Nixes Boko Haram Negotiations, More Northern Carnage” (Nov. 2012)
• “Senator Ensnared in Boko Haram Scandal; Open Civil War in Potiskum; More Bakassi Fallout: Nigeria Separatism Update” (Oct. 2012)
• “Jonathan Lets Bakassi Appeal Window Close; Efik King Joins Cause with Ambazonian Separatists” (Oct. 2012)
• “Abuja Rallies, Cameroon Crackdown in Run-Up to Anniversary of Bakassi Cession; Ogoni Trials in Washington, Johannesburg; Achebe on Biafra: Nigeria Separatism Update” (Oct. 2012)
• “Southern Nigeria Splitting Apart Too as the Muslim North Burns” (Aug. 2012)
• “Ambazonian Separatists Focus on Bakassi Peninsula in New Push to Split Cameroon” (Aug. 2012)
• “10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012” (Dec. 2011)
• “Remembering Odumegwu Ojukwu: On Biafra and on an African Continent Riven by European Borders” (Nov. 2011)

Jonathan Lets Bakassi Appeal Window Close; Efik King Joins Cause with Ambazonian Separatists: Nigeria Update, 7-13 October 2012

Secession of the Bakassi Peninsula is in the air again as the deadline for appealing its cession to Cameroon is allowed to pass, and the Efik king and other leaders begin envisioning a Bakassi Republic carved out of pieces of both Nigeria and Cameroon.  Read on ...

Appeal Window Closes, Angering Efik and Others in Nigeria.  Despite a last-minute lawsuit by Bakassian activists, Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, allowed an October 10th deadline to pass, thus closing the window of opportunity for appealing a 2002 ruling by the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) ceding the Bakassi Peninsula to the Republic of Cameroon.  Nine Bakassians in Cross River State in southeastern Nigeria had filed a lawsuit this week against the federal government over the question of sovereignty over the disputed peninsula.  The plaintiffs, a group called the Free Bakassi Association, asked the court to void the Green Tree Agreement of 2006, in which Nigeria acquiesced to the I.C.J. decision, and to order the Nigerian government to retake the disputed area by any means necessary.  But on October 8th, Mohammed Bello Adoke, the Nigerian minister of justice, announced that the deadline would be allowed to pass without appeal.  But Adoke promised to press Cameroon on the rights of Bakassians and other Nigerians living in Cameroonian territory.

Betrayed Bakassians Mull an Efik Republic to Straddle Nigerian-Cameroonian Border.  As the Nigerian government allowed the window on appealing the Bakassi cession to close on October 10th, furious Bakassians on both sides of the (now utterly officially demarcated) Nigerian–Cameroonian border took to the streets to protest.  Liyel Imoke, governor of Nigeria’s Cross River State—where many of the Efik ethnic minority live, including those displaced from Bakassi years ago when the territory was first transferred—pleaded for calm.  More pointedly, supporters of the once-sovereign Efik kingdom marched on the governor’s office, and Ekpo Abasi Otu, the obong of Calabar—the current hereditary ruler of the Efik-dominated Calabar Kingdom—said on the 10th, according to media, “that the Efik were considering the invitation by the people of Southern Cameroon to form a republic as the Federal Government [of Nigeria] had sold their ancestral land to Cameroon.  The coordinator of the Save Bakassi Group, Maurice Ekong, said that this was “the beginning of a long struggle for sovereignty.”  Also in Cross River, Cletus Obun, who heads the Cameroon Border Communities Association (C.B.C.A.), said this week that his group will petition the United Nations for a plebiscite and “will embark on serious mobilisation across local government areas bordering Cameroon in collaboration with the Efiks in Bakassi and the Southern Cameroon for an independent state of Abazonia.”  Efik and other ethnic groups in southwestern Cameroon, including many in the Bakassi Peninsula and many in the areas that used to be the British-ruled Southern Cameroons colony before a merger with Cameroon, newly independent from France, have been pushing for decades for a separate nation, to be called either Ambazonia or Ambazania (as opposed to Obun’s “Abazonia” (a new spelling, or a typo?) above).  Efik activists in August declared an island off the coast of the Bakassi Peninsula the “Republic of Bakassi.”

The obong of Calabar

See an earlier article in this blog with a full discussion of the Bakassi and Ambazonia questions.

Meanwhile, sources are reporting that the Cameroonian government’s security forces are cracking down in Bakassi and Efik in Nigeria have been unable to contact relatives on the Cameroonian side of the border.

Jonathan Offered Okah Amnesty for Blaming Bombs on Political Enemies, Court Hears.  In the trial of the accused Ogoni separatist bomber Henry Okah, which began last week in Johannesburg, South Africa (as reported at the time in this blog), the court screened a 2009 interview with the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network, shot after he’d been granted amnesty by the Nigerian government, in which he said, “There are still thousands and thousands and thousands who are prepared to fight and continue fighting,” adding, “I don’t look like I am contributing to violence; I am participating in fighting for my rights.”  When asked if he was repentant for past violence, he said, “I’m not.  Why should I be?  What we want is our land.  ...  I think in a few months, if government doesn’t address the real demands ... very soon, there will be a resumption of violence.”  Okah, alleged leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), is being accused of masterminding a wave of car-bombings in Nigeria in the year following that interview.  In another interview heard by the court, Okah claimed that after the 2010 car bombings a representative of Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, phoned him in South Africa and asked him to get MEND to retract its claim of responsibility so that Jonathan could “blame the attacks on northerners who are trying to fight against him to come back as president, and if this was done, I was not going to have any problems with the South African government.”  Okah refused the offer, he said in the interview, and a few hours later was arrested.

The Ogoni flag

New Igbo Youth Movement Says It Lured 1,000 Away from MASSOB.  The head of publicity for a new Igbo group in southeastern Nigeria, the Association of Igbo Youths (AIYO), registered in 2007, said on October 5th that at least 1,000 members have fled a longer established group, MASSOB, to join AIYO, citing as a cause that MASSOB does not look at those that have been imprisoned, widowed, or orphaned as the result of MASSOB violence.  MASSOB stands for Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra.  AIYO, by contrast, according to the publicity head, Charles Chikeli, is a “youth vanguard” which promotes “peace, love, and oneness of the Igbo in accordance with the laws of the country.”

AS MANY AS 98 DEAD IN NORTH NIGERIA INCLUDE 30 SHOT BY “BERSERK” SOLDIERS.

On October 6th, battles raged for half an hour in Damaturu, capital of Yobe State in northern Nigeria, between the Islamist insurgency group Boko Haram and the federal government’s anti-terrorist Joint Task Force (J.T.F.), but there were no reports of casualties.  Six Boko Haram fighters were captured and arrested, some with the help of the citizenry.

Around the same time, two people in the village of Dogon Kuka, in northern Yobe, were killed when unknown gunmen opened fire on them.

A bomb blast near a television studio in Jalingo, capital of Taraba State in Nigeria’s mixed-Christian-and-Muslim east-central Middle Belt region, injured eight people on the night of October 6-7, including a woman and five children.  Boko Haram is suspected.

On October 7th, also in northern Yobe State, Nigerian troops killed approximately 30 suspected Boko Haram fighters in a battle that lasted several hours.  Among the dead, according to an army spokesman, was “the notorious, one-eyed Bakaka, the field commander of Boko Haram in Damaturu and a close associate of Abubakar Shekau,” the apparent leader of the terror network.  Hospitals also reported five uniformed men among the dead, presumably government soldiers.  Ten insurgents were arrested, and a gigantic cache of weapons and other equipment was recovered.

The “one-eyed” warlord Bakaka, recently neutralized—
though he seems to have full stereoscopic vision in this photo

On October 8th, in Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, an afternoon bombing of a military convoy killed 20 civilians and burned 50 homes.  An army lieutenant and six other military personnel were also apparently killed in the explosion, which prompted Nigerian troops in the area to “go berserk” in an impoverished neighborhood, opening fire, according to witnesses, and mowing down and killing 30 people that included civilians as well as those later identified as Boko Haram fighters.  They also set over 100 buildings, including houses and shops, and 35 vehicles ablaze.  Since military sources would not confirm any details of the alleged rampage—and claim no one other than two soldiers were injured in the initial blast—it is possible that there was only one wave of fires, attributed by different sources to either soldiers or the terrorist bomb.  One resident said, “The atrocities going on in Maiduguri is worse than what obtains in Somalia.  People are being killed and their wealth destroyed by the soldiers.”  In Kano, in north-central Nigeria, two police officers were shot and killed by gunmen on motorcycles on October 9th while protecting medical workers administering polio vaccine door to door.  Police have arrested eight suspected Islamist militants in connection with that incident.

Two days later, also in Kano, two officers with the Nigerian Federal Road Safety Commission (F.R.S.C.) were shot and killed by unknown gunmen, presumed to be Boko Haram.  An additional officer was injured.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Abuja Rallies, Cameroon Crackdown in Run-Up to Anniversary of Bakassi Cession; Ogoni Trials in Washington, Johannesburg; Achebe on Biafra: Nigeria Separatism Update, 30 September - 6 October 2012

Bakassian Activists Rally for Appeal of Nigerian Cession to Cameroon as Deadline Looms.  As the clock ticks down to the October 10th deadline for appealing the 2002 International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) decision ceding the Bakassi Peninsula from Nigeria to Cameroon—a step Nigeria’s central government has said it will not take—indigenous Bakassians, mostly from the Efik ethnic group, held demonstrations on September 30th in England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, as well as in Lagos, Nigeria, in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, and in Calabar, in southeastern Nigeria, seat of the precolonial Efik-dominated Calabar Kingdom.  One Bakassian activist, Ani Esin, said that the Nigerian government’s lack of interest in pressing its claim has emboldened the authoritarian government in Cameroon to send troops into the Bakassi region, where Efik activists on August 6th declared an independent Republic of Bakassi, and a retired admiral and former vice-president of Nigeria, Adm. Mike Okhai Akhigbe, said that if any government “fails to appeal the judgment, it should be considered as treasonable felony,” adding, “It is a shame that a country like Cameroon will outwit Nigeria on issues like this.”  Late in the week, Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, formed a committee to address the I.C.J. question and also the needs of displaced Bakassians, but it may be too little too late in the view of many.  (See my recent article on Bakassi and Ambazonia for a more detailed discussion.)

Cameroonian Forces Round Up Southern Separatists on Anniversary of Annexation.  In Cameroon itself, in Buea, capital of the Southwest Region that includes the Bakassi Peninsula, security forces stormed churches and other venues on the morning of October 1st and rounded up more than 100 suspected activists in favor of the secession of the larger “Southern Cameroons” region from Cameroon.  Activists say that in other towns scores were arrested in a crackdown across several cities leading up to October 1st, which is the date in 1961 when the formerly-U.K.-administered Southern Cameroons territory was forcibly attached, in the view of activists, to the new francophone-dominated Republic of Cameroon.  Those arrested include Nfor Ngalla Nfor, who is vice-chairman of the Southern Cameroons National Council (S.C.N.C.), and Augustine Ndangam, who is vice-chairman of the Southern Cameroons Peoples Organisation (SCAPO).  Both the S.C.N.C. and SCAPO, the group from which it split in the 1990s, have at times declared the formerly British parts of Cameroon and independent republic variously called Ambazonia or Ambazania.  There are also reports that the separatist flag has been raised at the envisioned boundary between the southern republic and Cameroon proper.  (See my recent article on Bakassi and Ambazonia for a more detailed discussion.)

The flag of Ambazonia

Nigerian Immigration Officer Confesses to Boko Haram Ties, Fingers Others.  In Nigeria, an immigration officer has been arrested after confessing to be a member of Boko Haram, the radical Islamist terrorist group operating in the north of the country.  The officer had been impersonating an army officer, the military says, and his arrest led to the arrests of others as well.  An army colonel told media, “He also confessed to having been trained alongside 15 other members of the sect on weapons handling, assassination, and special operations in Niger.”  The officer, Ahmed Grema Mohammed, had been arrested last month on his way to carry out an assassination in Borno State when he was arrested by the federal government’s anti-terrorist Joint Task Force (J.T.F.).

In Video, Boko Haram Leader Reports Arrest of Spokesman, Denies Peace Talks.  The supposed leader of Boko Haram revealed in a video uploaded to YouTube on September 30th—the 52nd anniversary of Nigeria’s independence from the United Kingdom—that its spokesman, Abu Qaqa, has been arrested by Nigerian security forces, adding, “I believe strongly that after this message from me they may decide to kill him this night.”  In the same statement, the alleged leader, Abubakar Shekau, denied earlier government claims that the Nigerian government is involved in secret negotiations with the group.  Speaking in Hausa, Shekau also warned of repercussions from the Coptic-American-made low-budget video Innocence of Muslims, which has caused rioting around the Muslim world.  “Everybody should wait and see what we will do regarding this,” he said.

Abubakar Shekau

5 Dead in Week of Boko Haram Violence in Northern Nigeria.  Meanwhile, violence related to Boko Haram in northern Nigeria continues.  Militants attacked an Islamic boarding school in Zaria, in Kaduna State in north-central Nigeria, on September 30th, with arms and explosives, resulting in a mêlée that left two militants dead and others injured.  The school is run by a Salafist cleric who is an outspoken critic of Boko Haram.  Two explosions October 1st in Maiduguri, in Borno State in Nigeria’s far northeast, injured at least two soldiers, but some reports say as many as seven soldiers were killed in one of the two blasts.  In Jalingo, capital of Taraba State, on October 4th, three were killed and at least 12 seriously wounded in a bomb attack at a “bush bar” (open-air pub).  (Meanwhile, this week’s massacre of at least 45 people at a college in Mubi, in Adamawa State, in the predominantly-Muslim northeast, was deemed eventually to be the result of student-government strife and not related to Islamism or Boko Haram.)

2 Nigerian Spiritual Leaders Long-Listed for Nobel Peace Prize.  Amidst the escalating violence between Christians and Muslims (mostly Muslim-initiated) in northern and central Nigeria, two local leaders, one from each of the two faiths, has made the long list for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.  Both the nominees—John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, the Roman Catholic Archibishop of Abuja, and Amirul Mumineen Sultan Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar III, the largely ceremonial Sultan of Sokoto, considered the spiritual leader of northern Nigerian Muslims—are critics of the violence of the Islamist militia Boko Haram.  Only one Nigerian, the late Wole Soyinka, has ever won a Nobel Prize, his for literature in 1986.

John Onaiyekan and the Sultan of Sokoto, Nobel Peace nominees

Nigeria’s “Middle Belt” Organizes to Assert Identity.  The United Middle Belt Youth Congress (U.M.B.Y.C.), which represents 144 ethnic groups in north-central Nigeria, this week asked the federal government for “a clean and everlasting break from the political oppression of the North.  Our greatest joy will be to be identified as and be called Middle Belt people the world over.”  The Middle Belt is a fuzzily defined term for the areas in Nigeria that have a mixed population of Muslims, who dominate the far north, and Christians, who dominate the southern half of the country.  Especially in the eastern part of the Middle Belt, some predominantly-Christian ethnic groups have been disproportionately targeted by terrorism at the hands of Boko Haram’s northern Muslim insurgency.  Some Middle Belt ethnic groups that are not Muslim or only moderately Muslim also live under shari’a (Islamic law) as the result of northern political pressure.

Niger Delta Separatist Goes on Trial in South Africa for Abuja Lethal Car-Bombing.  In Johannesburg, South Africa, trial resumed this week of Henry Okah, a national of Nigeria who is charged with masterminding a wave of terrorist acts in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, two years ago.  Okah is the alleged leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which claimed responsibility for a 2010 car bombing that killed 12 people.  He is being tried in South Africa because that is where he fled and was eventually arrested after the attacks.  On the first day of testimony, on October 2nd, the court heard from Selekaye Victor Ben, a former MEND media liaison who stated, “MEND was created to pursue the Niger Delta cause ... to fight for resource control.  ...  We engaged in guerilla warfare such as attacking military formations and oil installation and would facilitate the abduction of expats.”

Courtroom sketch of Henry Okah

U.S. Supreme Court Revisits Suit against Shell Oil for Human-Rights Crimes in Nigeria.  The Supreme Court of the United States on October 1st began its new session by revisiting a lawsuit by 12 Nigerians against the Netherlands-based multinational oil firm Royal Dutch Shell for being an accomplice to torture, execution-style murders, and crimes against humanity carried out against Ogoni people and others in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.  The named plaintiff in the case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, is the widow of Dr. Barinem Kiobel, who was hanged by the Nigerian dictatorship along with the internationally renowned novelist and Ogoni-rights spokesman Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.  Shell is accused by Kiobel et al. of assisting the Nigerian junta in the killings of over 800 people.  It will be a new test of a centuries-old law, the Alien Tort Statute (A.T.S.) that allows firms to be held accountable in U.S. courts for crimes committed overseas.  One constitutional lawyer was quoted as speculated that the Court might be unwilling to hear the case for being “afraid of some kind of backlash, what other nations will think of us.”  Which makes one wonder: what do other nations think of us?  One would think that a willingness to hold murderers and torturers accountable—unlike Barack Obama’s free pass to those who waged the illegal war in Iraq—can only improve the U.S. image abroad.

Anti-Capitalism Pranksters “Yes Men” Take on Shell Oil to Highlight Rights Case.  Meanwhile, a group of anti-capitalist pranksters and “culture-jammers” called the Yes Men , along with a group calling itself People against Legalized Murder (PALM), pulled off a stunt this week to lure tens of thousands of Royal Dutch Shell employees to a website—http://www.murderisbad.com/ (also see this Shell parody site)—alerting them to the United States Supreme Court case (see story above) over their human-rights abuses in Nigeria.  Shell acted quickly to block employees’ access to the site, leading to a corporation-vs.-hacker digital cat-and-mouse game.  The Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum said, “Surely most Shell employees, like most people, don’t want multinationals to get away with murder just because murder’s convenient.”  PALM’s Sean Dagohoy points, out, “When it comes to things like election spending, Shell and other corporations want to have all the rights of people.  But when accused of murder, Shell conveniently argues they aren’t a person.”

Mike Bonnano and Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, impersonating oil executives in an earlier stunt

Achebe Publishes New Memoir of Biafra War.  The world-renowned Igbo novelist from Nigeria, Chinua Achebe, has a new book due for release next week, chronicling for the first time his family’s experience in the disastrous Biafran War of 1967-1970.  Achebe, author of the global best-seller Things Fall Apart, which portrays the Igbo experience with colonialism, was an outspoken proponent of independence for the Igbo region in southeastern Nigeria, Biafra, but after the Nigerian government brutally reconquered Biafra in 1970, at the cost of more than a million lives, Achebe spent two decades in exile in America before returning to his homeland.  The new book, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, appears at a time when Nigeria is subject to more secessionist pressures, in almost every region, since the Biafran War.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Southern Nigeria Splitting Apart Too as the Muslim North Burns

The Islamist insurgency in the Muslim northern half of Nigeria, and increasingly in the “Middle Belt” region where Muslims and Christians live side by side, has been tearing this massive African nation apart (as discussed recently in a special report in this blog), with almost daily brutal violence against civilians.  At the end of last year, this blog listed northern Nigeria as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”  The military and the central government’s security forces are clearly utterly helpless against this threat.  The name of the shadowy jihadist organization behind the violence, Boko Haram, means “Western Education Is Sinful” in the Hausa language, but the group’s full formal name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means literally “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.”  Boko Haram does not claim to want to hive off northern Nigeria, where the related Hausa and Fulani peoples predominate, as a separate state.  (When out-and-out northern separatism does surface, as it does from time to time, it tends to be secular and to seek a Hausa-dominated state to be called Arewa.)  If even that seems quixotic, then their actual avowed goal is utter science fiction: the extension of shari’a (Islamic law), which is in force in the northern 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states, to the country as a whole.

Map showing the states in Nigeria where shari’a is in force

But in southern Nigeria there are even profounder fault lines appearing, especially within the past month, as Igbo, Ijaw, Ogoni, and Efik nationalists have begun to press for more autonomy or, in some cases, outright secession.  Keep reading ...

Nigeria is only one of a whole string of states along the Sahel region spanning Africa which is to some extent split along north-vs.-south, Muslim-vs.-non-Muslim lines (as discussed in detail in an article in this blog), including also Mali, Niger, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Chad, and, of course, the former Sudan, now Sudan and South Sudan.  Senegal and Western Sahara also have regional splits that are exacerbated by the wider geopolitics of religion, and even Kenya’s Mombasa region and Tanzania’s Zanzibar archipelago have exploded into Muslim separatist violence in recent months.

The Sahel is also the line along which environmentally informed geopolitical strategists tell us the Sahara Desert is spreading southward and where we can expect future wars over water resources as global supplies dwindle.

And Boko Haram is increasingly, and worryingly, allied with ethnic Muslim insurgencies in other parts of the barely governable arid center of North Africa.  In nearby Mali, the northern two-thirds of the country are a de facto separate state called Azawad, populated by Tuaregs and armed by weapons left over from the Libyan civil war, but ruled by militias loyal to al-Qaeda.  Eastern Mauritania, southern Libya, southern Algeria, northwestern Burkina Faso, the northern Central African Republic (C.A.R.), and northern Niger are also plagued by jihadist militancy and religiously-inflected ethnic tensions, and the ties among radical groups in different countries is growing.  Western strategists fear that the interior of the western Sahara can become the new Afghanistan, a lawless area where al-Qaeda and its allies can train and plan.  So when Hillary Rodham Clinton, the United States secretary of state, visited Nigeria earlier this month (as reported on at the time in this blog), Boko Haram’s potential threat to the world was atop her list of talking points.

But while the insurgency in northern Nigeria rages, old fissures in southern Nigeria, dating to the peri-colonial days before the 1980s rise of global jihadism, are reappearing.

Nigeria is among the most separatism-scarred countries in the world.  The failed attempt by the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria’s southeast to found a separate Republic of Biafra in 1967 led to a catastrophic three-year civil war in which a million or so died—most from starvation because of the central government’s brutal economic blockade of the fledgling state.

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa at 170 million and soon to be the third-most-populous in the world by the middle of this century (with a half-billion, exceeded only by China and India), is one of the world’s most multi-ethnic states.  No ethnic group has a majority.  The three largest, the predominantly-speaking Hausa (some classify them with the Fulani) in the north, the predominantly-Christian Yoruba in the southwest, and the predominantly-Christian Igbo in the southeast, are in an uneasy balance; their rivalries fueled a string of coups and counter-coups in the years after independence from the United Kingdom in 1960.  But these three are only two-thirds of the population: literally hundreds of other ethnic groups, ranging in size from millions to mere dozens, are distributed throughout the country as well.  Though the trauma of Biafra made separatist sentiments illegal and unthinkable for decades, ethnonationalism began to reeemerge in the 1980s and ’90s.

First, in 1993, when M. K. O. Abiola, a Yoruba, was elected to the presidency but then prevented from taking office by Ibrahim Babangida, a northern Muslim of the Gwari ethnic group, Yoruba nationalism increased in appeal and more Yorubas lost faith in the dysfunctional federal model.  The Oodua People’s Congress is the most prominent (but still marginal) proponent of violent Yoruba secession, but more prominent still are various autonomy movements and politico-cultural revivals throughout Yoruba country, which many non-Yorubas fear are the stirrings of separatism.  The governor of Abiola’s native Osun State, for example, Rauf Aregbesola, has been quite controversially taking on more and more trappings of autonomy for his small fiefdom (as reported on at various times in this blog), and similar things are happening in other Yoruba-dominated states.

The coat-of-arms of Osun State

Bayelsa State, President Goodluck Jonathan’s home state in the south-central Niger Delta region, decided on August 8th to adopt its own flag, coat-of-arms, and anthem (as reported on at the time in this blog), a move its governor, Seriake Dickson, explained: “In line with the vision of the founding fathers of our dearly beloved state and given this admnistration’s stand on Ijaw mobilization, Ijaw integration, and the need to promote Ijaw fundamental interest, which clearly is not subordinate to any other interests, the government of Bayelsa State has given its approval to have a state-owned emblem mark and strengthen our sense of identity as a state.”  Understandably, given that rhetoric, critics see this as a move down the road toward some sort of separatism.  Some editorial-writers have demanded that Jonathan distance himself from such expressions of regional ethnic distinctness.

The newly adopted flag of Bayelsa State.
You’d think that with all the shit they’re catching for this,
they’d come up with something a little more interesting.

In Nigeria, flags other than the Nigerian national flag are considered provocative.  Most of Nigeria’s 36 states do not have flags.  The nine exceptions are: Lagos, Oyo, Ondo, Ogun, Ekiti, and Kwara—all in the Yorubua-dominated southeast—and Cross River and Rivers states, in the southeastern “Biafra” region of the Igbo, and, most recently and most controversially, now, Osun and Bayelsa, which are Ijaw country.  So Jonathan is now in the position of being urged by Igbos and northerners to reject and counteract the centrifugal forces in the southwest, which he has so far seemed uninclined to do.

The flag of Edo State.  Now that’s more like it!
See, Bayelsa?  It’s your flag, you can put whatever you want on it.  Just go crazy—masks, knives, whatever.

The Ogoni people of the south-central Niger Delta region have made the most dramatic strides toward separatism in the years since the Biafran War.  In the 1990s, Ogoni activists rose up against the Nigerian dictatorship’s policy of essentially allowing Royal Dutch Shell to run the oil-rich Delta as its own colonial-style quasi-state.  The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and its push for more self-government, cultural and linguistic rights, and local stewardship of the environment garnered global support from human-rights and environmental activists, especially after the arrest and execution in 1995 of their celebrity spokesman, the novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa.  Though the military junta that carried out those atrocities is now replaced by a far more democratic regime, there is still widespread alarm throughout the rest of Nigeria at any noises that resemble Ogoni separatism.

The Ogoni flag flies in front of the grave of a murdered activist.

Thus, an August 2nd “declaration of autonomy”  by MOSOP has once again raised the stakes in the Ogoni struggle.  “By this declaration of political autonomy,” MOSOP’s leader Goodluck Diigbo, said in a radio broadcast, “we, the Ogoni people, are determined to enforce the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People, without fear or retreat.”  The announcement also invoked an Ogoni Bill of Rights declared in 1990 and 1991 at the height of the Ogoni struggle—as well as 272 village councils in six Ogoni kingdoms: Babbe, Eleme, Gokana, Kenkhana, Nyokhana, and Tai.  It remains to be seen how serious this new development is and how the central government will respond—if, with its preoccupation with the crisis in the north, it will be able to respond at all.

This is the flag that the Nigerian government would like the Ogoni people to pay allegiance to.

Biafran nationalism is rearing its head again as well.  Igbo activists are quick to point out that, in areas like the Middle Belt, Igbos are disproportionately victimized by Boko Haram’s Muslim-on-Christian terrorism, and they feel that a government still wary of Igbos is doing far too little to protect them.  More extreme voices see this as Muslims and southeasterners uniting to “ethnically cleanse” Nigeria of Igbos.  Though the Nigerian government tries to crack down brutally on all expressions of Igbo separatism, even banning the display of the Biafran flag, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) is active and has much popular support in the southeast.  A smaller and somewhat mysterious organization, the Biafran Zionist Movement, has also recently announced it will declare independence on November 5, 2012 (as reported on at the time in this blog), and has applied to join the United Nations (also reported on here)—but MASSOB disavows any connection with them or their proactive stance.  Still, a November 5th declaration of independence might light some kind of fuse.

Bakassi: the new powderkeg?
The newest expression of Nigerian ethnonationalism has emerged, however, in the far southeast, in what even in an independent Biafra would be a minority area, dominated by the Efik ethnic group—and in the adjacent area of what is now Cameroon, the Bakassi Peninsula.  The Efik are descendants of the Kalabari Kingdom (also called New Calabar or the Kingdom of Calabar), a full-fledged nation-state that was absorbed by the British into colonial Nigeria in 1884, though the eastern half of it ended up in Germany’s colony Kamerun.

The European boundary that split the Efik kingdom was always ill-defined.  Things became complicated in 1918 when Germany, as a loser in the First World War, surrendered Kamerun to the victorious U.K. and France under the Treaty of Versailles.  The British, western part was divided into Southern Cameroons and Northern Cameroons, two discontinuous strips of land wedged between the colony of Nigeria and the French portion.  France attached the Neukamerun (“New Cameroon”) portion of the former German colony to the vast interior swath of francophone Africa called French Equatorial Africa (including what are now Chad, the C.A.R., Gabon, and the Republic of Congo), while the rest of it was set up as a separate French colony called Cameroun.  When the Algerian war pushed Europe into setting its African colonies free as independent states in the late 1950s and early ’60s, it became clear that the oddly shaped British portion of the Cameroons would not make a viable state, so a plebiscite was held: Southern Cameroons, a Christian-mission-dominated coastal area, voted to join Cameroun as the Republic of Cameroon in 1961, while the predominantly-Muslim Northern Cameroons joined the new Republic of Nigeria, where it became what is now the eastern edge of the Middle Belt region, north of “Biafra.”

But some residents of the former Southern Cameroons, Protestants who were used to English as their language of administration, chafed at being part of a Catholic, francophone Republic of Cameroon.  In 1972, Cameroonian moves toward political centralization inspired the founding of the All Anglophones Conference (A.A.C.), which agitated for a return to the more federal 1961 constitution.  Unaccommodated, their discontent grew, until by 1995 a faction of the A.A.C.’s successor, the Southern Cameroons Peoples Organization (SCAPO), was petitioning the U.N. and organizing a referendum, in which, they claimed, 99% of locals wanted independence.  In 1999, a radio station was taken over by this faction, the Southern Cameroons National Council (S.C.N.C.), and a Republic of Ambazonia was declared.  This had little real effect, but Ambazonian nationalism was revived in 2006, when a small Efik-populated peninsula that had been administered by Nigeria since independence was transferred to Cameroonian control by the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) in order to settle a long-standing border dispute.  The plight of the residents of this strip of land, the Bakassi Peninsula, who did not want to be Cameroonians, inspired SCAPO to declare a Republic of Ambazania (note slight difference in spelling), which was the old Ambazonian territory, plus Bakassi.

A map of Cameroon’s imaginatively-named provinces,
highlighting those that were formerly British-ruled and consider themselves a separate country.

And now, on August 6th of this year, just four days after the Ogoni declaration (see above), the Bakassi Self-Determination Front (B.S.D.F.) founded Dayspring Radio on a small island, also called Dayspring, off the coast of the Bakassi Peninsula, and declared a Republic of Bakassi.  They hoisted the Bakassian red, white, and blue flag, dotted with stars to represent islands around the peninsula.  Meanwhile, the Ambazonia People’s Congress (A.P.C.) also declared this month that due to technicalities in the transfer of the peninsula in 2006, Bakassi is indeed, in strictly legal terms, a sovereign state (though their arguments are unconvincing on legal grounds).  (Note to readers: I have had trouble finding a good image of the Republic of Bakassi’s flag.  Below is one from the B.S.D.F.’s Facebook page.  It fits descriptions from news reports, but I doubt the word Bakassi is part of the actual flag.  If anyone knows or is able to learn more, please send me a message.)

But Efiks on the Nigerian side of the border are less enthusiastic about the Republic of Bakassi.  Florence Ita-Giwa, a senator for Nigeria’s Cross River State just over the border, reiterated at a press conference in Lagos on August 17th the position of her group, the Bakassi People’s General Assembly, that the peninsula is still part of Nigeria—a sentiment shared by many Nigerian nationalists, who felt burned by the I.J.C.’s decision for Cameroon in 2006, given that Nigeria had been administering Bakassi since independence.  In October of this year, the window for appealing the original I.J.C. decision closes, so Nigerian ire over this issue is rising.  Ita-Giwa, who is a member of Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party (P.D.P.) and a former advisor to Nigeria’s former president Oluṣẹgun Ọbasanjọ, said, “We completely dissociate ourselves from the purported declaration of a Sovereign State of Bakassi.  It is our view that the issue confronting us is not served by a declaration of independence but by accelerating the resettlement of our people in the location of our choice.  We have no intention to secede from the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”  Her statement also invoked the shared heritage of the Efik nationality and the Kingdom of Calabar.  Thousands of Efik live stateless in Nigeria and wish to be resettled on the Bakassi peninsula, as Ọbasanjọ had promised.  Ita-Giwa calls Dayspring Island, ground zero of the new Bakassian independence moves, “unceded” and is where she would like Efik refugees, who include some traditional rulers, to be resettled.

Bakassians protesting

It is not clear how many Bakassians support independence.  On August 21st, local leaders gathered to complain of the Cameroonian government’s unilateral changes to Efik place names, as well as heavy taxes, police beatings, and government seizure of boats and fishing nets.  It would seem that the central government has already been pushing Bakassians about as far as they can be pushed.  The ball seems now to be in Cameroon’s court, and if they decide to move militarily against the Bakassians, it may light yet another fuse in an already volatile Nigeria.

Between the Ijaw, the Efik, the Ogoni, and the Igbo, soon there may not even be a Nigeria for Boko Haram to secede from.

[Related articles: “Remembering Odumegwu Ojukwu: On Biafra and on an African Continent Riven by European Borders” (Nov. 2011), “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012” (Dec. 2011), “Mali Becomes the Latest African Country to Split along North–South Lines” (Feb. 2012), “Jihadists Imperil Nigerian Unity” (June 2012), “Ambazonian Separatists Focus on Bakassi Peninsula in New Push to Split Cameroon” (Aug. 2012).]

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]