in the federal government. With the demise of electoral politics in 1966,
Ibos were dominant at the national level through the military regime. Thus
it was not by secession that the Ibos sought the advancement that would
have been theirs in a country without regional obstacles to recruitment and
promotion. The concept of an independent Biafra did not emerge among Ibo
leaders until after the army rank and file had mutinied and assassinated
hundreds of Ibo officers and men and after pogroms in Northern cities
raised the spectre of genocide.
In 1966 the East was by no means the only region proposing a loose con-
federation for the future of Nigeria. All parts of the country were ambivalent
about the desirability of Nigerian unity. The West had used the threat of
secession from the federation more than any other region since preparations
for independence from Britain began, and secession had also been consid-
ered prior to independence by the leaders of the Muslim majority in the
North (Panter-Brick, 1976, pp. 31–3). It was largely the fears of the minori-
ties in all regions, including the East, for their futures under a fragmented
Nigeria that united the rest of the country against Biafra.
Arguing that ‘the probability of secession of a regional unit from a nation-
state is dependent upon the expected costs and benefits to the region from the
maintenance of the national unit and those of secession from it’, Nafziger
(1972, p. 185) points out that ‘the benefits of regional autonomy for the East
increased relative to the benefits of continued membership of the federation
as a result of the discovery and commercial exploitation of crude oil centred
in the region in the late 1950s’. However, oil did not prompt secession. It
simply made it a viable strategy in the eyes of the Biafran leadership against
the national level of government. The share of revenue from oil accruing to
the East became a major source of political friction – specially after 1959,
when a new revenue allocation system left the East with a fraction of its ear-
lier oil revenues. Another major factor was the decision in 1967 to increase
the number of states in the federation from 4 to 12. Dividing the Eastern
Region into three states meant that the Ibos would be in a majority in only
one and would be reduced to one-sixth of the region’s oil output. The Ibo
heartland would be severed from the oil resources and landlocked.
The Biafra case also suggests that levels of economic integration may be an
important factor in the build-up of ethnic consciousness and demands for self-
determination. In Nigeria at the time of the Biafran secession the value of
inter-regional trade was low. Indigenous firms tended to sell to local markets.
Virtually no capital moved between regions. Ethnic conflict between 1965
and 1967 further discouraged economic integration. The cost of secession
was therefore perceived to be less than the benefits of integration, especially
210 Understanding Third World Politics