My last week’s article, ‘IPOB is an insurgency, not a terrorist organization’, elicited a remarkable number of comments – kudos and criticisms as one would expect when one throws one’s hat onto the public space.Space will not permit me to reproduce some of the articles, many of which brought some interesting perspectives to the conversation. I will summarise and respond to three key issues raised about the article: First issue: In a very articulate post on Facebook entitled, ‘IPOB, Paddock, Rohingyas: Who is a Terrorist?’, Hussaini Hussaini argued that my article “set down the conditions that persons must satisfy to…

When the Union flag was lowered and the Nigerian flag raised 57 years ago there was a sense of euphoria. Many former colonies had to fight a war of independence in which many lives were lost but we were spared that trauma. So it would be fair to say that Nigeria got its independence on a platter of gold. But that gift was thrown away six years later. The war we didn’t have before independence we had it after: the Biafran war. That war which lasted for 30 months and cost one million lives still haunts us today like an…

A Biafra-like agitation for independence has been unfolding in neighbouring Republic of Cameroon since November 2016. The people of Northern and Southern Cameroons under the umbrella of the Southern Cameroons Ambazonia Consortium United Front (SCACUF) finally decided to affirm the independence of the English-speaking sections of Cameroon from the Republic. Like the Indigenous People of Biafra, the Ambazonians as they have called themselves since 1984, are protesting against their alleged marginalization by the dominant Francophone Cameroon and the Paul Biya government in Yaounde. They insist that whereas oil is found in the English-speaking South Western part of Cameroon, the central…

Last week, Kurds in northern Iraq voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence for the country’s Kurdistan Region. With some 30 million Kurds divided among four states (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran), nationalists argue that they deserve the world’s recognition. In Spain, some 7.5 million Catalans have raised the same question. Does it matter that polls show Catalans, unlike Kurds, to be closely divided on the issue? Does it matter that the states bordering Iraqi Kurdistan might use force to resist secession? National self-determination, the principle that US President Woodrow Wilson put on the international agenda in 1918, is generally defined as…