Biafra reseccionist

Whether a constitutionally governed nation is
to exist in perpetuity, sacred and inviolable
even by the existential realities of

irredeemable socio-cultural fault lines, is a
matter for the conjecture of the
jurisprudence of law and of morality. The
question being: should a democratic society
be presumed immune –legally-speaking or
morally so- even from the rumbling dissent
of self-determined minorities bent on opting
out of the union?
Or put another way: does a part of a
constitutionally governed nation- whether it
be a state or a section comprising of states-
have a right to unilaterally seek, by whatever
means, to opt out of that union and to form
another? Or the converse of that may be
asked: should a President in a
constitutionally governed society be
constrained by law or morality –or by both-
to allow a part secede from the territory he
is legally elected to govern?
Will he be obligated –by the Constitution or
by the unwritten universal laws of nature, or
by both- to fight to keep the union for which
he was inaugurated into office to preserve,
protect and defend?
These questions have continued to agitate
the minds of jurists and of political
scientists and there does not seem to be a
single jurisprudential solution to the
question of ethnic or other classes of
minorities and their presumed right to self-
determination or their duty of fidelity to an
existing statehood to which they are fated
by the circumstances of socio-political
history to belong.
Willful self-assertion
Yet proponents of the ‘right’ of ‘might’ to
willful self-assertion say that any minority
section of a constitutionally governed nation
can secede from an existing state it no
longer desires to be part of, -if not by a
constitutional process, at the very worst by
‘force’.
Or is ‘Might’ the only ‘Right’? Provided a
seceding minority has the ‘will’, the ‘grit’ and
the ‘fighting power’ to force its way out of
the union; and provided thereafter it has the
‘might’ to defend its new sovereignty, -
either against the revolting anger of un-
yielding irredentists or against potentially
emergent new rebellions from its very own.
But the reverse is also the case, that even
as a MINORITY section of a democratic
entity has recourse to the moral justification
of the use of force to assert the inalienable
right to self-determination, so does a
democratic MAJORITY of a constitutionally
governed nation have legitimate recourse to
the use of force –if it can- to preserve the
union. Thus, in actual fact the question of
who is right between the majority fighting to
preserve the union and the minority fighting
to opt out of it, will simply be located in
who is able to assert both ‘will’ and
‘firepower’ and not necessarily in who has
the moral justification to so to do.
It can thus be seen that any argument by an
existing political order in favour of the ‘right’
–legally or morally- to preserve a union is
always concurrent with the arrogation by it
of the ‘right’ to deny the seceding party its
presumed ‘right’ to opt out of the union. And
the reverse is equally the case, that
secessionists, in arrogating to themselves
the presumed ‘right’ to willful self-
determination, also tend to deny the ‘right’
of the existing political order to fulfill its
constitutional obligation of preserving,
protecting and defending the union.
And so going by the doctrine of the ‘right’ of
‘might’ to forceful secession, it can be said
that for the agitators of Biafra to secede
from Nigeria, the section that they purport
to agitate for –namely the South-East- must
not only be able to outgun, or at the very
least match the fire power of the existing
political order, it must be able, permanently,
to sustain and enforce its breakaway.
But going by the logic of those who insist
that in all circumstances only ‘right’ should
be ‘might’, no minority section of a
constitutionally governed nation has the
right to force its way out of a legal union
except by the leave of the majority in that
union through the due process of law and
not on the sentiments of moral
considerations.
The Lincoln perspective
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the
United State of America provided an
excellent jurisprudential justification for the
use of force to suppress any rumbling of
undemocratic dissent that has secession as
its ultimate goal. According to that
perspective no democratic minority has a
right under the law to secede from a union
consecrated by the Constitution.
Lincoln came into office in 1861 by less
than 40% of the popular vote and the advent
of a republican administration had already
created apprehension in some of the
Southern states who feared the new
President might interfere with the institution
of slavery -which had existed in those
states. In fact weeks before Lincoln’s
inauguration seven of those states had
already threatened to secede from the 72-
year old Union. This was in spite of the fact
that there was proof that although Lincoln
opposed the extension of slavery into
western territories, he did not favour
abolition either in those states where it
existed.
It was therefore clear that the secessionists
had ulterior motives and were thus not to be
pacified but confronted. And so Lincoln in
his inaugural speech was to inform a shaky
nation with a divided army that he was
‘prepared to fight a war to maintain the
Union’. His argument being that ‘the right of
a ‘democratic minority’ for self-
determination cannot be exercised in
override of the right of a ‘democratic
majority’ which is constitutionally
legitimated to preserve and to protect the
Union.
The Right of 'Way' and the Right of 'Say':
Lincoln, by the way, did not derogate the
right of the ‘minority’ to dissent –including
its so called presumed right to seek to
dismember the Union in order to create its
own; but he said that the exercise of that
delicate species of fundamental right was
essentially lower in the hierarchy of rights
than the right of a ‘democratic majority’ to
preserve the union.
Thus side by side with the right of a
‘democratic majority’, the right of a
‘democratic minority’ in any constitutional
democracy cannot and has never been any
higher than the passive extent allowed to it
in the axiom which posits that ‘the minority
has only a say and the majority a way’.
Constitutional checks and limitations
Said Lincoln in his Inaugural speech: “A
majority held in restraint by constitutional
checks and limitations … is the only true
sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects
it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to
despotism”.
Nothing can be more rational; especially
given the systemic, concept-driven nature of
today’s organised societies whereby people
have chosen, strictly to live by the principle
of the rule of the ‘majority’. To what avail
will that principle of ‘majority rule’ be if any
‘minority’ component of a constitutional
democracy, at any time, and outside of the
due democratic process, can choose to
terminate the Union or to permanently alter
and impair its constitutionally-prescribed
configuration?
President Lincoln had also used the
‘doctrine of perpetuity’ to advance the
argument that “in contemplation of universal
law and of the Constitution” the Union of
the states that made up the United States
was “perpetual”; and that, that ‘perpetuity’
was necessarily implied even though it was
not expressly stated “in the fundamental law
of all national governments”.
And to that extent Lincoln felt justified and
constitutionally legitimated to say to the
secessionists of his days “no state upon its
own mere motion can lawfully get out of the
Union”! Said German Philosopher and social
theorists Jurgen Habermas, “Being bound to
the constitutional achievements and ideals
of their predecessors, future generations (in
any state) remain un-free; for they are
denied the opportunity to found their own
constitution”.
An oath registered in Heaven': And although
the Constitution, as Lincoln posited
“contained no prohibition of secession or
enforcement language to preserve the
Union”, it did –like all other democratic
constitutions- specify an oath of office
mandating the President “to preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution”. And if
so, what can be more deserving of the
President’s ‘preservation’, ‘protection’ and
‘defense’ -in a constitutional democracy-
than the territorial integrity of the State?
And thus said experts that in the true
interpretation of ‘sovereign power’, “since
the people had not vested the President
with the authority to fix the terms of
separation”, Lincoln was right to make “war
the inevitable consequence of secession”
and to declare himself “constitutionally
unable to stop it”. And as Lincoln himself
eloquently said, whereas the secessionists
had “no oath registered in heaven to
destroy” the union, he as President had “the
most solemn one to ‘preserve’, ‘protect’ and
‘defend it’.”
The Lincoln inaugural speech was the same
in which he made the famous statement
“This country, with its institutions, belongs
to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they
shall grow weary of the existing government,
they can exercise their constitutional right
of amending it or their revolutionary right to
dismember or overthrow it.” The phrase ‘the
people’ without doubt referred to the
‘majority’ -and not a ‘minority’ of it.
Peaceful referendum
A minority can only hope to court the
understanding and cooperation of the
‘majority’ to cause the necessary due
democratic processes, which may lead to a
peaceful referendum. But since according to
Lincoln, “Unanimity” on the one hand “is
impossible” and “the rule of a minority” on
the other “is wholly inadmissible”, anarchy
or despotism –as he warned- would be “all
that is left” if the rule of a ‘democratic
majority’ was rejected.
Said Lincoln, even in the hypothetical
scenario that the United States were ‘not a
government proper’ but merely an
association of states in the nature of
‘contract’, that contract could not be
“peaceably unmade by less than all the
parties who made it”; because, as he asked
hypothetically, whereas “One party to a
contract may violate (or)… break it, does it
not require ‘all’ to lawfully rescind it?”
POSTSCRIPT
The right of the Igbo ‘minority’ or any other
‘minority’ for that matter, to secede from a
constitutionally governed Nigeria must be
located in the complex hyacinth of these
jurisprudential argument. And in all honesty
it is a right concurrent with –if not inferior
to- the right of the democratic ‘majority’ to
deny.