Spokesperson, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)
With utmost respect, the position attributed to U.S. Representative Riley Moore reflects a familiar but deeply flawed assumption: that preserving the territorial integrity of Nigeria is synonymous with protecting Christians. History, however, proves the opposite.
For more than six decades, Nigeria has remained territorially intact under a British-designed, highly centralized structure that suffocates genuine pluralism. Throughout this period, Christians—particularly in Northern Nigeria, the Middle Belt, and parts of Yorubaland—have endured recurring massacres, mass displacement, church burnings, and a culture of impunity often enabled by the state itself. The crisis is not a lack of security cooperation; it is the structural failure of a forced union between irreconcilable religious and civilizational systems.
The claim that self-determination “emboldens terrorists” is not grounded in evidence but in the logic of an expensive lobbying industry that thrives on preserving the status quo. Terrorist movements are not born from oppressed peoples seeking safety. They flourish where centralized states suppress identity, deny autonomy, and reward violence with appeasement. Afghanistan offers a modern warning: decades of military cooperation, foreign aid, and institutional engineering collapsed overnight, while radical ideology returned with greater ferocity.
History consistently shows that separation—not forced coexistence—has saved persecuted religious minorities. The Huguenots did not survive Catholic France because France suddenly became tolerant. They survived because an independent Protestant England already existed: a sovereign refuge with the political will, military capacity, and moral clarity to protect them. Without Protestant England, there would have been no sanctuary for Europe’s persecuted Protestants.
The same principle applies to Nigeria today.
The agitation led by Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is neither a call to violence nor an attempt to destabilize West Africa, contrary to narratives promoted by British and Nigerian lobbyists in Europe and the United States. It is a demand for a democratic referendum—the most peaceful conflict-resolution mechanism recognized under international law. A restored Biafra would serve as a civilizational anchor: a homeland where Christians and adherents of other faiths can live without fear, and from which persecuted peoples across Nigeria could find refuge and protection.
This is not theoretical. Since the emergence of IPOB, the once-routine mass killings of Igbos in parts of Northern Nigeria abruptly ceased. That outcome was not accidental. Collective self-assertion created deterrence where decades of silence and appeasement failed.
Security cooperation between the United States and Nigeria may manage symptoms, but it has never cured the disease. Repeating a strategy that has failed for generations—while dismissing self-determination as dangerous—is not realism; it is historical amnesia.
No genuine advocate of peace opposes cooperation against violent extremism. But refusing to acknowledge peaceful, constitutional exits, while insisting on the permanence of a demonstrably broken state, guarantees the continuation of persecution rather than its end.
An independent Biafra—like Protestant England in Europe’s past or Israel in the modern era—would not threaten regional stability. It would create it, by offering persecuted peoples what they have never truly had within Nigeria: a sovereign place of safety.
True concern for Christians—and indeed for all Nigerians—must begin with intellectual honesty. Forced unity has failed. History is unequivocal: safety, dignity, and peace follow self-rule, not its denial.
