Book

In January 1970, Biafra surrendered. Nigeria’s military government declared no victor, no vanquished, and promised reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. Historians have long described the three decades that followed as a dormant period in Igbo political life, a quiet broken only by the sudden emergence of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra in 1999. From Secession to Statecraft overturns that reading of history. Drawing on archival records, Ohaneze Ndigbo’s internal papers, and contemporary press accounts, Oge Okonkwo traces a continuous, strategic political project. Igbo elites did not go silent after the war. They migrated registers. Reconciliation-era accommodation gave way to electoral bargaining in the Second Republic, then to quiescent, associational organizing under military rule, and finally to open constitutional bargaining at the conferences that shaped Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Each register carried distinct institutions, distinct leaders, and distinct, documented demands, for rotational presidency, for state creation, for federal character protections that governments promised but never delivered. When the 1999 transition arrived and those promises went unmet, the result was not resurgence out of nowhere. It was foreclosure, the collapse of a decades-long bargaining strategy that had simply run out of institutional room. MASSOB’s founding, in this account, is not a return to secession. It is what happens when statecraft hits a wall. Spanning 1970 to 1998, this book offers a new framework, register migration, for understanding how minority elites negotiate inside hostile federations, with direct implications for how scholars and policymakers read post-conflict ethnic politics far beyond Nigeria: in Catalonia, in Kurdistan, in Ambazonia, and in every state where quiet is too easily mistaken for consent.