Southeast and South-South states, particularly Ebonyi State, which will be used to break up IPOB/MASSOB demonstrations whenever they occur. This organisation should have no public name, as its aim is to infiltrate IPOB/MASSOB demonstrations and protests and break them up or turn them violent as a means of discrediting such protests, and creating plausible cause for more heavy measures by the government.
I would also suggest that the CBSOO should also create and run a pro-government armed regional security militia which will operate in the four southeastern states of Abia, Anambra, Enugu and Imo, and which will be the active fist of the Nigerian state in the downing of the pro-Biafran militants, and which will prevent accusations of human rights abuses that will be problematic for the Nigerian Army and Police, from being levelled at those two organisations.
Another big stick tactic the Nigerian government has to utilise in neutralising the pro-Biafran campaigns, is to build very high concrete isolation walls, with controlled access points manned by a combination of the Nigerian Police and the around areas in the cities of the region that are particularly notorious strongholds of IPOB/MASSOB. Controlling access in and out of such areas through a limited number of gates where Police and pro-government militiamen will carry out strict searches of pedestrians and vehicles, combined with regular raids by the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps and State Security Service assisted by the CBSOO-controlled regional security militia on homes within such isolated areas suspected of harbouring wanted pro-Biafran militants or weapons, will greatly aid to neutralise the presence of IPOB/MASSOB in urban areas in the four states region of the Southeast. The CBSOO as part of its mandate, must also aggressively engage in information influence operations against the Biafran cause, in order to shape the narrative and general perception surrounding the inevitable conflict to the advantage of the Nigerian state.
This campaign must include supporting pro-Nigerian think-tanks and policy advisory institutes in the West, cultivating and supporting networks of pro-Nigerian international journalists, mobilising the Nigerian diaspora globally against the Biafran cause, firming up the national resolve at home through the use of subtle, covert and overt manipulation of information, identifying and shutting down pro-Biafran propaganda sources through any means necessary, setting up and operating barrages of pro-Nigeria/anti-Biafra social media accounts, blogs, websites etc. The Nigerian Police Force and the State Security Service must as part of the Joint Counter-Biafra Operational Task Force(JCBOTF) aggressively arrest, detain and prosecute Nigerian politicians and political office holders who express solidarity with IPOB/MASSOB/BZN and other pro-Biafran secessionist groups, or who are known to be covertly providing support to such organisations.
This will purge the ranks of the political leadership of traitors and conniving double-faced infiltrators whose loyalties are to the Biafran cause, instead of the Nigerian government whom they pledged to be loyal to. The State Security Service must also be empowered to identify, detain and prosecute those on cyberspace who express solidarity with Biafra or who are engaged in disseminating pro-Biafran propaganda. Also within the civil service and public service both at the Federal and State levels, the State Security Service must identify and arrest anyone who supports passive or actively any of the pro-Biafran organisations, or who adheres to the subversive Biafran ideology. This purge of the Civil/Public services combined with the purge of the political class of all pro-Biafran traitors, in addition to ridding the Nigerian governance establishment of enemy operatives, will also help to firm up the Nigerian resolve and remove all treacherous persons who may oppose and sabotage necessary measures to beat Biafran plots, from being implemented.
[b]The Nigerian Army as part of the JCBOTF, should be tasked to jointly with the Police, maintain checkpoints on all main access roads leading into towns and cities across the four pro-Biafran Southeast states. The CBSOO-controlled regional security militia will in addition to such harsh but necessary measures, be a parallel strategy of feeding carrots to alleviate the effects of the stick on the people of the region, a sort of hearts and mind campaign if you will.
I would suggest that any viable counter-Biafra strategy must be linchpinned on manipulating the intense differences between the people of Ebonyi State and the rest of the Southeast. The Nigerian government must keep Ebonyi free of all harsh measures which will be visited on the other four Southeast states. Rather the approach should be to make Ebonyi people as complicit as the rest of Nigeria, even more so, in the application of necessary measures to put down the rabies of Biafran militancy and agitation.
The CBSOO must recruit the vast majority of the membership of its plaincloth, protest-scattering civilian organisation from Ebonyi State. This serves a double purpose by providing employment for young men and women of Ebonyi State, and by putting an Igbo-ish face on the people breaking up Pro-Biafran protests. The CBSOO’s human intelligence gathering operations should also employ many operatives from Ebonyi State. Plus the sole administrators to oversee the four Southeast states during the period of emergency rule, should be of Ebonyi origin. Also, as part of its stick strategy, the Nigerian government through the CBSOO should invest in developing infrastructure in Ebonyi State, along with the key industrial towns in the other Southeastern states. Through the CBSOO and other development support agencies of the government, grants and venture capital funds should be channelled to capitalise manufacturing operations across the region after such firms have been vetted and found to not harbour any links with the enemy.[/b]
An adequate investment in infrastructural development, plus support to industrial firms in the region will reduce the ranks of the unemployed who are vulnerable to recruitment by groups such as IPOB, while at the same time deepening the loyalty of the business and industrialist class in the region to the Nigerian state. Of course more measures in a proper strategy are needed by the Nigerian government to adequately defeat and destroy Biafran separatism, but I hope this, as a start, will create a foundation for a coherent and viable policy direction in this conflict.
Fulan Nasrullah is a Conflict Analyst and a National Security Strategist/Policy Adviser
