If you break up with your partner, announce you’re leaving, pack your bags, threaten never to return, involve outsiders in the drama, burn bridges on the way out , and then later reconcile , something changes permanently. Your threats no longer carry the same weight. Your ultimatums lose their shock value. The other person now knows that separation is not the end of the world. They have lived through it once. They have adjusted. They have built emotional calluses. So the next time you raise your voice and say “I will leave,” it is met with silence, not panic. The leverage is gone.
That is exactly what happened after the Biafra secession attempt in 1967 -1970.
The civil war was the breakup. A formal declaration of exit. A full confrontation. A violent divorce. And when it ended, Nigeria adjusted. The state restructured its security doctrine. Its political calculations. Its risk tolerance. Its perception of the South East. The federation learned that the relationship could survive rupture. So the threat of separation lost its ability to shock the system.
But Nigeria did something else deliberately after the war. It redesigned the structure of the federation to make future secession exponentially harder. Regions were broken into states. States were fragmented further. Federal control over security was tightened. Revenue allocation was centralized. Strategic military presence was embedded across zones. No single region was left with the territorial cohesion, economic autonomy, or command structure required to credibly attempt exit again.
The country didn’t just survive the breakup , it redesigned the house so no one could walk out that door the same way again.
That is an important detail many agitators never factored into their strategy. You cannot threaten a breakup using tools that no longer exist.
Yet instead of understanding this reality, decades later, Biafra agitation revived the same threat. Same language. Same posture. Same ultimatum energy. Except now, it was no longer a credible break-up threat. It was a repeated warning that had already been tested once and contained. And when a threat is no longer seen as existential, it stops being bargaining power and becomes background noise.
Worse, it began to look like emotional blackmail without capacity. Daily threats without follow-through. Sit-at-home orders without territorial control. Declarations without diplomatic leverage. At that point, the agitation stopped functioning as feasible negotiation pressure and started functioning as proof of instability. The opposite of what serious political bargaining requires.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country adapted. Political actors recalibrated. Security institutions hardened. Economic contingencies were built. Public sympathy from other regions thinned. The system moved from fear to familiarity. From alarm to management. That is what happens when a breakup threat has already been survived.
So today, repeating secessionist rhetoric does not create leverage. It reinforces the perception that the South East is trapped in a loop , recycling old threats in a new era where the stakes have changed. And in politics, perception becomes policy.
If the goal is national leadership, you cannot keep speaking the language of exit each time you don’t succeed. You cannot negotiate entry into power using the vocabulary of departure. No serious partner hands over the keys to someone still announcing they might burn down the house.
The path forward requires a different posture. Not breakup threats. Not emotional ultimatums. But mature negotiation. Clear interests. Coalition-building. Institutional engagement. Structure. Patience. Credible participation.
Because once a breakup has already happened and been survived, threatening it again does not make you powerful.
It just tells everyone to ignore you.
Can you hear me now?!? Good!
By Chioma Amaryllis Ahaghotu
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