And the most dangerous form of fandom is political fandom because when your favorite celebrity loses, you change your entertainment. When your political strategy loses, your people live with the consequences
By Chioma Amaryllis Ahaghotu
Biafra will not come. And the most ironic part is that many of the people shouting for it have never seriously thought about what happens if it doesn’t.
This is the part my people do not want to hear.
Biafra has been discussed, demanded, fought for, romanticized and weaponized for decades, but too much of the conversation has been driven by emotion rather than outcomes. From Ojukwu to Uwazuruike, to Kanu, to Ekpa etc, I keep seeing the same fundamental problem: the obsession is with the declaration, the grievance, the symbolism and the emotional satisfaction of resistance. The obsession is not with the outcome. And in politics, that is how you destroy a people.
A strategist does not only ask, “What happens if we win?”A strategist asks, “What happens if we lose?” What happens to the people? What happens to their businesses? What happens to their political relationships? What happens to their children? What happens to their ability to negotiate? What happens to the next generation? What happens if your strategy produces exactly the opposite of what you wanted? That is the conversation I rarely see.
You cannot build a political strategy around the assumption that your desired outcome is inevitable. You have to plan for the outcome you want and the outcome you are most afraid of. Declaring a war you have no realistic capacity and means to win is not necessarily courage. And if you know you cannot win, you have to ask yourself whether your ego is more important than the people who will live with the consequences of your decision. Ojukwu did not ask this question. He fled to safety while the people bore the brunt of the outcome.
The Nigerian Civil War is not simply a historical event to romanticize. The outcome matters. Igbo people came out of that war more devastated. Lives were lost, property was destroyed, economic structures were shattered, and many Igbo people had to rebuild from scratch. So when I look at the Biafra agitation today, I see a disturbing repetition. The rhetoric is loud. The emotions are loud. But where is the serious outcome analysis?
What happens if the agitation does not produce Biafra? What happens if instead it produces deeper political isolation? What happens if it damages the Southeast economically? What happens if it balkanizes the region politically and socially? What happens if it makes other regions less willing to trust or cooperate with Igbo political interests? What happens if businesses leave? What happens if investment slows? What happens if young people become more economically trapped? What happens if another generation pays for decisions made by people who will not personally bear the consequences?
What happens if you destroy the house while trying to convince everyone that you are building a new one, and the new house never comes? That is the question, and it is a question the people screaming the loudest should be answering.
Because the people making the decisions and the people suffering the consequences are often not the same people.
The men with microphones, movements, platforms and political ambitions can become historical figures. The ordinary person still has to run a business. The trader still has to cross state lines. The parent still has to educate their children. The professional still has to find work. The family still has to pay rent. And when the political experiment fails, ordinary people do not get to declare that it was a failed experiment and move on. They live inside the consequences.
This is why I am deeply suspicious of political movements that demand sacrifice from everyone but cannot explain the exit strategy. Self-preservation does not mean putting your people in a position where they have fewer options tomorrow. If your version of self-preservation destroys your alliances, weakens your economy, isolates your region and makes your people more politically vulnerable, then you have to ask whether what you are calling self-preservation is actually self-destruction.
And this is where I think many Igbo people have allowed themselves to be politically manipulated.
Every political bid eventually becomes a personal ambition. That is why political movements require personalities around them. Someone becomes the symbol. Someone becomes the face. Someone becomes the savior. Eventually, criticizing the strategy becomes equivalent to attacking the person, and suddenly the question is no longer, “Is this strategy working?” It becomes, “Do you support our man?”
That is how political vision and thinking dies.
I don’t care how charismatic the person is. I don’t care how angry the supporters sound. I don’t care how many people follow him online. I don’t care how emotionally satisfying the speeches are. Show me the outcome. Show me the political pathway, the alliances, the coalition, the institutions, the economic plan, the diplomatic relationships and the contingency plan. Show me what happens if you lose. Show me what happens if the government refuses. Show me what happens if other regions reject the proposal. Show me what happens if your own people become divided. Show me what happens to the people who cannot afford to leave. That is politics.
“ANA EMEGBU NDỊ IGBO” is not a political strategy. It is a grievance at best and an emotional appeal at the very least. And a grievance can feel legitimate without being a strategy. You can feel genuinely marginalized and still have a terrible political strategy. You can have legitimate complaints and still choose methods that make your position worse. You can be right about the problem and completely wrong about the solution. Being angry is not a political plan or roadmap. It is a feeling.
And this is why I see 2027 heading toward the same trap. There are people already treating the next election as though the only meaningful political objective is to prove that one particular person can win. But what happens if he loses? That is the question you don’t want to hear. Not what happens if he wins. What happens if he loses?
Because Igbo people will still be in Nigeria. Igbo people will still have businesses across Nigeria. Igbo professionals will still work across the country. Igbo families will still live outside the Southeast. Igbo traders will still depend on markets outside their home states. Igbo politicians will still need alliances. Igbo businesses will still need customers. And the people who have spent years shouting themselves hoarse online will not be able to wish those realities away.
If you are serious about political power, you build options. You don’t burn every bridge and then call yourself wise. You build relationships across tribes and regions, overtime. Steady, and intentional, toward an outcome. You build political parties that can actually compete or partner nationally. You recruit competent people. You win local elections. You build institutions and ecosystems. You negotiate, organize. You influence and develop policy. You become useful to people outside your immediate ethnic constituency. You make people in other regions look at your political movement and say, “These people can govern. These people can build. These people understand our interests too.”That is how you build political power.
Instead, too many people have reduced Igbo political advocacy to shouting online: “ANA EMEGBU NDỊ IGBO!” Okay. And then what? Who are your allies? What coalition have you built? What states outside of the strongholds can you flip to win? What constituencies have you organized? What policies have you influenced and developed? What institutions have you built? What relationships have you cultivated? What have you done to make your political movement attractive to someone who is not Igbo?
You cannot spend years telling everyone else that they hate you and then be shocked when you have no real coalition. Politics is not therapy. The objective is not to make you feel heard. The objective is to produce an outcome.
And if your agitation consistently produces worse outcomes for the people you claim to represent, then eventually someone has to stop clapping and start asking hard questions. Because the people who are emotionally invested in a political cause are not necessarily the people who understand politics, and the people who understand politics are not necessarily the loudest people in the room.
A strategist is constantly calculating consequences: If I do this, what happens next? And after that? And after that? And if that fails, what is Plan B? And if Plan B fails, what is Plan C?Chess players don’t sacrifice pieces because they are angry at the opponent. They sacrifice pieces because they have calculated what the sacrifice produces. That is the difference between strategy and your emotional reaction.
And I see very little of that calculation in the current political conversation. Instead, I see men and women becoming emotionally attached to political personalities and then retroactively constructing arguments to justify whatever those personalities do. That is not political consciousness. That is fandom.
And the most dangerous form of fandom is political fandom because when your favorite celebrity loses, you change your entertainment. When your political strategy loses, your people live with the consequences.
This is why I don’t care whether someone tells me they “don’t care about politics.” Politics will care about you. It will care about your business, your taxes, your security, your children’s opportunities, your community, your ability to move, your access to power and your future. And if you refuse to participate intelligently and strategically because politics is messy, people who have no problem playing the game will make decisions for you.
That is exactly how you wake up after an election and discover that the people you thought were fighting for your future were actually fighting for their own political relevance. They will go back to their businesses and livelihoods, you will go back to your frustration.
The question is not whether you think you love your people. The question is whether your actions are actually producing better outcomes for them.
Because history does not grade political movements on how passionate they were. History grades outcomes.
And if the outcome of decades of agitation is a weaker, more isolated, more economically vulnerable Southeast while Biafra still does not exist, then eventually we have to be intellectually honest enough to say: The strategy failed.
And if 2027 produces the same result because people confused grievance with strategy, personality with politics, noise with organization and emotion with planning, then the people celebrating the loss as proof that “Nigeria hates Igbo people”will have missed the real lesson.
The real lesson will be much more consequential. You cannot keep choosing political strategies based on what feels good today and then blame tomorrow for the consequences.
Nigeria is going to continue. Nigeria will be fine. The real question is whether many Igbo people will be strategically positioned to thrive within whatever Nigeria becomes.
That requires less shouting, less hero worship, less emotional blackmail, less political romanticism and much more calculation.
Think about the outcome. Not the speech or sound bites. Not the man. The outcome.
Igbo ga adi!
•Opinions, positions or thoughts expressed here are personal and strictly of the writer/author and do not represent the views of The Daily Crucible.
