October 1: Why Celebrate Nigeria With Mute Drumbeats? by Chuka Nnabuife - Commentary@ITREALMS

It is Nigeria’s 66th Independence Day anniversary today. Ordinarily, the streets should be agog with celebration — colours, carnivals, buntings, bouquets and frenzied fanfare. But somehow, the drums are silent, or at best, muted. The land seems sombre; even the airwaves are not commemorating the big day with the gusto they once did, including in the immediate aftermath of the bitterly fratricidal Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970.

Born in the tense 1960s in the former Biafran territory, I still recall, as a child growing up in Enugu; the hilly Coal City, capital of the former Biafra and an epicentre of the bloodletting, even as Biafra lost the war, we celebrated Nigeria’s Independence Day.