A critical rhetoric analysis of Ojukwu's Ahiara Declaration

From all indications Ojukwu's Ahiara Declaration (1969) was created as a visionary document given its proto-revolutionary and socialist pretensions. Possibly, the idea was to use it as a utopia to fire the imagination of beleaguered Biafrans and thus sustain their perseverance to ultimate victory in the Nigerian civil war. This paper contends that rather than achieve this apparently intended aim, the Declaration became a table-turning argument that produced the unintended effect of demoralising a critical segment of the population, that is, the elite, by inducing a despondent mass psychological state that hastened, among other factors, the Biafran loss of the war.