Peacebuilding Trajectories in Post-conflict African States: A Re-examination of the "3Rs" in Post Nigeria- Biafra War

Nigeria's amalgamation in 1914 has been described in various quarters as a marriage of two ?strange bedfellows' - the rich South and the poor North. Religiously speaking, the former was progressing along the secular and Christian lines while the latter was a conservative theocratic society with scattered pagan tribes like the Nupe, Kwararafa kingdom, and Kanuri that were conquered by the Fulani Jihadists. Like most African states, at independence, Nigeria and her new leaders found it particularly difficult to unite the ethnically and religiously plural population into a single political unit. Ethnic and religious rivalries, coupled with the fear of domination by one group among other things, led to the outbreak of a Biafran War (1967 - 1970) in the newly independent country. At the end of the war in 1970 came the ?No Victor, No Vanquished' proclamation by the then Head of State Gen. Yakubu Gowon. Similarly, in a bid to reintegrate the renegade Biafrans into Nigeria, the policy of Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (the 3Rs) was promulgated by the Federal Government of Nigeria to calm frayed nerves and forge a bigger and more virile Nigeria. However, 50 years after the policy was enacted, events in the country seriously suggest that the wounds of the Civil War have not yet healed as the factors that led to its outbreak are still very much obvious in present-day Nigeria. Hence, through textual criticism and thematic content analysis of primary and secondary data, this study re-examined the successes or failures of the post-conflict peacebuilding efforts in Nigeria. Essentially, the relative deprivation theory helped this study to cross-examine the extent of the success achieved by the policy of the 3Rs in the face of the renewed agitations for the creation of the sovereign state of Biafra and other violent extremisms in the country.