The Biafra Nations League (BNL): A New Scare in the Bakassi Peninsula.
The thrust of this paper is to showcase the emerging threat posed by Biafra Nations League in the Bakassi Peninsula which could jeopardise the long fought peace between Cameroon and Nigeria over the area. The study first sketches on the events that led to the ICJ verdict and the Green Tree Agreement which eventually brought peace between the countries. The study went further to dissect the Biafra Nations League (BNL): origin and objectives, membership and funding, structural organisation and militant activities since 2013. To unravel the mystery behind this Non State Armed Group(NSAG), the study identified that poor resettlement schemes, low infrastructural development, human rights abuses by Cameroon and Nigeria in the Bakassi peninsula, has resulted to psychological, socio-economic and political fallouts on the part of the indigenes, who now see the aspect of self-determination as their main stay. The study also brings to the limelight the increasing trend of militant activities in the Bakassi peninsula, which if not properly checked, could shatter the already laid pillars of peace. The study brings to the front line the need for the adoption of an alternative post-conflict peace building approach in the face of the ineffectiveness of the extant approaches in fostering positive peace and sustainable development in the region. Upon these findings, the study proffers some recommendations that could incorporate the desires of these three stakeholders: Cameroon, Nigeria and the Bakassi people to advance development and lasting peace. This paper adopts the qualitative methods and from it, content analyses in terms of data collection, analyses and presentation. The collection of data is based on secondary sources. Secondary sources included written sources relevant to the study; online newspaper and blog publications, policy documents, books, magazine and journal articles, as well as unpublished works, theses and dissertations, seminar and conference studies, amongst others. On an important note, a lot of data was harnessed from the official verified Facebook page of Biafra Nations League (BNL), created in 2014, and currently has more than 19,000 Facebook followers. All these are geared towards generating a novel empirical data on the Biafra Nations League, who for some time now, have become a new scare in the Bakassi peninsula.
KEYWORDS: Cameroon, Nigeria, Biafra Nations League, Bakassi Peninsula, Emerging threats
