only the callous would deny the fact that they have suffered immeasurably in the Nigerian Federation over the last 50 years. Only the uninformed would deny the fact that they have been butchered, murdered, persecuted, broken, humiliated, insulted, cheated and treated with contempt and disdain more than any other ethnic group in the country since July 1966. What the Nigerian state is confronted with in the new generation of Igbos who refuse to be cowed is a time-bomb. Unlike their fathers they cannot be appeased or intimidated. They are not fearful of the prospect of a second civil war. They are not prepared to settle for crumbs and neither do they fear death, conflict, defeat, incarceration, butchery or persecution. They are imbued with a spirit that cannot be suppressed and the more they cry ''Biafra'', the more the spirits of the millions that were slaughtered on the Biafran side during the civil war are invoked. The more they cry ''Biafra'', the more the souls of the hundreds of thousands of their people that were butchered during the barbaric pogroms in the north in the mid-60's and thereafter are remembered. The more they cry ''Biafra'', the more they remember how their fathers were stripped of everything after the civil war and how they have been denied the opportunity to rise to the highest office in the land. The more they cry ''Biafra'', the more they acknowledge and recognise the bitter fact that the Buhari administration regard their kith and kin as nothing more than third class citizens and pitiable prisoners of war. The worst thing that the Nigerian authorities can do is to treat them with levity or contempt. They are angry, they are fed up, they refuse to be enslaved, they want a brighter future and they have come to realise that they have nothing to lose. The most inappropriate thing that President Buhari can do is to continue to underestimate the power of their resolve or the clarity of their intent. The worst thing that they can do is to begin to jail them, to shed their blood and to take their lives. The more you lock up the Biafrans, the more they will rise up. The more you mock them, the more they will shout. The more you kill them, the more their anger will be kindled. The more you deny them, the more they will wax stronger. The more you treat them with disdain, the more they will defy you. The more you treat them like slaves the more they will aspire to break off and take their destiny into their own hands. You cannot resist an idea whose time has come.