Between Igbophobia and Igbophilia

Between Igbophobia and Igbophilia

Friday, May 13, 2022 12:02 am


Dr. Chris Anyokwu

By Chris Anyokwu

 

In the following weeks, though no more trainloads of dead and mutilated bodies of easterners arrived from the North, the chasm between the Federal Military Government and the Government of Eastern Nigeria has widened so much that there was no hope of peace and there was no indication that an amicable solution would be found to the crisis.  The Eastern Nigerian Military Government published a small book “Pogrom 1966” which documented the massacre of easterners in the North and some parts of the West.  (Excerpt from a novel, Roses and Bullets by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, JALAA, 2011, p. 168).

You would ask: what would make a country take up arms against a section of its own citizenry?  What degree of criminality exhibited by the offending citizens would provoke a pogrom?  What degree of animus, to be certain, would precipitate a genocidal blood-fest perpetrated against a people who share a lot in common beyond “tribe and tongue”?  Is it a case of cutting of the nose to spite the face?  Is the Igbo treatment emblematic of the proverbial cane used to flagellate the old wife but now put away in the loft, awaiting usage on the erring new wife?  In other words, would the same treatment be meted out to the Igbo a second time, as the ongoing military campaign in the South-east indicates or would another “tribe” or geopolitical zone this time be the unlucky erring new wife?  Could it be the Tiv, the Idoma, Southern Kaduna or even the Southwest or the entire South?

Nigerian soldiers: rescue kidnapped student

Nigerian soldiers

The other day, a video surfaced on social media in which a young man, ostensibly from the Igbo ethnic group, given his accent, language and, more importantly, the paraphernalia of the Biafra secessionist group hanging on the backdrop in the room, alleged that he had it on good authority that the Nigerian soldiers were planning to invade marketplaces in the Orlu area of Imo State.  He thus counselled his people to steer clear of marketplaces and open spaces until further notice.  Besides, it is important to add that, daily we now see amateur video clips circulating or “trending” – as the parlance goes – on social media purportedly showing what appears like military campaign going on in the southeast or some parts of it.  We hear heartrending and bone-chilling shrieks of terror and horror as the distressed victims of official terror, especially women and children, run pell mell, trying to get out of harm’s way.  We hear sounds of military choppers and war-planes droning in the air, sowing panic, mass hysteria and, of course, death and destruction.

At present, it is assumed that the Southeast is technically at war, a kind of re-enactment of the tragic events of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War of 1967 – 70 seem to be taking place as we speak.  And, added to the incendiary mix is the incidence of so-called “unknown gunmen” torching government facilities and wreaking havoc on police stations and targeting our security forces, especially the police.  It is common knowledge that the Igbo feel marginalised and, in fact, ostracised from the larger Nigerian Federation.  They feel that the Nigerian  authorities have refused to forgive them for the sins of the past, namely: daring to  secede from the Federation in the 60s.  Even though Nigeria claims that there was “No Victor, No Vanquished” at the expiration of hostilities, the fact on ground indicates that the Igbo are still perceived as the vanquished, as the rebels without a cause who must be taught a lesson forever by being shut out of the Nigeria banqueting-table.  After all, we know that, after the 2015 presidential elections in which president Muhammadu Buhari was declared winner, upon assumption of office, he had told the world that the Igbo did not vote for him en masse.

Nigeria's s President Muhammadu Buhari

Nigeria’s s President Muhammadu Buhari

 

As a matter of fact, he had talked about 97% – 5% voting ratio between the rest of Nigerians and the Igbo (never mind the arithmetic!).  Consequently, as unfolding events have shown, it is believed that there is no single indication of federal presence in Alaigbo, save the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.  No federal industries or factories are sited there; old federal property and structures are deliberately left to decay and run to seed; the road infrastructure is an eyesore.  To be sure, many of the roads are impassible, completely ruined by erosion and lack of maintenance.  Youth unemployment is at an all-time high thus spawning mass immiseration and disaffection.

Even though Nigeria claims that there was “No Victor, No Vanquished” at the expiration of hostilities, the fact on ground indicates that the Igbo are still perceived as the vanquished, as the rebels without a cause who must be taught a lesson forever by being shut out of the Nigeria banqueting-table.  After all, we know that, after the 2015 presidential elections in which president Muhammadu Buhari was declared winner, upon assumption of office, he had told the world that the Igbo did not vote for him en masse

A truly palpable feeling of despair and ennui and angst hangs precariously in the air.  Thus, this perceived feeling of official policy of ostracism and marginalisation of the Ndigbo has fuelled ethnic agitations and civil unrest over time.  MASSOB and the IPOB as well as their affiliates are the logical spinoffs of this anti-Igbo policy.  But if the truth must be told, the rain did not start beating the Ndigbo only yesterday.  No, it had started beating them much earlier.

In The Trouble With Nigeria (1983), Chinua Achebe, under the heading: “The Igbo Problem”, states thus: “The origin of the national resentment of the Igbo is as old as Nigeria and quite as complicated.  But it can be summarised thus: The Igbo culture being receptive to change, individualistic and highly competitive, gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials or advancement in Nigerian colonial society.  Unlike the Hausa-Fulani, he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba unhampered by traditional hierarchies.  This kind of creature; fearing nor God nor man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensation” (58).  Achebe continues: “But this kind of success can carry a deadly penalty:  the danger of hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness, which invites envy and hatred; or even worse, which can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness” (58).  Achebe is dead on the money by asserting that: “There is no doubt at all that there is a strand in contemporary Igbo behaviour which can offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness” (59).

Chinua Achebe.

Chinua Acheb’s Trouble with Nigeria

This “Igbo individualistic ethic”, accordingly, and, sadly too, has remained at once their abiding source of strength and sorrow.  Little wonder, Achebe further posits that “Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo” (56, emphasis added).  So, as earlier stressed, the rain did not start beating the Igbo today; it started pelting them long ago.  There was, for instance, mass violence against the Igbo in Jos in 1945; in Kano in 1957 and in Southern Cameroon in 1959.  The January 15, 1966 coup disingenuously dubbed an “Igbo Coup” – which witnessed the assassinations of frontline politicians from other ethnic groups, especially the Hausa-Fulani – was a classic case of an ant falling into a bowl of soup to be eaten by ant-loving foodies.

Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, one of the masterminds of the coup, was born and bred in Kaduna and his parents were from Okpanam, near Asaba, a part of the old Western Region under the leadership of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whom the coup plotters wanted to release from prison and make the Prime Minister (see Ademoyega’s Why We Struck).  It’s on record that officers from all parts of the nation were involved in the botched putsch.   As a matter of fact, the UK, Russia, Egypt and Shell BP helped Nigeria fight the Igbo (see Dan Jacobs (1987) The Brutality of Nations. Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe (2019) The Longest Genocide since 1966 and Achebe (2012) There Was A Country).

 

Odumegwu Ojukwu

Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu was alleged to have fired the first shot and you ask: why not when he was receiving thousands of dead Igbo from the North. (see Professor Onwubiko Agozino’s interview on Galaxy TV/ YouTube).  Agozino re-echoes the popular sentiment ascribed to Awolowo and Anthony Enahoro to the effect that starvation is a legitimate weapon of war.  Thus deployed during the war, the Igbo lost over three million lives, mostly women and children.  However, what’s worse, in no distant past, some non-Igbo elites had also threatened to drown the Igbo living and doing business in Lagos in the Lagos Lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean.  Some others have equally threatened to deport the Igbo living in their domains back to the Southeast.  Since the end of hostilities in 1970, according to reports by the Amnesty International, there has been systematic massacring of Igbo youth that is still ongoing even as they remain non-violent in the expression of their rights to freedom of association.  Some have criticised the Igbo as carrying with them “a baggage of bitterness”.  Others have pooh-poohed them as suffering from “victim-mentality”  or “persecution-complex”.

But the question to ask, in all good conscience is: Do the Igbo really have a cause? Hasn’t Nigeria sinned against them more than they sinned? Do you summon a boulder to kill a mere ant?  Scotland had a referendum to decide their future within the UK; California  did in the US and Catalonia in Spain.  The heavens did not fall.  People were not wiped off the face of the earth for airing an opinion; the country’s armada was not rolled out to crush the oppressed for seeking sunlight.

It is, however, heartwarming that, since the war ended, the Igbo have been able to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and got back to their feet again (see Ekwe-Ekwe (2006) Biafra Revisited).  In education and science, in business and sport, music and popular culture such as film and cinema, stand-up comedy, radio voice-over, jingles, sit-coms, agro-allied companies, healthcare and, to a degree, politics, the Igbo are pulsing; they are triumphant.

 

But the question to ask, in all good conscience is: Do the Igbo really have a cause? Hasn’t Nigeria sinned against them more than they sinned? Do you summon a boulder to kill a mere ant?  Scotland had a referendum to decide their future within the UK; California  did in the US and Catalonia in Spain.  The heavens did not fall.  People were not wiped off the face of the earth for airing an opinion; the country’s armada was not rolled out to crush the oppressed for seeking sunlight. 

As a consequence, many have come to admire them.  Yes, the late Sir Ahmadu Bello once expressed consternation over what he had considered the Igbo penchant to grab everything and anything in sight; their can-do spirit and entrepreneurial nous.  He had forecast that, if care was not taken, the Igbo would overrun the North, especially in the area of employment thus leaving the Northern youth high and dry.

Ahmadu Bello

 

Video: Watch what Ahmadu Bello said here

 

The same sentiment seems to colour now the collective perception of the Igbo everywhere you go.  Hating the Omo Ibo is the vogue, a tribal slur freighted with bone-deep resentment, primordial antagonism and mistrust.  Whether in church or the marketplace, office environment or public transport, residential neighbourhood or on the street, the Igbo person is an instant irritant, a butt of casual ethnic stereotyping and resentment.  S/he is the other, the outsider, the enemy.  This general aversion towards the Igbo is sheer envy writ large, period!  And as they say, envy is the compliment failure pays success/achievement.  The advice, then, is for the envious majorities to stoop to conquer; to borrow a leaf from the Igbo chap-book of ingenuity.  Maybe, after all, there’s some truth in the Igbo fancy that they descended from the loins of Father Abraham; that they are the Nigerian Jews.  It is thus suggested that Government must endeavour to make it up to the Igbo.  It’s not beneath Government to institute some form of reparation for the Ndigbo. A people who lost over three millions of their kith and kin to “friendly fire” deserve compensation.

Igbo people of Southeast

Igbo people of Southeast Nigeria

The Igbo must urgently be reintegrated into the larger Nigerian family.  We do not leave humans to embrace trees, as the saying goes.  People disagree to agree.  A dog’s bite does not get to her puppy’s bones.  So, egbe beli ugo beli/ Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch … Landlords and employers of labour should be more tolerant and kinder to the Igbo.  Yes, some of them, the Igbo, are bad just as you have bad people from every ethnic group.  The Federal Government must, as deliberate policy, begin to develop the entirety of the Southeast region.  Let there be fairplay, equity and justice for all, not just one section of the country.  There must be a level-playing field for every Nigerian in politics, bureaucracy, business, education, etc.  This will go a long way in healing the wounds of history and douse the growing tensions of the present.  Everyone knows Nigeria is teetering on the edge of a precipice at present; the auguries are overwhelmingly contrary and you feel the Nigeria tinderbox can implode any moment.  Let our ruling elite, for once, put our collective national interest over and above their narrow, selfish ambitions.  A stitch in time….

*This article was first published here on 6 June, 2021.

 

Chris Anyokwu, PhD.

Associate Professor of English

University of Lagos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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