Are there no elders left in the Igbo land?

By Olaitan Ladipo… There is a Yoruba saying that when a one-legged man sends his son to the market to buy him one shoe, it is an invitation to insults. When other people are tolerant of your shortcomings, it is foolish to push your luck.
Yesterday 14 June 2017, Nigeria woke to news report of yet another declaration, this time from the Southeast, titled 2019: Igbo youths demand presidency or Biafra. A group calling itself Ohaneze Youth Ndigbo Council (OYC) declared that “the South East will not accept any position less than a President of Igbo extraction in 2019”.

Most people would ordinarily dismiss this laughable declaration as youthful exuberance, even with the knowledge that many of Nigeria’s so called youth organisations are populated by grandfathers in their sixties. Already, some commentators have described the announcement disdainfully as a propagandist attempt to divert attention from Igbo elders practically on their knees in front of Arewa Professor Ango Abdullahi in Kaduna. Such is the silliness of Nigeria’s politics today.

However, the prominence accorded to this story by the Sun, a newspaper that claims, and is generally recognised, to be the ‘voice of the [Biafra] nation’ and the Vanguard, another pro-Igbo newspaper, is an indication that the people of the Southeast take the group and their announcement seriously. In that context, it is reasonable to assume that [majority of] Igbo people support the group’s ultimatum.

This insensate declaration closely follows the sit-down order imposed a few days earlier in Southeast towns by Mr Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous Peoples of Biafra. That naked coercion is cited by Fulani leadership as the main reason for declaring, a few days ago, their own provocative notice to the Igbo to quit the entire North.

Despite the inanity of this new ultimatum by the Igbo, one must admit that it is simply, yet another one of a string of absurdities currently plaguing Nigeria’s polity.

Read also: Fear: How Ndigbo Can Convert Retreat Into Advance

One such absurdity is the promise yesterday by Acting President Yemi Osinbajo to bring perpetrators of the hate ultimatum issued to the Igbo to book, considering that seated right there in front him at the meeting was perhaps the worst of the culprits, old Fulani gadfly Professor Ango Abdullahi.

Having said that, a situation has been created whereby, once again, the question is being asked about the influence, or lack of it, of reasoned opinion in the Southeast. For at least three good reasons.

Firstly, it appears that the Igbo are not in a hurry to shed the reputation for starting what they cannot finish. They do not appear to have learnt anything since July 1967 about the futility of mere bluster, including rebel leader Emeka Ojukwu’s boast just before the war that “no power in black Africa can subdue me”. Even though the Igbo had good reason to break away, there were alternatives to war which Igbo leaders refused to utilise. Humanitarian supporters of the Igbo cause cautioned against the headlong rush to war, including Professor Wole Soyinka who warned that “bluff is not a substitute for bullets’.

Secondly, never before has it become this crucial that older Igbo generation begin to educate the younger ones truthfully about the history of the crises of Nigeria. It is prevalent among post civil-war Igbo to situate the genesis of Nigeria’s problems casually at the door of the Northern Nigeria pogroms of 1966.

That narrative callously ignores that the whole issue started when military thugs led by Igbo Majors Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Chukwuma Nzeogwu stole in the middle of the night to murder Northern Nigeria and Yoruba leaders in their beds and in front of their families. Subsequent revelations affirm that the murders were carried out at the behest of a few, and tacit approval of many, Igbo politicians of the day. No amount of propagandist rewriting of history by the likes of the late Chinua Achebe will change the truth.

One of the insults that the Igbo continue to slap onto the injury they did to the Yoruba on the night of 6 January 1966 is to believe somehow that the Yoruba are grateful that they murdered Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintọla. They believe also that the Yoruba would have been equally glad had they murdered his deputy, Chief Rẹ̀mí Fani-Káyọ̀dé, who was only saved by the skin of his teeth when Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon rescued him from his would-be Igbo murderers.

They are probably unaware of the Yoruba saying that however unruly a child might be, the parents would never hand him to the tiger to devour. Chief Akintọla, even though a rebel to the Yoruba national cause, was a brilliant Yoruba son. Akintola’s deputy, Rẹmi Fani-Kayọde, Queen’s Counsel QC and Senior Advocate of Nigeria SAN, was one of the most brilliant lawyers ever to come out of Britain and Nigeria.

While the vengeful pogrom subsequently carried out in the North is inexcusable, there is no need for the Igbo to continue to scratch old wounds open by inspiring insensitive and deliberately provocative historical amnesia.

Thirdly, the statement exposes the hypocrisy and lip service that the Igbo pay to democracy. What the Igbo are demanding—undemocratic imposition of a President— is exactly what the progressive elements in the country have been fighting, and literally dying, for in the last sixty years. Of course, the Igbo would not know because they have hardly been part of that sacrifice in the same way and extent as other parts of the country like the Southwest, South-South and the Middle Belt.

As if nothing has happened in between, the Southeast are once again attempting to force Igbo leadership on the country like they did in 1966.

The same mindset apparently informs Igbo inability to play opposition role in a democracy. Chief Awolowo’s principled opposition to feudal hegemony and Yoruba commitment to democracy kept the Southwest in perpetual opposition for generations including even eight [of the twelve] years that Yoruba man Obasanjo was in government but not in power.

Despite their claim that “no Igbo has been allowed to get close to the seat of power for decades”, whatever they mean by that, it is an established fact that Goodluck Jonathan’s was all but in name an Igbo government. One of the biggest undermining of Nigeria’s new democracy is the way that so many leading Igbo members of that administration have decamped to the ruling All Progressives Party.

It is amazing that the group would cite President Obasanjọ’s statement to beg the Igbo, and Acting President Yẹmi Ọṣinbajo’s statement to keep the national marriage intact, as supporting grounds for their claim. The fact that these are elderly manner of dealing with a petulant child seems completely lost on the whole of Southeast. It makes you wonder the more where the numerous elder statesmen of Igbo land are.

 

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