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KWENU: Our Culture, Our Future |
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Ndiigbo need deliverance (1) Ubanese Nwanganga
Friday, January 14, 2005
“…For by strength shall no man prevail.” (1Samuel Ch. 2 verse 9)
On 10th November 2004, hell was let loose in Awka and Onitsha when hoodlums descended on the two cities and destroyed properties worth billions of naira. Most of the properties belonged to the Anambra state government. They were built or bought with taxpayers’ money. The attack took place in broad daylight in the full view of the police, who cared less. The hoodlums were said to be political thugs recruited and let loose on the state by a chieftain of the ruling party in the state, Chris Uba. Chris Uba, it should be recalled, is the godfather of PDP in the state. He rigged the gubernatorial election in the state in 2003 in favour of Chris Ngige, a medical doctor turned politician. In 1999, another chieftain of the party who then held sway in the state, Emeka Offor, rigged the 1999 gubernatorial election in favour of the former occupant of Anambra State government house, Dr. Mbadinuju.
What is common between Uba and Offor, besides rigging their political godsons into office, is that they made the state ungovernable by demanding unreasonable returns on their investments in the political process. Emeka Offor succeeded in crippling the state government and in the process rendered Mbadinuju ineffective as governor. It is widely believed now that Emeka Offor received between two hundred to four hundred million naira monthly from the Mbadinuju-led Anambra State government. As a result, Mbadinuju could not deliver to the electorate the fruits or dividends of democracy. This should be expected. After paying Emeka Offor and of course taking care of himself, after he was not into politics for nothing, there was nothing left for the poor people of Anambra state. Workers were not paid. Teachers were frequently on strike necessitating closure of schools for months on end. Pensioners waited in vain for their pensions. State roads deteriorated without receiving attention. Life continued as hell for the people.
As the general elections of 2003 approached, many people in Anambra concluded that the state had seen enough of governor Mbadinuju and his political godfather. The ruling party in the state and at the centre also saw with the people and decided to stop him from being re-elected. He was dropped as the party’s governorship candidate. He frantically pitched his tent with the Alliance for Democracy on whose ticket he ran and lost his deposit. Then, a new godfather, greedy, arrogant and well connected to the presidency, emerged from nowhere to replace Emeka Offor. He was commissioned by the party as well as the presidency to deliver Anambra state at all costs. Poor people of Anambra state! They had hoped to choose one of their respectable and committed sons who was going to wipe out their tears of anguish brought about by Mbadinuju’s four years of retrogression.
Instead of the candidate of their choice, Peter Obi, the new helms man, Chris Uba, foisted Chris Ngige on the good people of Anambra state and the state and the people entered a new but more debilitating phase of evil and woes, which enjoyed the active support of the presidency. Uba, like his predecessor in infamy, demanded payment for his investments in cash and in kind including strategic ministries such as finance and works. As God would have it, Chris Ngige, beneficiary of a calculated effort to humiliate Ndiigbo by their enemies, decided to declare his independence and to ignore the terms of the fetish accord at Okija shrine. In doing so, he ignored the import of one Igbo proverb, which says that nnunu na-agba egwu n’uzo, nwere onye na-akuru ya egwu. He quickly forgot that Uba was a creation of the powers that be that were wary of assertiveness of Ndiigbo.
Uba was not an ordinary phenomenon. He had federal might solidly behind him. So, to take him head on therefore meant taking on the federal might including the security apparatuses as well as the police. Anu ga-epu mpi, ekwu ga-eshi ya ike. Ngige did not have the muscle to stand his ground in the face of the bulldozing federal might. This was a Herculean task for it stood to reason that to overcome such intimidating power required a countervailing power, which has been banished from Igbo land since the end of the civil war in 1970. Ngige hoped to rouse sympathy by playing the ethnic card, for after all he was and still is an Igbo son, the fact that he was given a stolen mandate notwithstanding. And to a considerable extent, he has been correct. Many prominent Igbo sons and daughters in Nigeria and in Diaspora are more concerned with what they consider as an attempt by Obasanjo’s federal government to humiliate Ndiigbo. So, instead of demanding a return of the people’s mandate, the clamour has been to end the humiliation of Ndiigbo by a Yoruba led federal government.
The recent decision of the ruling party to suspend Uba and his political godson flies in the face of reason. It is a huge political joke. But we should not be surprised. We should bear in mind the mission of PDP in Anambra state. Otherwise if it was not to humiliate Ndiigbo, why not do the right thing by returning the people’s mandate from governorship, the senate, the house of representatives and the state houses of assembly? Let the people’s mandate be restored.
My concern here is why should phenomena like Offor, Mbadinuju, Uba, and Ngige ever manifest in Igboland? What has gone wrong with us? Is Igbo land the same that produced Nnamdi Azikiwe, Akanu Ibiam, Michael Okpara, Kingsley Mbadiwe, Mbonu Ojike, Chike Obi, Dennis Osadebey, Raymond Amanze Njoku, etc? Is it the same Igboland that stood up to the combined might of the old North, Yorubaland and the south-south minorities? Is it the same Igboland for nearly three odd years fought with bare hands to stay alive? I have asked these questions before and I am convinced that something fundamental has gone wrong in Igboland. Otherwise, how can nwaafo Igbo play such despicable role in his motherland, among his kith and kin, the types that Emeka Offor, Chris Offor, Mbadinuju, Ngige and a host of others have been involved in? How can any right thinking Igbo man participate in the destruction of his motherland on the scale that was visited on Awka and Onitsha? Has our collective conscience taken leave of us? That an Igbo man hired thugs to destroy the scant development in Igboland is shocking. Even in the mad days of “Operation Wetie” in the “wild, wild West,” things did not get to this disgusting extent. That Umuigbo wrecked Awka and Onitsha, no matter what they were paid to do it, should be a major concern to us all.
The rape of Anambra State, we should recall, is one of the so many manifestations of our problems, which have gone of out control and have assumed monumental proportions. Why are we prone to making mistakes? Have we been cursed with the spirit of error? Or, why are things not working in our favour? Are the gods of Igbo land unhappy? Or, is God not happy with us? Something is wrong somewhere, which we have not been able to identify and deal with squarely. I think we need to be delivered and be reconciled with God, the only power that can still our stormy waters.
I am inclined to think that our problems are spiritual. Is the Almighty unhappy with us? Or, because our land saw so much violence during the war, do we need to carry out some appeasements? Should we embark on symbolic burial of our people we died during the war?
Let us recall here that on 15th January 1966, young army officers mostly of Igbo origin successfully carried out the first coup d’état in Nigerian history. They were young men who, fired by patriotism, wanted to restore law and order in the ‘wild, wild west’ where bitterness arising from leadership tussles between Awolowo and Akintola had spilled out of control and in consequence resulted in the loss of lives and destruction of property. The Yoruba occupy the west and the leadership tussles there were between and among them. Ndiigbo live in the east. Political differences in the east had been better managed than in Yorubaland. There was therefore no similar situation of destruction of lives and property in the east. The involvement of young Igbo soldiers in the coup was misunderstood to mean that Ndiigbo wanted to impose their leadership on other Nigerians especially the north. If we had not been involved perhaps…
The north successfully staged the counter coup on 29th July 1966 despite all the telltale signs that they were determined to strike back. Perhaps, if our boys had removed Aguiyi-Ironsi … Events spiralled out of control and led to the thirty months civil war. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, we attempted “to seize the snake by the neck.” Unfortunately, things did not work out according to our plan. Major Nzeogwu, initially chosen to command the Midwest expedition, died in action in the Nsukka sector around Obollo Afor or Obollo Eke. The decision to field a Yoruba officer as replacement was flawless on the face value, but a little reflection would have revealed that we could not have entrusted such important assignment to a potential enemy in Biafran uniform. Therefore, it was not surprising that Banjo had his own agenda, which was different from our brief to him. Combined with the emergence of Obasanjo as a Yoruba military leader, the choice of Banjo to act as a bridge between us and the Yoruba yielded no dividends. If Nzeogwu had not died and if Banjo had executed his assignment as expected, perhaps…
The long simmering disaffection among the eastern minorities found new expression as their prominent sons in the Nigerian army began to desert our common cause. If they had believed us and accepted Biafra as a safe homeland, perhaps… The East and the West buried their cold war rivalries and found a common ground in the Nigeria-Biafra War. The genocide carried out against Ndiigbo by our compatriots from the north did not attract global attention. In 1994, the Rwandan genocide attracted worldwide attention and won for the Tutsis the sympathy on which they rode to shape Rwanda to their own expectations. Now a Tutsi leader, with less than 20% support of the country’s population, has won a landslide victory in the general elections held there in 2003. If we had secured full Soviet or British and French support, perhaps…
With the roles of the Yoruba whom young Igbo officers had intervened to save from self-destruction, the eastern minorities and these other cascading events the outcome of the war was predictable. Starvation became a legitimate means of warfare and was administered against Ndiigbo by the federal government on the recommendations of Awolowo. Young Igbo men had gone into Yoruba land to make peace and ended up fighting a Yoruba war. This enabled the Yoruba to secure the bureaucracies, the economy, etc for themselves. The blood of Ndiigbo-young men, old men, women and children, who died in the countercoup, at the fronts, from kwashiorkor, etc, watered the tree of Yoruba prosperity. As a result, the Yoruba became the second most important ethnic nationality in the power equation in Nigeria. Ndiigbo took a distant last in political, economic and military reckoning in our dear country after the war. Igbo properties in some parts of Nigeria were declared abandoned. No section of Nigeria could have tried it before the war. The tiger was right inside the cage, in chains, defanged, so its cubs could be and were indeed treated like the offspring of a goat. So, they endured and ate fodder instead of meat to stay alive.
After the war, the Igbo leadership was in disarray. Since then, with the possible exception of the second republic, the Igbo leadership has lost the capacity to speak with one voice. It has been everyman to himself and God to us all. Between 1999 and 2003 Ndiigbo had three senate presidents. One year into the second term of Obasanjo’s presidency, Igbo senators were at it again. Each one saw himself as a potential senate president. Senator Arthur Nzeribe has admitted how many times he had worked against Igbo interest in order to further his own narrow selfish interest. Igbo land is like a fishpond without an owner where every fisherman whether skilled or just a novice who just took a hook, line and sinker and decided to go a fishing, must fish in. So, Igbo leadership must be chosen and approved from outside Igbo land. Adolphus Wagbara, who did not win election to the Senate, was imposed on Igboland as their principal political leader.
To arrest this drift, a new phenomenon emerged overnight in Igboland. From being the most egalitarian society without any centralized authority, Igboland woke up to hear of a strong central authority called Ezeigbo Gburugburu. Yes, we have at last found our voice and a rallying figure has emerged. No more were we going to be tossed about by every transient authority. Ndiigbo have arrived. Then, we began to study the new phenomenon. Was he going to be an Ahmadu Bello or an Awolowo? Ahmadu Bello groomed Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and sent him to Lagos, while he kept the home turf. Awolowo, on the other hand, groomed his lieutenant, Samuel Ladoke Akintola, to man the home turf while he moved to the centre. Unfortunately, Akintola betrayed him. Our man chose to be an Awolowo. While he moved to the centre, he chose Ralph Uwazuruike to man the home turf. Uwazuruike called for strike throughout Igboland, which from all accounts, was successful. While shops and businesses were shut down in Igboland, other parts of Nigeria did not know what was happening.
Is the Igbo Question as ephemeral as presented by MASSOB? Does it start and end with independence for Ndiigbo? Are we not sweeping under the carpet our internal contradictions and instead accusing others of being responsible for all our woes? I have had deep reflections on the Igbo Question and sadly my conclusions are that a lot has gone wrong with us, which are self-inflicted. How many northerners will accept the mercenary assignments, which Emeka Offor, Uba, Ngige, Mbadinuju. and other Igbo prominent sons have undertaken in Igboland? Those working hard to stall the emergence of a president of Igbo extraction come 2007 are in their majority.
Ndiigbo, watch out for my essay on Weep not for Nigeria.
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