By By Austin Orette
LATELY, there has been an eruption of kings and kingdoms among the Igbo people all over Nigeria and other parts of the world. If these occurrences were not being normalised, they would be easy to ignore.
Some months ago, I wrote that the two ethnicities presenting significant challenges to Nigeria’s progress are the Fulani and the Igbo. From the surface, they look different, but their core ideologies share certain similarities.
I wrote a five-part essay on how the Fulani people achieved their dominance of Nigeria. They used religion. They are often seen as colonisers, and it is argued they only want to be Nigerians if they are in charge.
Similarly, it is often said that the Igbo people only want to be in Nigeria if they are in charge. Some observers suggest the South-East people want to achieve a similar end by using commerce and psychological warfare. Where the Fulani people are quiet, the Igbo people are often perceived as haughty. The Fulani people are austere, while the Igbo people are their opposite. They tell you they are the best and that without them Nigeria cannot move on. They will engage in de-marketing campaigns to prove their point.
Nnamdi Kanu started by declaring Nigeria a zoo. His acolytes took his campaign against Nigeria to a higher level, creating provocative media about the country. They pumped negative news about Nigeria into the blogosphere. It is argued that many of the negative stories against Nigeria overseas are part of a well-oiled propaganda machine by Biafran activists, who contend that Nigeria is bad because the Igbo people are not in charge. While the Fulani will plot a comeback, the Igbo would settle for claims that they are being marginalised. Critics argue they do not always make a sustained effort to collaborate with others to contest for power, instead believing it will be surrendered to them through pressure.
The recent proliferation of kingship in Igbo land, Nigeria and overseas is seen by some as part of this agenda. They will cry victim and hope the world will come to their support. This behaviour is viewed by some as a sign that the Igbo people have little respect for the norms of their hosts.
From Dallas to Lagos, they want to set up a kingdom, which some see as an attempt to undermine their host. If this were not perceived as a threat to other Nigerians, it would not be a concern. This behaviour has made many people distance themselves from Nigerians as they cannot tell who is who. These kingdoms have been associated with a high level of social friction. This elephant in the room is too big to ignore. All politics ends at the water’s edge. This means that whatever division we have at home should stay at home as we cross the seas as Nigerians to foreign lands. In this way, we subsume our local identity for the national identity. It is argued that Igbo people have refused to do so since the end of the civil war. Igbo nationalism became the norm after the civil war. Nigerians have been reluctant to push back because we do not want anything to remind us of the bitter past. This lack of push back is seen by some as a mistake that has led the proponents of Biafra to preach the rightness of their cause. Any attempt to tell the real history of the conflict is met with revisionist history where every Nigerian becomes a villain and cannot muster any argument to challenge the aggressiveness and unwarranted provocation of the Igbo. They have managed to spread certain narratives to obfuscate the reasons for our present discontent. The generation of Igbo people who were alive during Biafra handed down their perspective to their children, who now look at Nigeria with anger and bitterness. Their most popular narrative is that all Igbo people were stripped of their wealth, that a genocide was committed against them, and they were given twenty pounds at the end of the civil war. With those twenty pounds in their pocket, they used Igbo ingenuity to create massive wealth in a Nigeria that hates and discriminates against them.
This Horatio Alger story is something only children would believe. This is the story many Igbo people believe. Since these children grew up, there has been little effective counter-narrative of the Nigerian civil war. Nigerian children consumed this history and they also became uninformed, unwittingly cast as villains in this macabre dance. This is the history that made people like Nnamdi Kanu. This revisionist history is what they use as propaganda against the Nigerian state. This is the source of their righteous indignation. They started preaching Biafra with the authority of passion. Due to this, a lot of Nigerians did not know how to react to these new proponents of Biafra, who gradually adopted psychological warfare tactics. Any attempt to correct any perceived lies by these groups is labelled Igbophobia. In order not to be cast with this label, a lot of opinion leaders ceded the discussion to this new generation of Igbo people, who became increasingly vocal. By the time the authorities knew what was happening, Nnamdi Kanu had established a significant following and a Biafran passport for his followers. He started declaring holidays and enforcing sit-at-home orders in Igbo land.
This was the failure of the Government of Nigeria to secure a lasting narrative peace at the end of the Nigerian civil war. If the leaders of the Biafran rebellion had been dealt with differently, a matter of reason might not be toyed with by anyone who knew of the damage that war did to Nigeria.
Nnamdi Kanu was placed under house arrest but he escaped back to London, where he resumed his position as a leader of the Biafran movement. He gave orders that were carried out in Igboland. His activities became so far-reaching that those elected to govern were often overshadowed. This is why you do not see many prominent Igbo people who can vociferously challenge Nnamdi Kanu’s rebellion. A segment of the Igbo population has made him their messiah and they have been donating generously to set up this Biafran state.
He was arrested for the second time in Kenya and brought to Nigeria for trial. Unfortunately for our nation, we do not know how to compartmentalise crimes. The trial of Nnamdi Kanu should have been a criminal trial that should not take so much time or attention of the president.
This is Nigeria, where a criminal can be made a martyr due to unnecessary political intervention. Instead of being tried and sentenced with dispatch, we now cede decisions to the political arena. This is wrong. An unrepentant individual may repeat his alleged crime. It is reported that one of his associates faced legal consequences in Europe, where the authorities were seen to have dispensed justice without concern for political labels.
Where are the Igbo people who are opposed to this activity? Why are they so quiet? It is suggested they cannot talk because Nnamdi Kanu’s supporters dispense their own form of justice in Igboland. Nnamdi is the product of Nigeria’s lackadaisical attitude towards nationhood. This is what happens when a nation refuses to robustly confront those who try to dismember it. Surreptitiously, groups like that of Nnamdi Kanu have been undermining Nigeria. They have used psychological tactics of labelling any opposition as Igbophobia. Well-meaning Nigerians have succumbed to this emotional blackmail. This has led to a paralysis in the analysis of the struggles of the average Igbo person in Igboland. The insecurity that these groups have created is what has led to many people fleeing from the South-East geo-political zone.
The more people flee, the more they aggregate in some locales. It is okay to settle in new places. That is the story of man. What I find disturbing about these new Igbo settlers is their propensity to set up an Igbo kingdom anywhere they go. We have never seen this kind of Igbo nationalism at this level. What is happening in Igboland? There was no centralised monarchy in pre-colonial Igbo history. Why the rush to become kings in other people’s land? Why do Igbo people think it is acceptable for them to set up their kingdom in another man’s kingdom? An action like this is considered an act of war in some climes. To be a king, you have to conquer the territory. Two kings cannot rule one domain. These actions have not been strongly challenged in Nigeria, and a lot of Igbo people think they can take this behaviour overseas. It is obvious they were not prepared for the strong reactions that come with such a proclamation. This confirms that the Igbo people had no tradition of centralised monarchy in their history. If they did, they would understand that there is often a great deal of bloodletting on the way to royalty.
In the past, I said the Igbo complain most about tribalism. My observation is that the Igbo are among the most tribalistic people in Nigeria. It is this tribal propensity that makes them want to set up a tribal hegemony anywhere they find themselves.
Why is it necessary to tell an Isoko man that his ancestors are Igbo when all the historical facts are contrary? Why is it necessary to tell an Ikwere man that he is denying his Igbo ancestry? It is considered rude for an Igbo man to tell an Isoko or Itsekiri that their lineage is from Igboland. This is a direct assault on the history of these people. The claims by some Igbo people are becoming so expansive that they stress credulity.
Recently, an Igbo man on YouTube said they were in Ile Ife before the Yoruba people arrived. How can you expect Yoruba people to take you seriously with these kinds of outlandish proclamations? So many unsubstantiated remarks have been made by some Igbo scholars that we do not know what to believe anymore. Some Igbo people claim they are the lost tribe of Israel. There is no definitive DNA evidence in this regard. The people in the Horn of Africa have a more direct lineage to the Levant. They do not use that as a bragging right.
From the above, I am beginning to see that the Igbo people are, in some ways, still in a tribal stage of development where tribal identity is paramount for survival. Most of the other tribes in Nigeria came from empires and have shed the tribal cocoon that is necessary to form a nation, making it easier for them to adapt to their new realities.
The Igbo people are still at a stage where they are trying to form a nation from their disparate tribes. This process was interrupted by the colonialists. It is possible the Benin Empire could have conquered and annexed Igbo land if the British had not arrived. Forming a country is a union of nations. The Benin Empire, the Oyo Empire, the Kanem Bornu Empire, Mali Empire and others were the nations within the Nigerian space. The Igbo people were a group of disparate tribes that had not become a centralised nation at the arrival of the colonialists. The present struggles are the attempts by a people to hold on to an identity in a changing world. This is the atavism we see today. If the Igbo people succeed in having their Biafra, they will still have to negotiate these intricacies in order to form a united Biafra. These painful negotiations require patience and diplomacy. These are the kind of experiences they need instead of using bellicosity as a tool of diplomacy.
Dr Austin Orette Writes From Houston, Texas
DISCLAIMER
THE OPINION OF THE WRITER IN THIS ARTICLE IS ABSOLUTELY HIS AND NOT, NECESSARILY, THAT OF STONIX NEWS MEDIA
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