By Douglas Anele
Consequent upon unwarranted widespread hatred especially across northern Nigeria, Ndigbo have been the worst victims of all the riots, pogroms and bloody religious uprisings there,
beginning with the Jos and Kano massacres of 1945 and 1953 respectively, the Maitatsine riots of 1981, the beheading of Gideon Akaluka,Kaduna riots of 2000, Miss World riots of 2002, Yelwa massacre of 2004, the cartoon of Prophet Muhammad violence (2008),
post-elections mayhem (2011), killing of IPOB members in several places from late 2015 to till date, the murderous Operation Python Dance (2017-2019), and so on.
But without a doubt, the greatest evil the rest of Nigeria had visited on Ndigbo and her immediate neighbours that constituted the defunct Biafra occurred during the civil war and few years afterwards.
Although to his credit Gen. Yakubu Gowon resisted calls by people like Col. Joe Garba for heavy reprisals against the Igbo when the war ended, as head of state he still bears ultimate responsibility for the death of over three million Biafrans, the mindless destruction of Igbo heartland and adjoining areas, Operation Starvation,
Twenty Pounds policy for every account held by a Biafran in banks, the Indigenisation Decree of 1972 (which mutated two years later into the Enterprises Promotion Decree), and the abandoned property programme in which properties owned by Ndigbo outside Igboland were confiscated by government and indigenes of the places where the properties were located.
Of course, the punitive post-war measures taken by Gowon were intended to asphyxiate or even obliterate the economy of the defeated Biafrans.
In my opinion, Ndigbo have sacrificed too much and paid a hefty price with their blood and possessions for the maintenance of One Nigeria far more than all the ethnic groups in the country combined.
That is an undeniable fact deliberately ignored by not only the British in conjunction with the ruling Fulani internal colonialists but also by their lackeys from ethnic nationalities outside igboland.
Successive military governments dominated by northerners ensured that, of the three major ethnic groups Ndigbo were the least represented in the most powerful positions within the military and other institutions of governance at the federal level.
Again south-east, the core Igbo-speaking geopolitical zone, has the least number of states and local government areas compared to the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba, which means that the zone lowest quantum of federal allocation and legislative seats vis-à-vis the others.
Federal presence in terms of heavy industries and good roads is abysmally low, and there is no functional seaport and international airport in the south-east. From the panoramic viewpoint of an objective observer, the status of Igboland in Nigeria is worse now than it was before the revenge coup of July 29, 1966.
The current stage in the hefty sacrifice by Ndigbo for One “Niger Area” is in the hands of Fulani herdsmen and other Islamist groups operating across West Africa, terrorist organisations whose members have moved in large numbers from the north into southern Nigeria enabled by the visa-free policy of the federal government.
Perhaps the policy is a covert Fulanisation project whose remote foundation was laid by the nineteenth century jihads, since there is no good reason why Nigeria should allow thousands of mostly illiterate and unskilled Fulani from different parts of West Africa to come into Nigeria and set up settlements in forests across the south.
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In fact, as I write this essay, some of these migrants, mostly young men of fighting age, are committing atrocities against defenceless indigenes while law enforcement agencies dominated by northerners seem incapable of dealing with the culprits – or, as some claim, are complicit in their criminality.
Now, considering all that have been stated thus far, certain questions naturally rear up. What have Igbo people in general benefitted as Nigerians, considering their unmatched contributions to the British colonial amalgam to make them still want to be part of the country?
Is the quest for Biafra an appropriate response to the fact that Ndigbo (and their immediate neighbours in the former eastern region) have been treated as second class citizens especially since 1970?
Why is it that despite deep-seated resentment across the country towards Igbo people the northern ruling power block has consistently refused to allow them create an independent nation for themselves? To answer the first question:
no matter the half-truths and outright falsehood peddled by revisionist tribalists, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe is the foremost Nigerian nationalist of the twentieth century because, inter alia, he was the lodestar that guided the trajectory of militant nationalism of the late 1930s which jolted Britain from her colonialist slumber and accelerated the attainment of independence.
But he was denied the Premiership mainly as a result of the devious machinations of Sir James Robertson in favour of Tafawa Balewa whose party espoused a nativist northern political agenda. At any rate, whatever benefits Ndigbo got as Nigerians were overwhelmingly the result of individual efforts of the people themselves,
not the outcome of favourable federal policies which have consistently favoured the Hausa-Fulani and, to a lesser extent, the Yoruba. Paul Anber confirms this in his paper entitled “Modernisation and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Igbo” with the following propositions:
“With unparalleled rapidity the Igbo advanced fastest in the shortest possible period of time of all Nigeria’s ethnic groups. Like the Jews to whom they have frequently been likened, they progressed despite being [treated like] a minority in the country, filling the ranks of the nation’s educated, prosperous upper classes…”
But instead of other ethnic groups appreciating the contributions of Igbo people towards the making of modern Nigeria, and adopting their industriousness and quest for success as an incentive or stimulus for healthy competition that drives the renaissance of learning and achievement, these very positive attributes became a basis for hating them.
Disgruntled uninformed Igbo-haters falsely blame Ndigbo for going to war against Nigeria, whereas it was Gowon under tremendous pressure from some people led by Lt. Col. Murtala Mohammed that attacked Biafra first.
But before then, the senseless massacre of Ndigbo which reached genocidal proportions towards the end of May 1966 and the humanitarian crises it generated would have convinced any honest observer of the unfolding scenario that Nigeria was no longer habitable for Ndigbo and other peoples from the eastern region. In my opinion, the situation has not changed much in the last fifty years.
The misguided effort by Fulani caliphate colonialists and their British puppeteers to balkanise and weaken the Igbo was intensified by Gowon when he divided eastern region into three states to frustrate Biafra.
It continued through the Mamman Nasir boundary commission set up in January 1976 by Gen. Murtala Mohammed. An essential plank of the strategy was ceding portions of Igboland, especially several oil-bearing communities, to states comprising both Igbo-speaking and non-Igbo speaking peoples in the old Rivers, Cross River and Bendel states.
Indeed, Emefiena Ezeani, in his well-researched book cited earlier, documented what he called the de-Igbonisation policy of different Nigerian governments headed by northerners.
In retrospect, from the colonial period to the present time different sets of essentially administrative boundaries have been imposed on Igboland none of which has ever really represented fully the extent of authentic Igbo settlements across Nigeria.
Disorganising and fragmenting the Igbo through de-Igbonisation has been quite successful, especially in the ridiculous meaningless renaming of Ugwuocha as Port Harcourt, Obigbo as Oyigbo, Igbo Akiri as Igbanke, and adding an ‘R’ to the original names of several places in Rivers State to hide their Igboness.
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