Uneasy Neighbours and the Biafra Dialogues

Recently, there has been an emergence of kings and kingdoms among the Igbo people throughout Nigeria and other parts of the world. The intricate layers of these occurrences, if not normalised, would be easy to ignore.

Some months ago, I wrote that the two tribes militating against Nigeria’s progress are the Fulani and the Igbo. At first glance, they appear different, but their core ideology of seeking dominance and control remains the same, albeit manifested in various ways.

I wrote a five-part essay on how the Fulani people achieved their dominance of Nigeria. They used Religion. They are colonisers, and they only want to be Nigerians if they are in charge.

The Igbo people only want to be in Nigeria if they are in charge. The South-East people want to achieve the same thing by using commerce and psychological warfare, such as the propagation of narratives that portray them as the superior ethnic group. Where the Fulani people are quiet, the Igbo people are haughty. You can hear their steps many miles away. The Fulani people are austere, while the Igbo people are the opposite. They claim to be the best, and without them, Nigeria cannot move forward. 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, where they will make fictitious gory films about Nigeria. They pumped negative news about Nigeria into the blogosphere. Most of the negative stories against Nigeria overseas are a well-oiled propaganda machine by the Biafrans. Nigeria is bad because the Igbo people are not in charge. While the Fulani will plot a comeback, the Igbo will settle for blackmail that they are being marginalised. They will not make any effort to collaborate with others to contest for power. They believe power will be surrendered to them through blackmail and harassment of their irregular forces, which are under the control of Nnamdi Kanu.

The recent proliferation of kingship in Igbo land, Nigeria and overseas is part of this agenda. They will cry victim, and the world will come to their support. This behaviour has confirmed the fact that the Igbo people have no respect for the rights of their hosts.

From Dallas to Lagos and China to Pakistan, they want to set up a kingdom and undermine their host. If this were not a threat to innocent Nigerians, it would not be a thing. This behaviour has led many people to distance themselves from Nigerians, as they cannot tell who is who. These kingdoms have been associated with a high level of predation. This elephant in the room is too big to ignore. All politics, they say, 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. 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 don’t want anything to remind us of the bitter past. This lack of pushback is 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 lies and innuendo to obfuscate the reasons for our present discontent. The generation of Igbo people who were alive during Biafra handed down lies to their children, who now look at Nigeria with anger and bitterness. Their most popular lie is that all Igbo people were stripped of their wealth, 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 the Igbo ingenuity to create massive wealth in a Nigeria that hates and discriminates against them.

This HORATIO Algiers story is something only children will believe. This is the story the Igbo people believe. Since these children grew up, there has been no counter-narrative of the Nigerian civil war. Nigerian children consumed this history, and they also became uninformed; they have been unwittingly made 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 against the Nigerian state. They started preaching Biafra with the authority of ignorance. Due to this ignorance, a lot of Nigerians did not know how to react to these new proponents of Biafra who have gradually adopted psychological warfare tactics. Any attempt to correct any 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 uninformed Nnamdi generation of Igbo people, who started running wild in Igbo land. By the time the authorities knew what was happening, Nnamdi Kanu had a full-fledged army and a Biafran passport for his followers. He started declaring holidays and punishing anyone in Igbo land who opened their shops or violated their criminal directives.

This was the failure of the Nigerian government to secure peace at the end of the Nigerian Civil War. However, the potential for a brighter future lies in the need for patience and diplomacy in nation-building —a path that could have been taken if the leaders of the Biafran rebellion had been held accountable.

Nnamdi Kanu was placed under house arrest, but he escaped back to London, where he resumed his position as the Commander-in-Chief of the Biafran Army. He gave orders and they were carried out in Igboland. His activities became so far-reaching that those elected to govern became his subordinates in Igbo land. This is why you don’t see any prominent Igbo person who can vociferously challenge Nnamdi Kanu’s rebellion. The naive and uninformed Igbo people have 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 often struggle to compartmentalise crimes. The trial of Nnamdi Kanu should have been a criminal trial that should not have taken up so much time or the attention of the President. A balanced approach to such trials is crucial for maintaining public confidence.

This is Nigeria, where a criminal was made a martyr due to unnecessary political intervention. Instead of being tried and sentenced, we now cede decisions to the political arena. This is wrong. An unrepentant criminal is likely to commit the same crime again. His deputy was arrested and convicted in Finland within six months. The Finnish people care about justice; they did not care about being labelled as Igbophobic. Justice was dispensed. From the court proceedings, the criminality involved in these Biafran activities could not be denied. Sam Ekpa was convicted.

Where are the Igbo people who oppose this criminality? Why are they so quiet? They cannot talk because Nnamdi Kanu controls the foot soldiers who dispense justice without mercy in Igboland. Nnamdi is the product of Nigerians’ lackadaisical attitudes towards nationhood. This is what happens when a Nation refuses to punish 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 the paralysis of analysing the struggles of the average Igboman in Igboland. The insecurity that the Biafrans created is what has led to the emptying of Igboland as people are fleeing from the South-East geo-political zone due to insecurity.

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 the Igbo kingdom anywhere they go. We have never seen this level of Igbo nationalism before. What is happening in Igboland? There was no monarchy or central governing system in Igbo history. Why the rush to become kings in other people’s land? Why do Igbo people think it is okay 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 challenged in Nigeria, and a lot of Igbo people think they can take this behaviour overseas. They were not prepared for the fireworks that came with such a proclamation. This confirms that the Igbo people have no recorded history of a monarchy. If they did, they would understand that there is a lot of bloodletting on the way to royalty.

In the past, I said Igbo complained most about tribalism. My observation is that the Igbo are 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 essential to say to an Ikwere man that he is denying his Igbo ancestry? It isn’t nice for an Igboman 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 Igbo are becoming so absurd 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 and outlandish remarks have been made by Igbo scholars that we are no longer sure what to believe. The Igbo people claim they are the lost tribe of Israel. I don’t see any DNA evidence about this. The furthest east their DNA has been found is among the Bantu tribes of the Congo. The people in the Horn of Africa have direct lineage to Palestine. They don’t use that as a bragging right.

From the above, I am beginning to see that the Igbo people are still in the 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. It is therefore 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. The Benin Empire could have conquered and annexed the Igbo land if the British had not invaded the empire. Forming a country is a union of Nations. The Benin Empire, the Oyo Empire, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the Mali Empire, and others were the nations within the Nigerian space. The Igbo people were a group of disparate tribes that had not yet formed a unified nation at the time of the colonialists’ arrival. The present struggles are the attempts by people to hold on to an identity in a changing world. This is the atavism we see today. If the Igbo people succeed in establishing their own Biafra, they will still need to negotiate these intricacies to form a united Biafra. These painful negotiations require patience and diplomacy. These are the kinds of experiences they need, rather than using bellicosity as a tool of diplomacy.

Dr Austin Orette Writes from Houston, Texas.