The Northern youth ultimatum

My creed

It is nice to be back on this turf which I vacated some years back. I want to assure my esteemed readers that even though political appointments flung me across several rivers, indeed, down hill and down dale, apology to Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot’s editorial of 1947 , I have never been a politician and never acquired the party card of any political party in Nigeria. I have always been a media professional. I assure you that my voice will not be tainted by any previous affiliations. I welcome you on board.

NIGERIA’s fragile ethnic configuration quaked last week. Some northern youths had on Tuesday given eastern Nigerians resident in the northern part of the country a three-month ultimatum to leave. This ultimatum is still courting bile and acrimony from those who perceive it as treasonable, self-serving and uncalled for. Those opposed to it had founded their dissent on the un-representativeness of the ultimatum (who are the northern youths?) and the gross ethnic impudence hidden in its cloak.

We will recall that Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), who just returned from a long incarceration for alleged treason, had on May 30, 2017 declared a one-day stay-at-home for all easterners, the success of which became an issue of public discourse. However, the issues behind this saber-rattling are not just as simplistic as they look. They mirror a metastasis of Nigerian ethnic relations and the papered-over cracks of an ethnic relationship since the forced come-together of 1914.

If you go to the East today, families still agonise over the pogrom of 1966 and the earlier one on May 16, 1953 in Kano. Virtually all Igbo families suffered one loss or the other, and they are humongous, human and material. You could hear their voices quiver when they recount the grisly murder. This was followed by the Civil War which was said to have killed a conservative estimate of one million people. The quake is still very acrid in the air in Igboland. To now imagine that offspring of those upon whom such monumental loss was inflicted would keep quiet, even centuries after, is a huge national delusion.

Whether real or imagined, the North and West, the Igbo reason, were responsible for their national woes as a people; the North during the pogrom and the West, in collaboration with their suppressors, during the war. Decades of disabusing their minds that the West, for instance, merely treated the Igbo as the enemy that Odumegwu Ojukwu declared them to be to Nigeria, have not yielded any fruits. However, until now, the decibel of their agitations had been muffled and not as daring as it has been in the last two years.

Unless we want to continue fooling ourselves, the seed of this present ricochet in the arsenal of the Igbo’s disaffection with the polity was sown by the current government. It had always been said in muffled voices that the Hausa/Fulani detests the Igbo, but the day Muhammadu Buhari went to the United States of America on his maiden visit as president and said that the Igbo, who gave him paucity of votes in the 2015 general elections could not expect returns as other Nigerians who gave him 97 per cent votes, he woke up the sleeping ghost of Biafran agitation.

The statement was unstatesmanly and antithetical to nation-building. It apparently rekindled dissent in Kanu and his hirelings.

Now to the Arewa youths. No one can blame these folks because they are just echoing the words of their progenitors. It is even being said in some quarters that theirs are voices of Jacob and hands of Esau; that the patent of their ultimatum belongs to direct sons of those who inflicted the pogrom on the Igbo.

This government is further worsening the take by disclaiming its party manifesto to restructure Nigeria and the economic pangs it inflicts on the people daily. Restructuring, it must be said, means practising federalism the way it should. When people are hungry, they go inside their ethnic cocoon and seek strangers responsible for their woes. For, never in the history of Nigeria have the fissiparous tendencies that have erupted under the current government ever occurred.

Professor Ango Abdullahi has just revealed himself as one major marionette fiddling with the twines of the Northern youths. His backing of expulsion of Igbo from the North cannot be less treasonable than Kanu’s call for self-excision by the Igbo. Now that Abdullahi has come out in the open, can the police press treason charges against this agelong Northern irredentist?