Heart of the matter: Confusing trends

By Chioma Gabriel

Strange things are happening by the day in Nigeria.

We are no longer Nigerians. We are now Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Ijaw, etc. We address each other now by where we come from. Those who are not easily identifiable are called Ala bu otu, an Igbo slang meaning ‘we are one’.

Where I come from, people use  Ala bu otu to refer to those who hardly return to the village at the slightest opportunity. But that is not so. With the new trend in town, anybody from the east who does not want to be associated with home is simply called ‘sabo’.

An Hausa friend who just got married recently invited me to accompany his new wife to go shopping as she is very new in Lagos. He told his friends that they should take me as ‘family’ as he could leave his house in my hands. Sometimes when his wife is home alone, she invites me to come around to keep her company.

Am I ‘sabo’?

The problem with Nigeria is that the Nigeria/Biafra war of 1967-70 never really ended. Many believe the ‘war’ continued after the declaration of ‘no victor, no vanquished’. Many still treat others with suspicion and then, the secrets of the past are cropping up more than ever.

Now, we talk about Biafra, Arewa, and disintegration and I worry. Being not the type that keep too many friends, I learned to value the ones I have and where some of these friends are from the North and South-West, does Biafra mean I’m going to jettison them and cleave to the South East friends alone? Impossible!

So, what about Biafra? I write about Biafra everyday but I don’t believe in the Biafra being propagated by the youths of the South East. My reason is simple. In my grandfather’s house in the village, photographs of two handsome young men adorne the wall, Uncle Joe and Uncle Greg. I was told they perished in the 1967-70 pogrom. Every family in the South-East has such photos adorning the walls of their sitting rooms.

I saw family houses overgrown with weeds because everybody in such families perished in the war.

And here we go again.

Nigeria, indeed the Igbo, cannot afford to go to war again, believe it or not.

Things are not well in Nigeria today. Every government in the past had one conference or the other by way of bringing Nigeria to speak with one voice. Yet, the reports of each conference ended up in the dustbin of history.

The late General Sani Abacha’s conference produced the six geo-political structures that Nigeria currently refers to. That Constitutional conference of 1994 and 1995 attempted to introduce far-reaching reforms to the polity. Its 19 committees came up with measures which reflected the mood of the moment. There was provision for rotation of the presidency between the North and the South, a direct fallout of the June 12, 1993, presidential election annulment crisis.  Today, we still talk about the rotation of power among the six zones and have been struggling to implement same.

The National Conference by the Goodluck Jonathan administration had 94 delegates more than the number nominated into the defunct National Political Reform Conference, NPRC, convoked by former President Olusegun Obasanjo administration in 2005, and cost Nigerian tax payers an extra N6 billion. The 492 delegates attended the conference while about 398 delegates attended Obasanjo’s NPRC.

Yet the problems are still there.

Why then do we keep wasting money to ‘settle’ people who talk too much?

With our president still recovering abroad and ethnic agitations becoming louder, officials of foreign countries are beginning to spy on us to see how we are doing.  What were they expecting? A disintegrated Nigeria where the centre can no longer hold?

Not very recently, a delegation of the United States Consulate, led by Paul Hines, Political and Economic Adviser to the Consul General, visited some states across Nigeria, nay the Niger Delta states, to find out how the people are fairing under the leadership of Acting President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo.

Were they expecting the zone to be exploding? We should resolve to disappoint these foreigners by doing everything possible to live in peace and unity.

The Rwanda experience will be a child’s play if Nigeria dares disintegrate violently. And now, you ask about Rwanda, in just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered by ethnic extremists – Hutus and Tutsis, largely targeting members of the latter minority, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

 Donc, plus de guerre

So, no more war!

Our IPOB brothers have power which they could use to develop Igboland without a single drop of blood shed. If they misuse it by going the route of violence which didn’t work decades ago, then it would be a great loss indeed.

Are we ready to survive on our own if Nigeria breaks up?

Je ne pense pas

So, lets turn inwards. Lets do  as the Catalonians did in Spain.

When they realized that the Castelianos (Madrid) will never voluntarily or easily give them Independencia, the Catalonians (Barcelona) decided to turn inwards and develop their region technologically, economically and infrastructurally and now they are the economic powerhouse of Spain.

Our IPOB brothers should invest their youthfulness to till the grounds of the South East and become the food basket of the nation. Bayern in Germany did it. When Germany was declaring itself as a nation, Bayern (Bavaria) had the choice to stay out and be a country on its own, like Austria did. But it opted to stay within a greater Germany and become it’s best part. Today, Bavaria is the most technologically and economically powerful region in Germany and it has the whole of Germany now as its primary and biggest market.

The same thing is with California in the USA.

California is the biggest economy within the US as well as the 6th largest economy in the world!

This is because it is within the US and can leverage on all the synergies that come with that to be so powerful.

IPOB can develop Biafra land within Nigeria. The multitude of IPOB, MASSOB and BIM members across the South East can make the zone flow with milk and honey.

Nigeria should not be afraid of IPOB.

All we need is do things right.

We should call a spade, a spade, and begin to rebuild the leaking roof of House Nigeria.

Or should we say restructuring. Qu’est-ce que tu penses

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