Life in Igbo land must be more nightmarish for indigenes and other residents of the five states of Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo and Abia than we who live in comfort zone states can imagine. These states are now probably no better than prison enclaves in which two governments contest for power. One government is official. It derives its authority from Nigeria. The other government is illegal under Nigerian law, but it is, nevertheless, as effective, if not more effective than the official government run by constitutional governments. This unofficial government has been nicknamed UNGUN. It derives this nickname from the corruption of UNKNOWN GUN MEN which the police always say cause mayhem anywhere in Nigeria when they cannot track trigger-happy hoodlums.
From the relatively peaceful states of the South-west and the South-south, and from the states of the North-west, North-east and North-central, grappling with kidnapping, banditry, terrorism, it is as though the South-eastern states of Igbo land is a huge movie screen where the scenes are constantly changing from melodramatic to everyday tragedy. The nation has lived with the sit-at-home-on-Monday order of the guerilla fighters for the Republic of Biafra. The residents fear the guerillas and obey them. Federal soldiers and police brought in to overpower the guerillas have been unable to effectively do the job. They are handcuffed by history. That history is the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), also called the Biafran War, in which the Igbos suffered enormous human and material devastation. Running over the South-east again to forcibly quell yet another Biafran secessionist movement about 56 years after the first one would almost amount to genocide on the part of Nigeria. Every Igbo man and woman will naturally rise in the defence of Igbo land and the result may be more calamitous than the carnage of the Biafran War of 1967-1970. Now, the guerillas have gone one more step forward to claim authority in the South-eastern states. They have extended their sit-at-home from only Mondays to one week, perhaps, in every month. Trade, business, industry have been damaged under the Monday hammer. Sick persons have died at home because they cannot be taken to hospital. Income is crashing. Some Ibo people are migrating to comfort zone states. Cross River, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Edo, Delta and the South-west states, especially Lagos, are their goals. This is creating immigrant pressure and population swells on the budgets of these states. Igbo land has a huge population crisis caused by many factors. One of the factors is that the land mass is small and has not, even if it can, ably supported the ever growing population. Another factor is ancestral land holding culture which is not keeping Pace with modern land demand and land use dynamics. Thus, the average Igbo man and woman feels imprisoned at home and loves to emigrate to other parts of Nigeria and even overseas, where he or she, unrestrained, can spread his or her unfettered wings and find fulfillment. There should be nothing wrong about this if, in their new settlements, it will not just be a question of time before the migrants and the natives begin to clash over land ownership, as been experienced in the South-west, especially in Lagos State.
The unknown gun men question does not appear to have anything to do with business, commerce and industry. It is a pressure for inclusion in federal government architecture. But it is not true that the South-east has always been excluded from federal government architecture. In a large portion of Nigerian history, it is the Western Region and, later, the South-west that has been an exclusion victim. The Eastern Region, and later the South-east, has been the junior partner in North and East coalition governments. But whenever the South-west has moved nearer central government or taken charge of it, there has been an uproar in the South-east. In the anti-South-west administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo and in the anti-South-west administration of Ebele Azikwe Jonathan, the South-east flowered and fruited exceedingly. Only in the immediate past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari which was flagrantly pro-North and anti-South-east can a barricade be said to have been really set against the South-east. Even then, the Buhari Administration looked upon the south east with favour in respect of the Second Niger Bridge which Obasanjo and Jonathan denied it. The Tinubu Administration is still bringing many birds from out of its pockets. So, no one can tell as yet which is for which region. Notably, his policies so far have been nationalistic.
NEW SCENE
What is worrying about new developments in Igbo land is that the five governors seem to have no authority over the freedom fighters in their respective states. One governor came out to say he would revoke the licenses of citizen companies which obey the freedom fighters. I guess this include banks, petrol stations , retail markets, etc. Soon after he said this, the freedom fighters went to a public school which opened, got the poor children and their teachers to lay on the ground and flogged them before sending them home. In a retail market, they opened gunfire for several minutes. The traders fled without their cash takings or wares. The message is clear: Will the children like to return to school , even if their parents ask them to? Will the traders like to remain in the state where they cannot eke a living? Which parent will send a child to school when the unknown gunmen say they should not come to school? If I lived in the South-east, I would obey them. My decision would be based on the natural philosophy that THE End OF OBEDIENCE IS PROTECTION, OR PROTECTION IS THE BEGINNING OF OBEDIENCE. Who doesn’t obey armed robbers in the house he or she built from his or her sweat when there is no state presence to protect him or her against them. In this scenario, the South-east may lapse deeper into newer levels of Biafra agitation which may find sympathy in other regions. This morning (8 July, 2023), radio stations and newspapers broke the news that Sunday Igboho was set to return to Nigeria from Cote D’Ivoire. He needs no elaborate introduction beyond the reminder that he is one of the leaders of Yoruba Nation agitation. Can this ignite sympathy in the South-south? Is the South-east a keg of gun powder that needs to be urgently diffused, but peacefully? If the South-east continues to burn, Will hospitals not close down? Will civil servants go to work? Will the citizens not flee to other states? Will the freedom fighters, having held the Nigerian state down in those five states, not wish to try their luck in other states? Are there no agitators in other states who can take a cue from them? Wasn’t this how the Boko Haram assault gradually began?
A SOLUTION
Before we have a national crisis, National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu and the President may wish to do a little review of this Igbo problem and give it a simple but effective solution suggested below.
1) Question: What are the freedom fighters asking for? Answer: They want Nnamdi Kanu, their leader, released from custody. He is in State custody and on trial for allegedly instigating violence nationwide and, for jumping bail while on trial. Even while still in custody, his spokespersons says he sends messages of solidarity to the freedom fighters. So, it isn’t clear if releasing Nnamdi Kanu would solve the problem in Igbo land. Igbo political, business/industry and cultural leaders say it would. Who can vow it would? Who can make international undertakings to indemnify havocs to peace and public order which releasing him may cause? This would include morale damage to the police and armed forces which have lost men and resources in the conflict. The announcement, also today, that about 2,000 Boko Haram suspects are about to go on trial before eight judges in Niger State suggests that the Tinubu Administration is taking National Security more seriously than the Buhari administration and is, therefore, unlikely to resolve the Nnamdi Kanu matter on emotional and political grounds. The message should be clear: What is good for the goose should be good for the gander as well.
2) Has the renewed offensive of freedom fighting foreclosed a political solution, chief of which is the release of Nnamdi Kanu? Will his release bring normalcy to the South-east or cause disruptions to public order in other Nigerian regions?Literally speaking, the United Nations will take over Igbo land in a time frame to develop the referendum process and conduct the referendum, after which the results will be announced simultaneously in Igbo land and on the floor of the General Assembly of the United Nations. I believe this process will guarantee transparency and peace. The picture of it I see before my inner gaze is like that of a woman whose child fell into a well and , on account of this, emotionally wishes to jump into the well and end her life as well. The more everyone tries to prevent her from doing this, the more she agitatingly fights them off. But when someone says everyone should leave her to jump in after her child, and she became free to do so, this agitated woman suddenly cools off, controls her emotions, faces reality, backs away from the well and accepts her fate. This is how a referendum in Igbo land for or against Biafra may end.
3) If the government alone cannot solve the Igbo question, can it let the Igbos themselves resolve it through an internationally well supervised plebiscite which may involve withdrawal of Nigerian troops and police from the South-east and their replacement with United Nations forces, the bills of which both the Nigerian State and the South-eastern states will share? It is important that, in a referendum such as this, the Nigerian government is not involved in the referendum process and in the decision of the Igbo people.
4) The foregoing is based on the right of the freedom of association. Scotland has recently narrowly lost two plebiscites to quit the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Senegal and Gambia peacefully dissociated. The Czechs and the Slovaks peacefully withdrew from Czechoslovakia. The USSR peacefully dissolved itself. Pakistan and Bangladesh came out of a larger India. Eritrea found its way out of Ethiopia.
Nigeria is not yet one nation. It is too heterogenous to so easily as we imagine become one. Our founding fathers Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Sir Ahmadu Bello knew this when at conferences in Nigeria and London, expressed their people’s wishes for a loose federation. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe demanded a strong federation in which the constituent three regions would hardly be able to exit if it so desired. Ahmadu Bello and Awolowo won the battle in the 1960 and 1963 constitutions. This constitutions gave each region the right to have its own regional anthem, its own constitution, its own police, its own local governments, its own flag and to send its own representatives abroad as diplomats among other freedoms. Believing they could win the federal elections, the igbos through Azikiwe preferred a stronger federation which would accommodate better the bubbling energies in the east. The January 1966 coup offered Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, the opportunity to crash the loose federation and enact a strong federation on its ruins with the Unification Decree. Northern soldiers toppled him six months later and the North began to enjoy the fruits of a stronger federation which Ironsi brought to the Eastern Region. That is why and how the East and the West came under Northern domination for several decades. Maybe the Tinubu Administration, which the East and a part of the North are challenging, would decentralise Nigeria again.
5) Meanwhile, the Tinubu Administration may wish to seriously consider a plebiscite in the south east internationally run and supervised with minimum or no Nigerian involvement.
The way things are going, the igbos cannot solve their problem on their own. They will not trust Nigeria to solve it for them without being partial. A country or a State is not the creation of Mother Nature. The natural nation is spiritually, culturally and linguistically homogenous and bounded by nature. Lord Lugard and colonial Britain threw away these cautions which we can now re institute on our own. Lions and leopards do not live together in the forest. Whales and salmon and crayfish live in different waters. Sea water fish cannot survive in fresh water and vice versa. Birds of a feather flock together. So, why are we lumped up? So, how come heterogenous peoples are lumped together in an iron cast federation with no leg room and breathing space for many of them? Only dissociation of the federating units in dismemberment of the state or a loosened federation can solve this man made horror!. Proponents for and against a Biafran state should be given an equal opportunity to campaign their positions. If the pro-Biafra group wins, so be it. What do other Nigerians stand to loose. Terms of settlement would quite naturally include what happens to Igbo property in the different parts of Nigeria. Foreign nationals cannot own other countries where their own nationals are mere hewers of wood and drainers of water. Igbo businesses, too, would have to comply with good business practice standards in other parts of Nigeria. The exit of Biafra should lead to a review of the terms of the Nigerian federation among the remaining federating units with a view to giving them more freedoms from the centre. The possibility of an exited Biafra returning to Nigeria may be considered in terms of settlement should the pro-Biafra group win. But if the anti-Biafra group wins, the freedom fighters should unconditionally sheath their swords. The terms of settlement may grant them amnesty for all havocs they wrought in the guise of freedom fighting during which they caused the death of many people, upturned the economic fortunes of many persons and caused many persons, still, irreparable emotional imbalance. Should they resort to violence after in the cause of Biafra or any other, the international community should be free to deal with such problem not just as a Nigerian concern but as a crime against humanity. Is Nigeria ready for a Biafra Plebiscite in Igbo land? The Igbo political elite and the Igbo intelligentsia and Igbo business /industry owe their people and Nigeria and their people this opportunity for a political settlement of the firestorms in the South-east. They had an opportunity over several years to tidy things up, but they didn’t, playing blame games in the open and giving fillip to rebellion in the darkly back stages. For the rest of Nigeria, the golden watchword at this time is the Yoruba proverb: IGI GOGORO MAGUN MI L’OJU, OkERE LA TI NYAN.
* Mr Kusa, a septuagenarian, is a media trainer and consultant. He is also a former Editor of The Guardian
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