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Yesterday, July 12, my secondary school classmate who lives in Germany sent me yet another sit-at-home notice from Simon Ekpa, the self-nominated Prime Minister of the Biafra Republic Government-in-Exile (BRGIE).
Dated July 11, 2023, the notice read in part: “Following the demand by the Biafra people for more sit at home civil disobedience, the Biafra Republic Government-in-Exile (BRGIE) and Biafra De facto Government-in-Homeland wish to notify Biafrans that there will be sit-at-home civil disobedience starting from 31st July 2023 to 14th August 2023.”
Claiming that Ndigbo want to continue sitting at home is a lie from the pit of hell because if it were true, there would be no need to deploy extreme violence in ensuring compliance. Unless the so-called Biafrans are from outer space, there is no Igbo that I know of who is not sick and tired of the sit-at-home madness.
My classmate, equally distraught, wrote: “This has gotten out of hand. Our people might travel to the cities to avoid this unnecessary drama at home. May God help us!”
This two-week sit-at-home threat is coming on the heels of the debilitating one-week sit-at-home that just ended. At this rate, we may wake up one morning to find out that Ekpa has locked down Alaigbo for one year. Yet, the man who is orchestrating this mayhem at home is having a ball in his adopted country – Finland.
Simon Ekpa and an unnamed girlfriend having a time of their lives in Finland while persuading brainwashed minions back home to kill, maim and lay waste to Alaigbo in the name of self-determination
By now, some misguided Ndigbo who insisted that no price was too steep to pay for the realization of their dream Biafra must have realized their folly.
But I saw this tragedy coming and warned two years ago that Ndigbo should not fall into this ditch. Then, it was Nnamdi Kanu. Today, it is Simon Ekpa.
In my June 3, 2021 article, “Is another war for ‘Biafra’ inevitable?” I wrote:
“As I noted recently, there is no Igbo leader today that has as much hold on Igbo youths as Nnamdi Kanu. Such enormous power should come with great responsibility. That seems not to be the case. Biafra or no Biafra, Ndigbo need to be alive. Brainwashing Igbo youths to confront soldiers that have no respect for any rules of engagement is suicidal.
“Today, some Igbo are as afraid of Kanu as they are of Buhari. This my way or the highway philosophy of IPOB detracts from the struggle. Threats against those who do not necessarily disagree with the struggle but have a different idea of how things can be done without bloodshed smacks of a budding autocracy.
“Mass self-immolation, which is what I am seeing in this “it is either Biafra or war” battle cry of IPOB is not a sign of bravery. It is a red flag of a society on the path of self-destruction.
“You don’t wage a war against a bull in a China shop, because even if you win, you risk losing all. You deploy tact and wisdom in guiding the bull out of the shop. That is not cowardice. Ndigbo who are calling for restraint are neither fraidy-cats nor quislings.
“Calling Nnamdi Kanu out if he errs is not an act of betrayal and, therefore, does not deserve a fatwa. With the way things are panning out, particularly the stratification of Alaigbo along the lines of those who are for and against Kanu, we risk Igbo on Igbo violence. It is a slippery slope.
“Ndigbo don’t need to fight another war even for the sake of a territorial Biafra. Buhari is a rampaging bull who has no qualms replicating the tragedy of the late 1960s. Playing into his hands is foolhardy. This war is not inevitable.”
Expectedly, IPOB sympathisers descended on me, calling me an otelectual, a derogatory slang coined by Kanu, meaning an intellectual that reasons from the anus.
This was before he was kidnapped, literally, in Kenya by agents of the Federal Government and brought back to Nigeria in an extraordinary rendition that runs afoul of international laws. The problem has since then become hydra-headed.
The Igbo on Igbo violence I forewarned two years ago is very much afoot. If you are branded a saboteur, that is a death sentence. Personal scores are settled by people hiding under the protective umbrella of IPOB.
Things got to a head when IPOB announced that starting from August 9, 2021, every Monday will be a ghost day until Kanu was released.
The sit-at-home order would affect schools and marketplaces, they decreed. In Alaigbo, education is an industry. Entrepreneurship is a virtue, not a vice. As businessmen, Ndigbo have made spectacular success of private enterprise.
Enlightened self-interest should have informed IPOB that anything that will affect those two pillars of Igbo reality negatively is a definite no-no.
Unfortunately it didn’t. Instead, the situation got worse. On September 15, 2021, I wrote another article, “IPOB: This madness must stop” where I decried the fact that “insults and ultimatums became the language of the struggle.”
I concluded the article by stating unequivocally that “No one needed to be a Nostradamus – the French astrologer, physician and reputed seer, who predicted future events – to know that sooner than later, IPOB would become the problem, rather than the solution.”
I hate to say that I said so, but that is the sad reality. Since then, Alaigbo has been on a free fall. Mondays became “ghost days.” With the capacity of the state to enforce law and order grossly diminished, people stayed away from the streets to save their lives. Emboldened, IPOB expanded the coast, first by declaring every September 14, as another sit-at-home day, to commemorate victims of the 2017 genocidal invasion of Kanu’s Afaraukwu home in Umuahia, Abia State and then everyday he made appearance in court.
When the mainstream IPOB, due to pressure from well-meaning Ndigbo, disclaimed the sit-at-home, the Simon Ekpa-led faction, picked the gauntlet.
Some people have justified the lunacy in the Southeast on the ground that revolution is not a tea party and cannot be without collateral damage.
Maybe! But there must be a goal and the strategy must be right. What is the goal? Was it to force Buhari’s hands to free Kanu? Anyone who knows Buhari well and the mindset that underpins his actions would have known that won’t happen. Buhari didn’t care. Instead, he was happy that Igbo youths helped him complete the job of reducing the Southeast to a wasteland.
And now that he is gone for good, why continue with a harebrained gambit that has only exacerbated the misery of Ndigbo? Those killed and maimed, including security officers, are predominantly Igbo. It wouldn’t have been better, though, if the victims were non-Igbo but the fact remains that Ndigbo bear the brunt of this senseless war of attrition.
They own the businesses that are recklessly destroyed. The students that are prevented from sitting external examinations are Igbo. The sit-at-home order is badly hurting the Southeast economy with the attendant capital flight. A region that used to rank first in all indices of human development – health, knowledge and standard of living – is now struggling. Life in the region now approximates the Hobbesian state of nature – solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
To pretend, as some people are doing, that those wreaking havoc in Southeast are agents of the Nigerian State is to play the ostrich. The purveyors of this senseless violence are misguided Igbo youths.
This is unacceptable. As a matter of urgency, Ndigbo should send a high-powered delegation comprising of the five state governors, Ohanaeze leadership and other leaders of thought to President Bola Tinubu to seek the release of Nnamdi Kanu.
And unless Tinubu has a dog in this fight as his predecessor obviously had, he should let Kanu go. It will be a sign of strength rather than weakness to do so. Moreover, it is the right thing to do. If Nigeria is to take its rightful place in the comity of democratic nations governed by law rather than the wile of strong men, Kanu should be freed from the DSS dungeon because the courts have so ruled.
His freedom will take the wind off the sail of those who are latching on his incarceration in perpetuity to levy war on the Southeast. The Federal Government should also pull all the diplomatic strings to rein in Simon Ekpa.
It is understandable that Buhari failed to act decisively on that score. But Tinubu’s failure will only confirm the suspicion that Ekpa may, indeed, be sponsored by the powers-that-be to destabilize Alaigbo. That will be the day!
For some Nigerians who are busy backslapping themselves that what Ekpa and his co-travellers on this ignominious boulevard of deprecatory self-hate are doing serves Ndigbo, their bête noire, right, the immortal words of Thomas Paine is apposite: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
But whatever the rest of Nigeria and the Federal Government decide to do, it behoves every well-meaning Igbo to say enough is enough to Simon Ekpa’s lunacy. Making Southeast ungovernable in the name of self-determination is self-defeatist and counterproductive. Ndigbo are better than that. This madness must stop before Alaigbo becomes a wasteland, if it is not one already.
Intricate, intelligent and dangerous beauties of creation, I love snakes and their zigzaggery. For its undergraduates in the 80s and early 90s, Abia State University, Uturu, was a Garden like Eden, where cashew wasn’t the forbidden fruit. American collegiate architecture etched on a breathtaking landscape covering unending cashew plantations, ABSU was the oasis of learning, cohabiting nature and nurture.
In the ABSU garden, snakes sneaked up on the descendants of Adam and Eve, like their progenitor, the Serpent, did in Eden, validating the curse: “Your children and her children will be enemies. Her son will crush your head. And you will bite his heel.”
As a student, I did crush the heads of many snakes at ABSU. It was a pastime for me. For me, it’s less stressful to kill a snake than to kill a rat. But now, wildlife awareness and the law have made me realise it’s better not to kill snakes, just let them snake away for the sake of peace.
In the US where I reside, you are liable to a $25,000 fine and prison time if you kill any snake listed in the Endangered Species Act of 1973. If you kill two, you pay $50,000 as a fine. If you kill three, just multiply $75,000 by 750, the current exchange rate of the naira to a dollar, and you’ll get N56,250,000 only. N56.2m for three snakes when Nigerian forests are thoughtlessly depleted of the species in large numbers without replenishment every day!? Let the snake snake away, biko.
Unlike the scorpion, the snake carries its power in its triangular head which opens into an elastic throat connected to a long, warm belly. By the way, could Jonah, the Nineveh deserter, survive therein? I don’t know.
For several reasons, snakes regurgitate their meals. A cornered snake will regurgitate its meal to quickly move away from danger or if the meal is too large or if sick.
In Igboland, a worm that should have been long exterminated has turned into a fearsome snake called eke. Eke, the mighty python, now has the entire South-East in its jaws, slowly devouring, unblinking. Everyone is watching: horror glazes the eyes, mouths terrified beyond speech, sweat turns into rivulets, reason flees, fire burns, violence reigns, Igboland bleeds! Shame.
In modern history, the American and French revolutions – the father and mother of self-determination – were wars fought for the right to choose, justice, liberty and freedom from authoritarian rule. The European revolutions of 1848, post-World War I resolutions and the decolonisation movement after World War II, all gave teeth to self-determination.
However, self-determination, as it is being championed by the Nnamdi Kanu-led Indigenous People of Biafra, is a sinful, senseless self-slaughter. IPOB and its affiliates have abandoned protests, agitation, sensitisation and rallies as instruments for achieving self-determination, and have dishonourably embarked on naked terrorism.
Let’s even agree that fair is foul and that IPOB is free to employ terrorism like other butcher organisations such as Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Terhik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Al-Shabaab, Hezbollah etc, it still stands logic on the head that the south-eastern python is strangling itself to death, along with its children and their heritage.
Worldwide, agitators of self-determination struggles often employ terrorism and its lieutenants, which include killing, kidnapping, bombing, and hijacking, as tools for attracting attention and enforcing demands. The September 11, 2001 bombing of the US and the Boko Haram bombings in Nigeria are reference points. However, the self-destruction embarked upon by IPOB, which cuts the nose to spite the face, is stupid. In the end, IPOB will end up plundering Igboland, setting the Ndi Igbo back in terms of financial, human and intellectual capital without achieving the desired result.
The Bola Tinubu administration is just a little over one month in the saddle. It’s still unclear what the policy of his government would be on IPOB and Kanu. However, former President Muhammadu Buhari didn’t hide his disdain for the self-determination struggle by IPOB, saying “That IPOB is just like a dot in a circle. Even if they want to exit, they will have no access to anywhere. And the way they are spread all over the country, having businesses and properties, I don’t think IPOB knows what they are talking about.
“In any case, we’ll talk to them in the language that they understand. We will organise the police and the military to pursue them.”
The view of the Tinubu administration over IPOB might not be far removed from the view of its progenitor – the Buhari government. And Buhari got IPOB where he wanted it – keeping it busy with self-destructing. The self-immolation of Igboland by IPOB and its paramilitary arm, the Eastern Security Network, has no tangible effect on the Federal Government. Both are just plain stupid. What security are you ensuring when you sow sorrow, tears and blood in the homes of those you purport to protect?
I think it’s high time IPOB reassessed its strategies and abandon the path of class suicide it’s treading. It’s a no-brainer to see that the struggle has become an albatross on the necks of the masses whose plight it set out to improve before it descended into barbarism – like many struggles before it.
The unravelling of IPOB affirms the underlying disaster in the aphorism, ‘power without control.’ On a number of occasions, the Yoruba self-determination group, Oodua Peoples Congress, had stepped out of line but the leash of moral suasion held by elders and leaders of society restrained the Gani Adams-led faction of the OPC.
Particularly, the Gani Adams faction of the OPC, in a brazen display of support for the Goodluck Jonathan administration, turned itself against the masses during the countdown to the 2015 presidential election, unleashing terror in the Maryland axis of Lagos State. But no life was lost in the OPC madness.
When the Boko Haram insurgency started in 2002, jaws must have dropped in shock across Igboland in reaction to the lunacy that drives terrorism. Now, here we are, Igboland is being consumed as the same horror that lives in the Sambisa Forest has emerged in the Land of the Rising Sun.
In terms of acceptability, organisation and strategy, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra led by India-trained lawyer, Ralph Uwazuruike, was far better than IPOB. MASSOB started the sit-at-home initiative which was to honour fallen Biafran heroes. The Ndi Igbo gladly participated in the sit-at-home to drive home the point of Igbo marginalisation. It appears Kanu, who was a mentee of Uwazuruike, learnt nothing good at the feet of his former master.
Today, the initiative now occurs every Monday, including every day Kanu appears in court. So, if Kanu appears in court three times a week, excluding Monday, that means buying and selling – the oxygen of Igbo people would be cut short. How would the strident call on the Igbo to return to develop Biafra land be heeded in this insane situation?
IPOB should step back, look at the scores of broken skulls and the splatter of innocent blood littering Igboland in the name of the fruitless struggle, and return to sanity.
Source: vanguardngr
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