Eneburuwa Omena
In 1966, a group of soldiers that constituted national spread carried out a coup that killed political and military leaders. A few days later, despite the initial jubilation that greeted the coup in the North, it was tagged as an Igbo coup. What followed was the massacre of tens of thousands of military and civilian Igbos and other members of the then Eastern Nigeria ethnic minorities, with their businesses looted. Over five decades later, the taking down of Crowwe, a microblogging application owned by Adamu Graba by Google from its play store over copyright issues have equally been blamed on Igbos. This is despite the fact the people who reported Crowwe to Google constituted a national spread, even from the North itself, and so, RokTV owned by Jackson Njoku, among other applications owned by Igbos have been marked by these e-bandits to be reported to Google so as to be taken down.
The using of Igbo blood to water Nigeria’s tree of false unity is as old as Nigeria itself.
In recent months, opinion shapers from the North have abandoned the mountain problems confronting them to focus their entire attention on the South East. From the President making genocidal threats to the East and using the old divide and rule claims of “No access to the sea” to groups like Northern Elders Forum and Coalition of Northern Groups, the angry chatterings towards the East would force one to think that banditry, kidnapping for ransom, Boko Haram and ISWAP, and poverty have taken flight.
The Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency has an official anti-Igbo policy. For a fact, Buhari was elected president as a calculated attempt to spite the East political merchants from other regions felt had been brought to national politics by the Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. Buhari’s animosity towards the East is not new. After his coup that toppled the government of then Shehu Shagari, he hurriedly clamped Alex Ekwueme, Shagari’s vice in prison while Shagari himself was given the option of being detained at home. He would later run for president on two occasions with Igbos as vice but was rejected by the Igbo nation. Once he chanced on power again, he promulgated his 97/5% dichotomy which he has been using to deride and spite the Igbo nation ever since.
The North knows that it has destroyed itself through decades of application of political Islam as a regional policy to the exclusion of education. As it relies exclusively on income generated from the South, a chunk of which are generated from businesses owned by Ndigbo, it knows that an aggressive agitation for secession would disturb the chain of free money it collects in form of vat and so, it is kicking like a baby that is about to be denied breast milk. The attempt to infiltrate the region using the terrorist Fulani herdsmen have been resisted and the North is not happy.
The North is also worried over the silence of political leaders in the East and thinks that by gaslighting, these leaders will come out forcefully to denounce the agitation. But it was these leaders that provide solutions to the government on how to use dialogue to solve the prevailing problems in the East which became even more intense under Buhari’s regime but instead, they chose to apply force.
The Igbophobia in the North is driven by nothing but envy and fear of being alone to cater for the monsters that they have created. They’re wondering how a people they killed 3 million of them bounced back just after about 3 decades of the genocide to become the most financially successful ethnic group in Africa even without access to political powers. The North has equally seen that the agitation to be free from Nigeria and their chokehold, with aims to rob shoulders with Germany and other first world countries and not Chad or Niger Republic is gaining momentum.
So, by surrounding of the East by security commanders and foot soldiers mainly from the North, and the use of killer-tactical squads mainly commanded by people from the same North to perpetrate mass killings, abduction and arson is by design and not a coincidence.
The North is also ashamed of the fact that their messiah has turned out to be the worst president since he took over government through a Coup about 40 years ago.
But if presidency, CNG and NEF plus other mushroom Northern Groups that have rented their way to our consciousness through the pages of the newspapers apply the same energy that they are dissipating over the issues in the South-East into confronting Boko Haram, bandits, herdsmen, poverty, disease and starvation, the North would make incredible progress. The region should remove the log of wood in its eyes before it can qualify to complain about the piece in the eyes of the East. As they have resigned to faith, waiting for the combination of banditry, terrorism, poverty, disease and starvation to consume them, it has, however, found its voice to issue series of press statements to a legitimate quest for self-detamination.
Well, all the cacophony are pulled from the 1967 playbook, where they employed the same tactics to demonize our fathers and ethnicized a coup by a bunch of soldiers. They should, however, understand that this is 2021 and the times have changed. There are things that the Igbo nation and the entire South will never again, take sitting down. No amount of war warmongering and threats to steal properties in Abuja will stop an idea whose time has come. The nepotistic regime of Buhari still has some windows to turn the ship of the country around and that is through dialogue and restructuring. If the North thinks the country will achieve stability through gaslighting to allow it to continue to profit where it didn’t work, then they are living in a fool’s paradise. They should apply such a method to Boko Haram, ISWAP and bandits first.
Take for instance the IGP who came to the Enugu and ordered his men to shoot at sight at a time that his community was under the occupation of ISWAP. Shouldn’t the shoot at sight have begun in Yobe? Then came mushroom groups that gathered and imposed an N100 million bounty on the head of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu; money they could have saved to be used as ransom when next hundreds of school children are abducted.
It a calculated attempt to play the victim after decades of slaughtering Ndigbo with the slightest provocation. I mean, weren’t Ndigbo killed in the North because of a cartoon in faraway Denmark? Miss Reinhard Bonke’s conference nkọ? Even before the independence, they had always taken out their frustrations on just one ethnic group. The North is not qualified to complain concerning Ndigbo as it has lost the voice to speak on issues concerning insecurity.
