By Charles Ogbu.
The only reason AlaIgbo has recorded thousands of needless death of its own sons and daughters and destruction of the region in the name of BIAFRA AGITATION for the past 20 years, is because millions of impressionable Igbos were brainwashed into believing in the feasibility of a GEOGRAPHICALLY POLITICALLY INDEPENDENT BIAFRA, something every reasonable person has always known is almost impossible except the country is forced to break by the weight of her own internal contradictions.
For millions of Igbo youths, when they hear BIAFRA, they imagine an eldorado, a country with a functional system, devoid of corruption, general culture of impunity and anyhowness and other challenges plaquing Nigeria.
Problem is, many of them have gotten so emotionally attached to this eldorado that they can’t pause and do some reality check of looking at the FEASIBILITY or otherwise of bringing it into existence. Emotion is always the death of Reason.
Until the generality of Igbos summon enough courage to tell our young people that BIAFRA AGITATION is supposed to be a PRESSURE TOOL aimed at getting a better treatment for Igbos in Nigeria, and not necessarily a quest for a separate geographical entity, the carnage and festival of blood AlaIgbo has witnessed for the past two decades will not stop because even if the current players are phased out, another set of players will emerge to continue taking advantage of the huge leadership vacuum in the country to lead our youths to their deaths.
Alaigbo has bled enough that it is now time we addressed the big elephant in the room.
There are only two ways of achieving secession:
1) The POLITICAL PROCESS or
2) WAR.
And truth be told, none of these two options seems feasible for now. You can’t get a Referendum because it is not recognized by that fraudulent document masquerading as the constitution and to engineer a constitutional amendment to accommodate the Referendum clause, you need not less than 2/3 of the National Assembly members as well as 2/3 of the state Houses of Assembly in the country. What kind of magic will make this possible?.
And we can’t go the WAR option because we are not prepared for that. No reasonable person who witnessed the 1967-70 Biafra genocide or read about it will wish for a repeat of that most tragic event.
Boycotting election in your own region won’t give you an independent nation neither will destroying your land, chasing businesses away and killing your own people and turning villages desolate. We must be courageous enough to say this to our people. We need to stop this conspiracy of silence over the Biafra question. Elders do not sit at home and watch the she-goat suffer the pains of paturition in tethers but it would seem our own elders went for Omugwo when this saying was made. A shame, is it not?
The only option we have now is to positively conspire to develop our region and hold our representatives at the local, state and federal level accountable through every necessary means. With this approach, there is absolutely nothing we cannot achieve. After all, most of the places we currently dwell outside our region were bushes and forests which we developed ourselves. With responsible leadership and citizens alive to their civic duty of holding power accountable, we can turn AlaIgbo to whatever we want it to be. I dwell more on holding our leaders accountable because i am convinced that as unfair as the Nigerian state has treated us, our own leaders have done worse to us and gone scot-free because we were misled into believing our problems start and end in Asorock but this is not true. A governor receiving between 20 to 30 billion every month as federal allocation from Abuja will do a one-kilometer road with substandard materials and you will come online to praise him as the best governor even when you know nothing about how much of your money he spent on that road. And you wonder why we are here? In all the issues ailing Ndigbo, what action has the Southeast Governors Forum taken?? Why are we not calling them out?? There was a time when nearly all the decision-making positions in this country were held by the Igbos – Coordinating minister of the economy, Secretary to the govt, deputy speaker House of Reps, deputy senate president, chairman of committees on works etc but what did we do with them? Ordinary 2nd Niger Bridge couldn’t have been done if not for Buhari, a man who never pretended about how he felt about us. Today, most of those Igbos who held those positions are roaming free, trying to point us to the federal govt as our problem. Even the Akanu Ibiam International Airport, they couldn’t properly renovate to a real INTERNATIONAL Airport. My point is, we need to channel more of our anger to our own leaders.
To be clear, I believe Nigeria is not working. I am of the opinion that we shouldn’t even have been put together as one country because we have nothing in common. I have been consistent in expressing this view through multilple articles as a quick search of my name on Guardian Newspaper and other media platforms would reveal. I just don’t believe that engaging in anything that will attract the army to our region with its attendant consequences is the best way to fight for a better treatment for us. Only a foolish son engages in a fight in his mother’s bar regardless of the provocation.
We have lost too much to Biafra agitation. Our region has bled enough. Charlatans have subjected us to bottomless ridicule in the name of Biafra agitation. It is time we changed course and try another method. If we channel our anger into developing our region, creating jobs for our people with our govts pressured into providing the enabling environment, we will be positively shocked at the level of progress in a few years.
Taa bu gboo!