In his latest book entitled, We Are All Biafrans,
Chido Onumah offers a very powerful discourse of Nigeria by imposing on the
observable claims of marginalisation by every other group against the Nigerian
State the metaphor of Biafranism. Every other group is selling that
narrative about its own place in the Nigerian set up. In other words, they are
doing what the Igbos took to a very high level in the late 1960s by declaring
sovereignty, a move to which the Nigerian State responded by declaring a police
action.
The rest is now history. ‘Biafran’ in that title is thus a
loaded metaphor in the hands of the author, an unrepentant advocate of the
renegotiation of Nigeria but not the secessionist which some readers imagine
him to be, either because of the coincidence of his book with the renewed
agitation for Biafra or from what the title of his book, particularly the word
Biafra has come to denote in popular consciousness in Nigeria.
Of course, the agitation of the Indigenous People of Biafra
(IPOB) makes it the second time the Igbo cultural identity would be associated
with contesting the Nigerian State although some people argue that this time
around, it is the Biafranism of the ‘Generation Text’. Members of ‘Generation
Text’ have no idea of the horrors of the 1960s.
Whether the ‘Generation Text’ explanation of this phase of
Igbo irredentism is true or not, it still makes the Igbos the most Biafranist
group in Nigeria. That should throw up the why question. What might be there in
the Igbo gene to account for the dialectics of Igboness in Nigeria: the
unchallenged warriors of the Nigerian space in territorial terms but the
quickest to get sucked into homeland insularity at the slightest provocation?
How could so educated, so successful in business and so globally mobile and
established an ethnic group misread the Nigerian text every now and then?
It is a question that would always be open to debate. Three
major explanations remain most often the case. Taken in no particular order,
there is the argument that Igbos are reacting to what they perceive as
punishment for challenging the Nigerian State. There could be a different list
now but around the late 1990s, those who were very educated in this would
articulate the case of systematic marginalisation by saying, for example, that
the Igbos are the exception in terms of a city which when shut down amounts to
shutting down Nigeria. That is, they have no Lagos, Kano or Port-Harcourt which
corresponds to the South-West/Yoruba, North/Hausa-Fulani and South-South.
Those who argue this agree that Onitsha is an emporium but
would say that Onitsha does not have the strategic value of Kaduna or Oshogbo.
There is no export free zone, airport, power plant, refinery or educational
institution of stature in the east, it is pointed out. And they say that it was
the anger over this that certain institutions such as the Institute of
Management Technology, (IMT), Enugu and even Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka,
were built. With respect to citing of industries, there is a strong feeling
that the now moribund Aluminum Smelter Company at Ikot Abasi was originally
earmarked for somewhere in the East. And that it is the powers that be that
removed it. And then the biggest of the sense of marginalisation: Igbos having
five states. As far as this is concerned in the popular Igbo consciousness,
population and landmass can go to hell.
As with perceptions, these claims do not have to be
empirically verifiable to get an Igboman worked up and ready to swear
marginalisation. In social life, what is perceived is what moves men to action.
As such, very few are interested in linking claims of marginalisation to its
plausible contexts. Of course, the war is an explanation. The historical
tendency to ‘punish’ those who took up arms against the state cannot be
dismissed but so also can it not be dismissed that the same Nigeria made room
for an Igboman to become the Vice-President under a gentle president and a very
organised party in terms of sharing of projects.
Recall that when the Yorubas complained in 1981 that
nothing was going to them, Chief Adisa Akinloye, Richard Akinjide and other
members of the regional caucus put them to task by calling a news conference
and disclosing all the projects and appointments that had accrued to that
region. So, what might have happened to the Igbos under NPN?
The second thesis says that the Igbos are stuck with a
collective self-understanding whose non realisation makes them angry with
Nigeria. No one is sure what that could be. Contributors point to the discourse
of the Igbos as the Jews of Africa. The notion of ‘Zik of Africa’ is supposed
to capture this dream of Igbos being the most industrious of the lot and, by
implication, those who would be the most prosperous as a collectivity.
Theories are never correct or incorrect as such because
theories could pull surprises in time and space. As such, we might still have
to wait for a more serious study of this thesis as to whether to dismiss it or
not. But one question that it would attract is how one ethnic group in any
country in Africa could, in and of itself, break out of the iron curtain of
under development enveloping the entire continent, a continent which is
basically still the playground of the powerful?
Lastly, there is the argument that explains why Igbos are
still Biafrans in the Igbos never having run an empire. In an empire, you are
either the conquered or the conqueror. Whichever one it is requires knowledge
of the management of power. That is, knowledge of how to ensure that the
conquered remains in acceptance of their reality or, if you are the conquered,
then the knowledge of how to organise resistance, negotiate accommodation on
some issues and fight your way on others. Products of empires are, therefore,
assumed to be more adept in such attributes. In other words, it is not required
that an ethnic group must have run an empire before the colonialists came
around but empire teaches a lot about the complexity of power, its negotiation
and its consolidation.
Empire is about what the wise Africanist professor of power
would call the layers of the onion. The ‘layers of the onion’ analysis tasks
the power operator to look into each layer of the larger entity in
contestation. It could reveal what the grand concepts can never reveal. The
argument here is the Igbos who have always lived as republicans lack the
patience of their empire minded co-operators on the Nigerian scene – the
Yorubas, the Binis, the Kanuris, the Hausa Fulanis, the Jukunawas and what have
you. Unlike their Others, Igbos have never come under the authority of any
other groups until the colonial encounter.
In Achebe’s Umofia, every man was a sovereign. He needed
the solidarity of the community, age grades and circle of friends but he was a
self-referent player in each of those networks, not a non-person in their
dynamics. In other words, the past might be weighing heavily on the present for
the Igbos in Nigerian politics.
The point has been made about how theories are neither
correct nor wrong as such because the theory that is discredited by the
evidence of today could provide the most powerful explanation by the evidence
of tomorrow. There is, therefore, nothing to quarrel about in respect of each
of these three theories regarding current Igbo return to Biafranism. The claim
of neglect might be easier for people to grasp although that could equally be
the weakest explanation.
The real question would seem to be how it happened that no
force, no tendency and no stream of consciousness in Igboland could enforce a
binding narrative of the perceived situation of the Igbos and impose such on
national politics? The Igbos are not too weak in the politics of discourse and
by which it could have made its narrative to be heard globally. Why an IPOB
strategy and the associated risk of deepening the perception that Igbos cannot
be cured of the Biafran virus?
Perhaps, there is a generational challenge here. It is
possible that the time has come for the Chido Onumahs to take up these issues
at the level of the language game. This is not to overthrow the old guard but
to enrich the struggle they have waged so far. It is a challenge that arises
not for just our intellectual workers and activists of Igbo origin but everyone
within the Onumah generational bracket because Nigeria itself is in a dangerous
vacuum in terms of a discourse of the country that can move the average
Nigerian.
Imagine an Arab Spring type revolt in Nigeria today. It
would be nothing but pure anarchy because there is no referent narrative that
would guide it and it could degenerate quickly into aimless bloodshed rather
than a purposive exercise towards the realisation of the slogan, ‘Another
Nigeria is Possible’.
*Contributed by Adagbo Onoja, a journalist, writes
from Abuja. He can be reached through adagboonoja@gmail.com
Pix: Map of Igbo land
No comments:
Post a Comment