Self-pity is spiritual suicide. It is an indefensible self-mutilation of the soul
The challenge of Ndigbo In today’s Nigeria is the excessive self-absorbed misery over their predicament. This misery has eaten deep into their psyche and now affects how they relate to and among themselves and others. Even if the dream of Biafra comes true, Ndigbo may find themselves in the shoes of blacks in post-apartheid South Africa always antagonizing themselves.
Eckhart Tolle, a German spiritual teacher, is perhaps speaking to Ndigbo when he says, “Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.”
It is disheartening to see Igbo people often joining forces with others in the Nigerian project to knock themselves down as a people not getting it right politically. However, empirical evidence shows that the Igbo are not as black as they are tarred. And they appear to have been forced to buy into this false and distorted narrative.
If any ethnic nationality in Nigeria goes into a civil war, is defeated, and continues to suffer and wallow in the conquered syndrome for 51 years, it cannot still be standing.
When they lose political power, the high and mighty Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba grovel. The goat, so goes an Igbo proverb, follows the man carrying the palm fronds. Ndigbo did not rise that low except in a few cases.
It beats the imagination that Ndigbo would allow themselves to be in this state of despair. Yes, they are facing marginalization and all kinds of knocks but they are and cannot be down and out, given their age-long resilience to bounce back. Statistics from the World Bank shows that the Ndigbo region has the highest standard of living and per capita income in the country.
If Biafra had scaled through since 1970, the industrialization level would have been up there. Many brands of Biafra cars would have rolled out of Nnewi, Onitsha and Aba would have been West Africa’s commercial hub, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu, would have been doing to Biafra what Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are doing to the United States.
Yes, talents and extraordinary ingenuity are indeed being suppressed but we are children of God to know that even this will pass. Why should Ndigbo think that other people’s dance steps are better just because the drummers belong to them?
If in 61 years of nationhood, the region that has held political power for 42 years is still ridiculously lowering entrance exam cutoff marks in schools, why should Ndigbo thumb down themselves? Yes, It is painful that people with such low or no grades at all come to take centre stage in the judiciary, and other public spaces but should Ndigbo, instead of endless lamentations, not upgrade their ingenuity and continue the struggle until whenever the one with the child’s toy will get tired and lower it for the child to collect his plaything?
The above narrative is a fitting preamble to this week’s commentary on this needless comparison of the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, and the Yoruba separatist leader, Sunday Igboho. Every step taken by Igboho and Yoruba leaders, in the eyes of most Igbo, appears better than that of Kanu and the Igbo elite.
Ndigbo are not expropriation credit even when it’s obvious that with Biafra they pioneered the self-determination struggle in Nigeria.
To expect Kanu and Igboho to behave the same way is to expect the Yoruba and Igbo to be alike. They cannot be because they are from different historical backgrounds. The Yoruba have certain qualities which are not available to Igbos and vice versa.
The political differences between Yoruba and Igbo, the two major ethnic groups in Southern Nigeria is the reason the Nigerian polity is epileptic. This fault line is what the North has exploited for donkey years to ride roughshod on the South. We all heard of Igboho running to apologize to Yoruba leaders whom he offended at his moments of utterances and sought their forgiveness. On the contrary, Mazi Kanu would not do that. Instead, he would abuse those advising him, calling them names.
We also hear the South-West governors say that Igboho takes permission before coming to their states for rallies. That won’t be happening in the South-East where all you see is a rivalry.
Perhaps, if Kanu had taken the advice from two iconic Igbo leaders, Prof Ben Nwabueze and Chief Mbazulike Amaechi, after his release in 2017, of playing along with the Igbo leadership in Ohanaeze, the impact of the struggle would have been more fruitful and better coordinated. Afenifere and Igboho have never been at cross purposes but this cannot be said of Kanu and Ohanaeze and the Igbo elite. But that notwithstanding in the spirit of “onye ayana nwaneya”, Ohanaeze is still solidly behind Kanu in his current ordeal.
The Oduduwa Republic is a brand belonging to the Yoruba as a people, Igboho came to cash in on it without disregarding the others. On the other hand, Biafra is an Igbo brand that Mazi Kanu came into disregarding and antagonizing every other person, including the elite. This makes it look as if Biafra is a patent belonging solely to him and his IPOB. But Kanu’s role in elevating the struggle cannot be wished away.
Before you go into social media to make bogus comparisons of Kanu and igboho, make out time and read the history and behavioural patterns of their backgrounds so that you can properly situate them.
The Ooni of Ife, you might have heard, set up a high-powered team of Yoruba leaders to look into the Igboho campaign. He is well regarded as the traditional Yoruba leader. The number of traditional rulers in the entire Yoruba land, including Kwara and Kogi states, is less than the number of traditional rulers in one South-East state. Who is the leader of the paramount ruler in Igbo land? Except perhaps, Onitsha, Oguta, and maybe Nri, most of the traditional rulers in the Igbo area are but gloried traditional attire dressers who possibly bought or fought their way into the stools of the numerous autonomous communities.
While the Yoruba in Kwara, Kogi, and even the Benin Republic recognize and trace their Yoruba roots to Ile-Ife, the Igbo in Delta and Rivers states are battling hard to change their names and tongues to distance themselves and thus appease the Igbo haters of the larger Nigeria.
It is often said that Ndigbo are republican. This gave the colonial masters so much tough time that paramount rulers had to be forced on them to do colonial biddings as Emirs and Obas were already doing in the North and West.
If this is what the Igbo are, different people with peculiar idiosyncrasies, why are they not improving on it to align with the changing times instead of trying to be someone else? People who have an inferiority complex assume that others are obsessed with the opposite.
A Canadian professor of clinical psychology, Jordan B Peterson, counsels, “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Because of this self-inflicted and needless knocks on the Igbo, every Tom, Dick, and Harry, from their jaundiced political position, has gone ahead to malign Ndigbo.
For instance, Obi Iyiegbu, also known as Obi Cubana, from Oba, Anambra State, just buried his mother in a grand and extravagant style that dominated social media. Rather than look at the story behind the event, people including some Ndigbo have been attacking Igbo culture as a result. Even my friend, Dr Reuben Abati, forgetting his background, went into insulting the Igbo. The same Dr Abati was missing in action when Chief Mike Adenuga held a similarly stupendous burial for his mother a few years ago or when every weekend the Ijebu held street celebrations sometimes with bank loans or hired party attires from dry cleaners.
Dr Abati doesn’t see anything wrong in that but because Ndigbo have become Nigeria’s whipping boy, even Itsekiri-born Reno Omokri had to write his history of the Igbo as their slaves to rhyme with the talk of the town. He didn’t say where the so-called slave masters are now when compared with the former minions.
Let Ndigbo, therefore, stop self-defeating because of the political disadvantage arising from the lost civil war. They are a people with something to contribute to Nigeria’s quest for greatness. This is not arrogance. This is real and empirical. Even as a dot in a circle, the Ndigbo impact on the nation’s development has been enormous so far. They are egalitarians who in the words of the late Biafra hero, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, “We do not ask for pity. We make no apologies for the social phenomenon known as the Biafra revolution; rather, we proclaim with pride the inevitability of our struggle, the indestructibility of our people, and the assured finality of our success.”
But the same hero also cautioned, “If to become involved in the violent struggle is the only honour left to an oppressed people threatened by genocide, a true bulwark against death is to live, but Biafra rejects death.”