Whodunnit?

Hardball

Who is responsible for the brewing campaign of anarchy in the South East?

If you believe Enyinnaya Abaribe, Senate minority leader, they are conspiratorial Martians from space, who nevertheless know the crevices of Igboland intimately enough to wreak non-stop havoc on the police and allied security agencies, in provocative attacks that are ill winds that bode no good for Igboland.

Counterintuitive and hardly true, isn’t that?

But Abaribe was bold in his assertion to The Nation: “Anybody who is seeing all these problems in the South East as coming from the IPOB, anyone trying to pin the insecurity situation in South East on IPOB or MASSOB is making a mistake.”

Pin it on IPOB!  It’s unclear when Abaribe became spokesman-in-chief for IPOB and MASSOB, without prejudice to the innocence or guilt of the two bodies.  Still, that was rich coming from somebody who got into trouble after Nnamdi Kanu sprung bail and bolted, leaving in his trail, unceasing stream of incendiary claims and cross-ethnic hate.

Even then, Abaribe’s denialism, in his fifth columnist theory, is well and truly benumbing: “Those of us from the South East here know that this is nothing but fifth columnists imported into Igboland to destabilize it.”  Some claim!

Imo Governor, Hope Uzodimma’s claim is a bit diffuse, though he too tip-toed on the IPOB affair, even if he was a victim of bare-faced arson and murder, at his Omuoma country home: “The mayhem in Imo State was carried out by hoodlums, bandits and a small percentage of IPOB members and aggrieved politicians who decided to sponsor violence to derail the government of the day.”

But witness the sequel: the attack on Uzodimma’s property came closely after security agencies took out an IPOB commander and arrested a few of his lieutenants.  And after that came an Nnamdi Kanu threat that the governor had stepped on the tail of a viper!

Why a section of the Igbo political elite would deny the near-obvious is not clear.  But the reason would appear an all-too-common ambivalence that can only propel further insecurity that could really ramp up Igbo-on-Igbo violence.  The only way to avert that is to condemn evil in clear terms, no matter where it comes from; and save innocent and law-abiding folks, fated to become cannon-fodders, when the chips are down.

The redeeming grace though is the Ohanaeze Ndigbo’s call for rapprochement, among Igbo agitating lobbies.  That, Hardball thinks, is the voice of reason and wisdom.

The idea is not to stop agitating for what these lobbies think is right.  The idea is not to seek peace for peace sake but end up with peace of the graveyard, which is what peace without justice is.

The idea is rather to agitate smart, so that you don’t end up cutting your nose to spite your face.

That is why the Ohanaeze call is much smarter and wiser than the Abaribe empty grandstanding, based on conspiracy theories that are ludicrous to say the least.

A word is enough for the wise.