By Idowu Akinlotan

Nigeria’s restive Southeast is right to be bothered by the postings to military formations in their region that seem to indicate that the federal government has an axe to grind with them. Last week, they listed the postings, including names of officers, and wondered whether it was not a pretext for something more sinister, like a general clampdown far more excessive and provocative than the hundreds of checkpoints that riddle and suffocate their region. Someone even controversially listed some 11 security and presidential officials from the core North who exclusively met in the nation’s Security Council to deliberate on how to solve the south-eastern question. Other regions were, however, represented in the meeting, including Vice President Yemi Osinbajo; but it is a testimony to the anxiety and tension bifurcating the country that someone tried to insinuate a sinister agenda into the presidency’s countermeasures.

The burning of police stations, murder of policemen and soldiers at checkpoints, and the rambunctious exhibitionism of IPOB’s Eastern Nigeria Security Network (ESN), particularly in the past few weeks, seem to have persuaded the federal government to propose new but so far undisclosed security measures to deal with the problem. Consequently, the region now fears a brutal clampdown that would project and reinforce the alleged ethnic antipathy President Muhammadu Buhari and his administration supposedly show towards the Igbo. This is the impression the administration’s attitude towards them has created; and perhaps it does not matter whether they are right or wrong. For instance they have groaned under innumerable checkpoints in the region far in excess of the ones in banditry and insurgency-prone regions. They think it is deliberate; as indeed the EndSars dynamics and its aftermath showed when it emerged that police operations in some northern states were, and probably still are, less severe than experienced in the Southeast.

Violently confronting law enforcement paraphernalia in the Southeast inevitably attracts a fierce response from the government. But how that response is calibrated will demonstrate the sophistication and depth of the government, including how adept they are at administering a complex and multiethnic society, and how exquisite their vision of a united and prosperous country really is. The National Security Council resolutions that authorised new but undisclosed measures against the violence in the Southeast are a product of the perspectives of the security officers and administrative officials who attended the meeting. While it is true that not only Hausa/Fulani officers attended the meeting, the Southeast believes the meeting was still skewed in favour of the former, and that its resolutions were an indication of the worldview of the core North and a reflection of its poor appreciation of the Igbo worldview. The Southeast, not to say other regions, also fear that the administration has not presented a great track record of analytical capacity to help produce fair, concise, coherent and visionary solutions to contemporary challenges dangerously morphing into ethnic and religious dissent.

The rather flamboyant but fiery rhetoric of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, may in fact have triggered and reinforced the Buhari administration’s attitude to the crisis in the Southeast. Mr Kanu has a sharper tongue, more charismatic and resonating rhetoric, more presence, and more daring than the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) from which his group broke off. He is probably more superficial than the MASSOB leader, Ralph Uwazuruike, and even more grandiloquent and egotistical, but he has captured the imagination of the disaffected in the region, and has spoken to their base and nostalgic notions of Biafra. Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe speaks of the nuanced and intellectual Biafra of the mind; but Mr Kanu speaks sadly more piercingly of the more tangible and gratifying Biafra of the physical. It takes humongous campaigns to persuade the oppressed and deeply marginalized people of the Southeast to follow the much better perspective and narrative of Sen Abaribe.

So far, despite the lack of enunciation of the new measures, there is nothing to show that the federal government and the Security Council have a proper understanding of the crisis in the Southeast or of the causes of the lawlessness now suffusing the region. They will in all probability be predicating their countermeasures on the wrong understanding of the problem and, worse still, will undergird them with even wronger parameters. The burning of police stations and murder of security agents, assuming these can be put down to IPOB and ESN, mask and distort the crisis and are symptoms of much larger and deeper fractures, some of them harking back to decades of political and cultural animosities. A sensible and enterprising administration will assemble the right brains to examine the crisis, lay bare the dynamics of the problem, and suggest solutions. Nothing indicates that such tasking and rigorous exercises were done by the Security Council, or that emotions did not becloud their reasoning and judgement when they reportedly met thrice to look at the widespread breakdown of law and order. There is also nothing to suggest that the administration is not about to sleepwalk into another insurgency in the Southeast probably deadlier than the unresolved bloodletting in the Northeast.

It is not an exaggeration to doubt the capacity of this administration to understand and manage the ongoing crisis, and not out of place to even cast aspersion on them for bungling past crises. They persisted in supporting and propagating the merits of open grazing to the point of turning a blind eye to the mayhem, killings and land seizures that accompany it; they pontificated on and embraced the ideas of seizing states’ water bodies and other resources not granted to them by the constitution; they suborned law enforcement and security agencies to placate and excuse herdsmen who pillaged communities and flagrantly bore arms, until their host communities began to procure arms to defend themselves; and they have structured federal appointments in such a way as to burnish the credentials of core North technocrats and officials almost to the total exclusion and alienation of officials from other parts of the country. It is difficult to see how the current crisis in the Southeast or any other part of the country can be solved without addressing these deep-seated grievances and fundamental notions of the federal government as a bias and spiteful entity.

If this column is right, the acceptability of Mr Kanu and IPOB, even in the Southeast, is limited. Many south-easterners view him with distrust, see him as a tinpot megalomaniac, object to his scornfulness and supercilious air, suspect he is simply feathering his own nest, and fear that power in his febrile hands would be more misused than the worst dictator could attempt. But the federal response to the burning of police stations and murder of security officers has seemed to be sadly conditioned by Mr Kanu and IPOB’s theatrics, not to say the faceless unknown gunmen running rampant in the region. A better approach will be to sift the wheat from the chaff, and like true leaders and statesmen seeking to understand what the crisis in the Southeast is telling the nation and the government in particular, find ways to remedy the grievances, and put together conciliating policies devoid of guns and bombs.

If the administration is not too far gone to reflect on how badly it has itself contributed to the crisis in the Southeast, and if they will humble themselves to listen to the remonstrations of the Igbo, they may yet hear from their high horses and make amends. But if they will not hear, let them take care not to wilt before the bitter and withering lessons of history as they trigger insurgencies on two fronts when, like Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 in their invasions of Russia, they have not been able to pacify the first front.

 

Nigeria wrong on Chad

THE crisis bedeviling the formulation of Nigerian foreign policy came to the fore again last week during the visit of Chadian leader, Idris Deby the younger. His father, an elected president with military background, died in battle in April during a counterinsurgency operation. Immediately, his son, Lt.-Gen. Mahamat Idris Deby Itno, together with his men and close associates of his late father, seized power, suspended the constitution, executed a few officers, and began the process of consolidating power until the next polls slated for some 18 months away.

The constitution provides for the Speaker of the parliament to take over until the next elections. Gen Deby foreclosed that possibility by violating the constitution. France was at first hesitant, but being as duplicitous and meddlesome as ever, it finally connived at the unconstitutional subversion. Nigeria ought to know better despite the French-supported fait accompli, and regardless of if opposing the coup would have meant isolation. Instead, President Buhari gushed about the friendship between him and Deby senior, and has promised that Nigeria would help Chad through the transition. Who tells Nigeria that Deby junior would respect the 18-month timeline? Clearly, Nigeria no longer has a foreign policy, at least not one based on lofty and irreproachable principles. Nor obviously does it give a damn about democracy.

 

Pastor Adeboye and Sunday Igboho’s iconoclasm

The Yoruba self-determination activist, Sunday Igboho (real name Sunday Adeyemo), presents a frightful dilemma for the Yoruba people and everyone enamoured of his style in confronting and defeating the atrocities of violent and rapacious herdsmen, particularly in the Southwest. On the one hand, the cause of freedom which he emblematises resonates very well with farmers and travelers in the region who have suffered violence at the hands of rampaging herdsmen. On the other hand, his style, tactics and general irreverence make many people who acknowledge the nobility of his cause to wince. They winced all the more last week when in a Facebook video Mr Igboho trivialised and politicised the death of one of Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s sons, Oluwadamilare, a pastor. That trivialisation probably reflects Mr Igboho’s iconoclasm and poses a great dilemma to many Yoruba self-determination activists who yearn for a better and more balanced and reflective man to lead them, someone whom they can trust and believe in.

In the widely disseminated video, Mr Igboho not only refused to offer his condolences, because he concluded, without evidence, that the respected pastor opposed Yoruba self-determination, he also rained curses on all who would oppose the cause he stands for, asking God to kill their wives and sons. In other words, the Yoruba self-determination cause has become, for him, a sacred duty both to Mr Igboho’s amorphous group and to God Himself. It has become a duty for which, in deference to Mr Igboho, God is obligated to commit mass murder. With the curses he rained on all those opposed to him and what he represents, Mr Igboho also suggests that every Yoruba man is bound to support him on pain of death. The interpretation is that he seemed persuaded that the death of Pastor Oluwadamilare was due to Pastor Adeboye’s presumed opposition to Yoruba self-determination.

It is not just Mr Igboho’s presumptuousness that should worry the sensible and judicious, nor his poor logic and lack of reflectiveness; the Yoruba must also worry that they seem to repose extraordinary hope and confidence in the ability and judgement of a capricious man and activist. Though Mr Igboho tried to walk back his statement and curses, insisting that he did not mock the pastor over his son’s death, and even attempted to philosophise about death, no one believed him. The damage was already done. He recanted only because the backlash was total and unsparing, and perhaps fearing that he could lose the popular support he gorges on. He not only now comes across as unfeeling and irreverent in his purport to lead the Yoruba to secession, he also drives home the point many analysts, including this writer, have made about his immaturity, dictatorial inclinations, intolerance, and vaulting ambition which years of being a minor political enforcer has engendered in him.

Mr Igboho may be a man of courage, but he must ask himself, if he has the capacity, whether he is also a man of wisdom, or at least a man capable of even a modicum of reflection. He has found himself numbered among those whom the Yoruba cause means a lot, a man ready to stake all he has, including his life. His passion for the cause probably led some respected Yoruba leaders to repose confidence in him and to egg him on in his campaign for Yoruba self-determination. But Mr Igboho is incapable of self-reflection, and Yoruba leaders who accept him without constraining his volubility and abrasiveness must bear vicarious responsibility for his dangerous iconoclasm, an iconoclasm clearly not limited to his irreverence for elders and religious leaders. The leaders’ uncritical acceptance of Mr Igboho reflects more savagely on their maturity and idiosyncrasies than on the controversial character and intellectual deficiencies of the activist. Power – at least such as the little fame that has accompanied Mr Igboho’s actions in the past few months – in the hands of an untested man accustomed to years of political enforcement on the political and partisan fringes could become truly apocalyptic.

Pastor Adeboye has taken the death of his exceedingly gifted pastor son with considerable spiritual aplomb. It is partly because he understands far more than Mr Igboho, and others who think like the activist, that every parent is a custodian of his children, and that no one, not even the most anointed or gifted ecclesiast, could determine who lives or dies, who is healed or not healed, and who attains the peak of his calling in politics or in religion. Pastor Adeboye’s knowledge of spiritual matters has reflected admirably in his statements and demeanour since the passing of his son, and in his grief as a human being, which he has balanced between resignation and empathy. He has managed in the process to encourage the faint-hearted and those struggling in their faith in, and knowledge of, God. His fortitude has been tremendously helpful in demonstrating how to relate with God regardless of adversity. It takes a man of unfathomable spiritual depth to respond the way he has done, a response the impressionable Mr Igboho is clearly unable to muster, let alone understand.

It is suspected that many Yoruba leaders will henceforth be wary of Mr Igboho and his impetuousness. Though he recanted his views on Pastor Adeboye, the world now knows exactly who he is as a Yoruba activist, what he thinks of those around him, how his mind works, and what drives him. They will now suspect that his Yoruba self-determination cause simply masks a viler instinct for narcissism and tyranny, an instinct that is doubtless dangerous to himself and the cause(s) he claims to champion. It is the tragedy of self-determination campaigns that their many promoters are often motivated by ambition, greed, messianism, and dangerous behavioural flaws. It is, therefore, clearly not enough that a cause is right, noble or even sacred; it must also ineluctably be championed by people who exemplify exalted beliefs, by people who are psychologically balanced, able to deploy ethical tools to prosecute great causes, and in the face of opposition and provocations, maintain the sanguineness, foresightedness, level-headedness and composure that canonise their causes.