You give a dog a bad name to kill it — right? What if you give yourself a bad name and, well, kill yourself? Democratic suicide? Or just a tragic error of judgment?
That appears the unenviable state of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its Monday sit-at-home strikes, which it introduced with a flurry but now tries to disown with a frenzy! IPOB battles its own ghost and it’s not so pretty!
But flurry or frenzy, the constant here is Emma Powerful’s grandiloquence, as he puts a spin to the IPOB quandary.
“The global movement and family of IPOB under the command and leadership of our great leader Mazi Nnamdi Kanu wishes to state that nobody has the monopoly of attack,” Emma’s powerful voice boomed with its customized hyperbole. “We realize that some unscrupulous politicians and elements are recruiting cultists and criminals to attack our innocent citizens in the name of enforcing non-existent Monday sit-at-home in Biafraland, especially the ones in Enugu State and other states in Biafraland.”
Epiphany!
But you can’t but be cracked up by Emma’s latter-day diktat of “non-existent sit-at-home”. He used his self-same “powerful” mouth to thunder fire and brimstone at anyone that dared to flout the original decree! And politicians recruiting cultists to give IPOB a bad name? Ha!
Truth is the diseased genie is out of the tragic bottle. It would take more than grandiloquent bluff to capture and re-cork it! Tough!
Still, you must empathize with IPOB in its present bind. “IPOB”, Powerful declared, “cannot be part of the destruction of the same people we are labouring to emancipate” — spot on! But the constant harassment, in its name, of innocent and helpless Igbo who just want to be push daily bread in peace, clearly doesn’t suggest that.
Which is why even as Hardball sympathizes with IPOB’s change of tack, IPOB must know it’s sheer lunacy to do stuff the same way, yet expect different results.
IPOB blundered into the ill-advised sit-at-home without thoroughly thinking it through. It was a spur-of-the-moment emotion, sweet then but very, very sour now. IPOB can’t therefore blunder out of it, with the same old grandiloquent emotions. It must think and think hard!
IPOB’s apparent lack of deep thinking is Emma Powerful’s threat to unleash its Eastern Security Network (ESN) on the alleged “base fellows [that] unleash mayhem on innocent Biafrans”. Between these alleged hoodlums and ESN, what’s the difference, even in the eye of the besieged Ndigbo? Six and half-a-dozen?
IPOB deserves praise for wanting to put things right. It’s an act of courage to pause and change direction, when you realize all you risk is blunder into the jungle, blinded by sweet emotions.
But it must go the whole hog — no half measures. That is why its communications must be deep — clinical and persuasive reason to force urgent behavioural change.
Playing the loud superman, as Emma Powerful tried to do in this release, just exposes the loud helplessness — and emptiness — of an IPOB at the end of its tether.