SIR: As I read the above titled article written by Dr. Arthur A. Nwankwo, on page 22 of The Nation of Monday, September 7, I couldn’t just ignore the views of a man that I thought was above such sentiments. A doctor passing judgments on hypothetical and imaginary situations, events and crucifying people practically and for real on such permutations!
Listen to Nwankwo… “This unwritten policy of ‘identify and cut the Igbo to size’ has continued even unto this day. No energy is spared in cutting Igbo to size when the chance arises. The end point of all this has always been to destroy the Igbo economy”. How I wised the author had elaborated on this, by citing one such policy and how it came about being formulated in the country with the exclusion of the Igbo and their interest.
Funny enough I have found out that almost all the travails and atrocities that Nwankwo and his co-victims suffered as enunciated in his narrative referred to Igbo men as principal actors. Take the Alpha Merchant Bank, owned by one Eke Kalu and one Yoruba man, Jimi Lawal as the Managing Director. The story is that the bank was liquidated by General Sani Abacha when Paul Ogwuma was Central Bank Governor, according to Nwankwo.
How come that the Alpha Merchant Bank was liquidated just because its owner was Igbo by General Abacha when the Central Bank Governor was Igbo and its Managing Director, Yoruba? What anti-Igbo law was cited to liquidate it and also to stop the Igboman as well as the Yoruba man from heading to the courts to seek legal redress?
Take the other example mentioned by the doctor of a case instituted against him by Nwobodo. Hear him “I have had my own experience with tribunals. If I have been tried by a tribunal in 1982 in the sedition suit instituted against me by Chief Jim Nwobodo, I would not have been free today”. He went on ‘If the tribunal had tried me under Abacha I would have been rotting away in jail by now”. Nwankwo concluded thus “It was the High Court in Enugu that set me free before I took the matter to the United States”.
What is the logic in these statements? An Igboman sued you for sedition and you got away and you are dreaming that if it were a tribunal you would have been rotting away in prison and a High Court had set you free. Therefore, tribunals were bad and high courts were good, even if what it meant was that the High Court did the wrong thing. Is Dr. Nwankwo not aware of several people who were set free by tribunals and several others jailed by high courts? Tribunals and high courts are institutions not individuals or persons.
Is Dr. Nwankwo telling us that all those who hate the Igbo used the Igbo against the Ndigbo? And if that is the case why should the Igbo blame others for their self-inflicted injury?
From the following, you would be able to easily see where the man is going and in whose defence he is fighting and why: “Now the same old politicians have come again calling on Buhari to set up tribunal to try so-called corrupt politicians. “Tribunal”, he went on “is antithetic to democracy”. Not done, Dr. Nwankwo fired on “setting up tribunals to try corrupt people in Nigeria is absurd. The courts are there, why circumvent them? He asked. Yes, indeed, the courts that set you free are there!
The man should be told point blank that there are no Nigerians anywhere who choose for the Ndigbo their inability to come together, politically, like they have come together, economically to dominate every buying and selling enterprise in Nigeria. The leadership of this country will continue to elude them if they carry on with this phantom idea that some people and sections of this country hate them and are out to deny them their right to rule this country. Political pundits are still baffled and nonplussed on how the Ndigbo felt justified and convinced that their near-total support for President Jonathan to rule Nigeria for 10 years until they were trounced in the March 2015 Presidential elections was the right thing to do to qualify to rule Nigeria in 2019. This is bearing in mind that both the Niger Delta and the South-east belonged to southern Nigeria.
And to Dr. Nwankwo, there are many ways of supporting corruption and corrupt people, especially your Ndigbo who presided mostly over that locust empire in the last government, without condescending to this unacceptable, heinous ethnic, religious, tribal and regional hatred and divide.
- Sale Bayari,
Jos.