It’s a season of supremacists; and Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes preen, strut, caper and crow!
It is not unlike that Yoruba proverb: at the fall of Ajanaku, the mighty elephant, knives and daggers of different hues go ga-ga!
Is the Nigerian Ajanaku, sired since 1914 by Lord Frederick Lugard, about to buckle — and all the buzz, dire signs of the free-wheeling knives to come? Maybe. Maybe not.
One thing is clear, though: in the excitement of the moment, the mirage of instant desire swallows cold reality. It is excellent wine for the trending feast of wild passion. But the sure hangover would be no less telling — and galling!
Which brings the matter to e-maps, springing up on the social media, pronouncing emotive, post-Nigeria republics.
The problem, however, is less the emotion. It is more the crass presumption.
Neo-Biafra, despite the fiasco of 1967-1970, the pre-defeat rollback at the Midwest and the post-defeat Igbo “abandoned property” of Rivers, is still mapped as the Igbo homeland; plus all of the Niger Delta, east and south; and, to the west, the eastern fringe of the present Delta State.
Why, the most virulent of that delusion even annexed part of Idoma country, in the North’s Middle Belt, as part of neo-Biafra!
As for “Oodua Republic”, it is the Yoruba homeland of the political South West; plus Edo, Ishan and Auchi lands (the present Edo State), the Itsekiri country of the present Delta, and, of course, the Yoruba “diaspora” in the political “North” of Kwara and Kogi, up to Lokoja and Idah!
At the height of this fantasy, romantics, Biafra and Oodua, were already swooning about some “South” — after IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu’s reported threat of no election in the South East, until IPOB secured its Biafra secession referendum; and former Senator Femi Okurounmu’s call for a united southern phalanx against the “Hausa-Fulani” he seems to viscerally hate.
How these romantics secured the consent of the non-Igbo and the non-Yoruba, mapped into “Biafra” and “Oodua Republic”, is not clear. But pray, how is that different from the Lugard cobbling of Nigeria?
In fairness to Senator Okurounmu he, with his Afenifere, are not new converts to restructuring. Neither is Ripples.
As he correctly noted in his two interviews with The Punch and Nigerian Tribune, restructuring has been the war cry of the South West, since Ibrahim Babangida’s rash annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election, which the late MKO Abiola won. That argument holds today as it held then — restructuring could well be the elixir to save Nigeria.
Still, pushing for restructuring is one. Launching into hate, by passionately dubbing a whole people the “Yoruba enemy”, as Dr. Okurounmu did in his interview, is another. That crosses the line from a civil campaign to crass demagoguery. That was unfortunate, with all due respect to the Yoruba elder.
Of course, the former senator got mixed up with pushing the legitimacy of his cause and marketing the Goodluck Jonathan National Conference, with its sop of pre-poll bribery and sundry baggage, that went awfully wrong for Jonathan’s re-election.
That was fatal to his message. To the acute, the medium simply slaughtered the message. He clearly appeared to speak from the bitterness of backing a wrong horse in 2015, and, for political redemption, desperately clinging to the “restructuring” buzz.
As it is true of Senator Okurounmu and his group, so it is of the avid new converts, of the South East/South-South, to “restructuring”. Their campaign would appear fired more by an election loss than any intrinsic belief in their new crusade.
Why? Well, President Jonathan, with his vociferous South East backers, had ample time to “restructure”. But why didn’t he do it, until his election-eve poisoned chalice, which lured the likes of Afenifere which, with the balance of political forces, had little or no electoral value, anyway.
But you must congratulate Nnamdi Kanu for his newly demonstrated street value, among the Eastern rabble.
Still, the “Biafra” sit-at-home order is nothing new. After June 12, it became a yearly ritual in the South West, to force back the unjust annulment, while the rest of the country, particularly much of the South East, didn’t see what the fuss was all about. What goes around, as they say, comes around!
Just imagine if everyone had squared against that heinous crime back then? Perhaps the search for justice would have been swifter and easier; and the national question, maybe resolved by productive federalism, wrought from hard compromise. But alas!
How far can IPOB stay the course of yearly sit-at-home strikes? Despite all the emotional huff over Biafra, it is a grand design to scuttle the Buhari mandate, lost and won. June 12 was to revalidate the MKO mandate, fairly won. Yet, it petered out as the years went by.
Still, for this latest rash of southern supremacists, arrogantly crooning their own homelands would thrive should Nigeria buckle, the political North has itself to blame.
The story of Nigeria is a torrent of injustices, arising from a skewed political geography that created a Northern sheriff, over and above the original two Southern regions of East and West.
By playing the end against the middle, pre- and post-Civil War, the North headed a concert of powers, with the South East/South South in tow, against Western Nigeria, in perpetual opposition.
But no thanks to Babangida’s recklessness, the North crossed the fatal line over the June 12 annulment.
No evidence, perhaps, that Babangida acted on behalf of anyone to annul a pan-Nigeria mandate, freely given. From his self-perpetuation scheming, he seemed to have more than enough self-motivation.
But there is more than enough evidence that the North’s power elite aided and abetted that crime, with the fond wish that the North’s political supremacy would stem the tide.
Well, it didn’t. And from that spot, the North lost its power invincibility; and started a sure and steady decline in power and influence.
Still, if supremacy is bad for the North, it can’t be good for the South — and that is the point the Biafra and Oodua supremacists miss, busy flexing muscles about making it alone; while betting the North would be left in the lurch.
If Nigeria must be saved — and it is imperative it is, for a united but workable Nigeria is far better than its balkanized parts — everyone must eschew hatred and bigotry.
Rather, we should embrace good, old justice, which need we re-stress, by quoting Prof. Woke Soyinka’s eternal words, is the first condition of human dignity, nay existence.
Besides, if Nigeria were to be restructured and saved, partisans across the divide must start talking with themselves. But with all these ethnic cacophony, they only talk at themselves.
That is a great pity, for Nigeria is at a crucial pass, which could make or mar it.
