Two presumably respected professors signed the communiqué of the last meeting of the Igbo Leaders of Thought (ILT) held in Enugu last week. One is well known: Prof. Elochukwu Amucheazi, president of the group and pioneer Director-General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA). The second professor is not quite as popular in the media, now or in the past: Jerry Chukwuokolo, secretary and a former head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Ebonyi State University. He is reported to have done a lot of work on socio-political and developmental philosophy, particularly within Igbo culture. Prof. Amucheazi is a political scientist who once taught at the University of Nigeria, Nnsuka, but is now retired. They may have signed the communiqué, but there is nothing to show that they authored it, or whether they didn’t have any reservations about sections of the draft.
But the views expressed in the communiqué amounted to sweeping generalisations. Three items stand out in media reports of the communiqué. One, citing what they describe as escalation in killings across Nigeria, especially of Christians, and needing to prevent Nigeria from full-scale collapse, they posit: “The U.S. must not hesitate to intervene physically, including invading Nigeria to disperse the numerous bandits now harassing the nation. We cannot watch history repeat itself. We owe it to future generations to halt this slide into genocide and war.” Two, they condemn what they believe is “genocidal profiling and economic strangulation” of Igbo businesses, linking it to anti-Igbo policies, perhaps in Lagos, and Fulani expansionism. They then conclude that if injustices against the Igbo prevail, the ideology of Biafra will remain attractive. Three, they reject the life sentence imposed on IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu as “unjust, illegal, and politically motivated,” insisting that the conviction is “sad, indefensible and speculative,” and capable of turning him into a “Mandela-like symbol of resistance.” They ask for his release, rehabilitation and compensation.
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The eminent professors obviously spared nothing. To them Nigeria is heading for collapse, the bedraggled United States is the knight in shining armour, Kanu is right and justified, and the Igbo are once again, perhaps as always, the victims of budding, if not full-blown, genocide. No communiqué can be more tendentious, and no analysis can be so offensively opaque. It is unlikely the professors wrote the communiqué, or read it with the attentiveness it deserves. And if they wrote or read what they finally disseminated to the public, they perhaps submitted unwillingly to the herd mentality of excoriating outsiders than engaging in the self-contemplation and careful examination which the occasion and Nigeria demand.
Start from their call for US invasion of Nigeria as a means of correcting the country’s many paradoxes and conflicts. Is the US president Donald Trump, in their view, a paragon of democratic leadership? And is the US itself an exemplar of good behaviour at the international level, especially with its gunboat diplomacy against Venezuela, the auctioning of Ukraine to Russia, and the insults and threats to friends and allies alike? Just how sagely does Mr Trump appear to be to the two Nigerian professors in light of his ongoing castration of the United Nations and the almost total demolition of the rules-based order? Mr Trump is abusive, uncouth, disorganised, contemptuous of Blacks and developing economies, and lacking in depth. Is this the same man Professors Amucheazi and Chukwuokolo are inviting to restore sanity and order to Nigeria?
It is not certain who the other attendees were at the ILT meeting last week, whether they were jaded and ageing academicians or mid-level rabble-rousers from the streets co-opted into making up the numbers at the meeting and giving teeth to the communiqué. Whoever they were, it is shocking and disappointing that they joined many unthinking others to advocate the release of the self-absorbed Mr Kanu whose organisation, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), unleashed mayhem against mostly the people of the Southeast. And comparing him with Nelson Mandela? Well, what kind of hyperbole is that? Not only is the trial still ongoing, and the outcomes at the appellate courts predictable, it is astonishing that the professors could describe his conviction as illegal, unjustifiable and politically motivated. Did the ILT follow his trial, and if they did perhaps absentmindedly, did they read the judgement? Even if the ILT does not care about the lives destroyed in the Southeast and the families shattered, nor the gargantuan economic losses and the humiliating IPOB-midwifed Monday sit-at-home order that locked down the region and paralysed business and social activities every week in the name of securing freedom for Mr Kanu and freeing Biafra, surely they should care about what the law says and how the trial judge interpreted it.
Finally, the professors and their communiqué speak to what they describe as genocidal profiling and Fulani expansionism to justify the retention of the ill-fated idea of Biafra in Southeast minds. These two superficial tools of incitement are quite popular in the region and among the Igbo worldwide. Instead of the Igbo intelligentsia carefully deconstructing these tools and helping the region to heal and move on even in the face of non-closure of the Biafra War, they have decided to join the rabble by boosting its presumptions. But is it the Igbo alone that are facing Fulani expansionism? And in the face of refusal to return the country to ‘true’ federalism, a departure first articulated and advocated by some Igbo politicians in the First Republic, has every major ethnic group in Nigeria not felt the pangs of ‘genocidal profiling’?
While Mr Kanu may be the hero of many south-easterners, the other regions see in him a tragic cult hero. The Southeat may view Mr Trump and the US as knights in shining armour, the rest of Nigeria and the world see him as a flawed and superficial leader masking his inadequacies under aggressive pro-Americanism. They cannot and will not save anyone. The professors should seek solace elsewhere rather than chase a chimera.
