Tag: Kanu

Ekiti maverick, Ayodele Fayose and IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu, are a peculiar pair.
The one is twice a blight on his Ekiti generation.  The other, a heady presage to avoidable catastrophe: again, for the second time, in a generation.
They made quite a sensational pair at an Abuja court on April 25 with Fayose, all infantile jabber, declaring himself and his Ekiti Kete, self-annexed Biafrans.
But beyond the drama of optics, they made a more telling metaphor — sweet disasters baiting their people.  Nevertheless, the people appear too roused to resist their own doom.
In Fayose’s first coming (2003-2006) — Fayose o, Yes oooooooooooooooo! — he exited in a blaze of odium.
But that wasn’t his ultimate humiliation.  At his fall, he was accused of all sort of heinous crimes — poultry racketeering, a killer squad to bump off political enemies, real or phantom, and gubernatorial fascism Ekiti never knew; and again unlikely to know.
This second coming (2014 till date), he is a worrying study in noisy emptiness — yakking before thinking, and sundry empty street drama, to press his democratic folksiness.
Vintage Fayose street shows?  The governor as executive fire-fighter; as merry glutton, wolfing at the buka next door; as ladder-clambering member of a work gang, monitoring work on a bridge — in fact, as unabashed hustler for attention, with a spider’s web line between the sane and the insane!
So, when Fayose happened on his Biafra jabber, he provoked additional comedy to Ola Rotimi’s comic play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again.  Tweak that a bit, with Fayose’s melodrama? Maybe, Their Osoko Has Gone Mad Again!
So long for Fayose’s unending ribaldry! Nnamdi Kanu’s is made of a more tragic hue.
Now, wherever the Igbo want to be, in or outside Nigeria, is entirely their business.  But if they go about that with hateful demagoguery, then it becomes everybody’s business. That is Ripples’ only problem with Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
Besides, there is something eerie about Biafra’s one-sided narrative, powered by a saint-versus-sinner passion.
It was, in the build-up to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).  It was in its post-mortem, by Prof. Chinua Achebe, in his swan song, There Was A Country.  It is in Kanu’s current turbo-charged IPOB gambit.
That appears the most sensational attempt at rigging history, even when some of the participant-observers still live, if aging.
Since Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot started amplifying Igbo achievements and toning down others’, hype appears to come with the Eastern territory.
To be sure, hype is no crime.  Every people always project something to burnish collective pride.  But it becomes dysfunctional, when instinctive and compulsive.
Take the land hunger that has sent many Igbo scuttling outside homeland for economic nourishment; and see how it fits into the Biafra agenda.
Land hunger is nothing new — or bad.  In antiquity, fierce land hunger in Crete and surrounding islands, triggered the founding of Greek colonies, a cluster of voluntary diasporas, angling for economic survival.
These settlements would mature into city states, which not only birthed pristine democracy, but also gifted the West its grand thinking — art and literature, philosophy, science, technology and IT.
Just imagine the evolution of Greece — and Western critical thinking — without these pristine settlements!
But tweak that a bit: can you imagine Igbo evolution in Nigeria, without these far-flung internal economic diasporas?  Yet, not a few, even among the most asset-vulnerable, would recklessly endanger all of that, in a moment of unthinking hype!
The Biafra gambit — now, more than then — appears to fit pat into that explosive mindset, without much thought about the Igbo land hunger question.
If the Biafra fiasco (1967-1970) didn’t curb land hunger, by making the East retain its best within its homeland, what guarantees a future Biafra gambit — success or failure — would?
Despite the sharp contrast between Emeka Ojukwu’s Oxford elitism and Nnamdi Kanu’s explosive street populism, Biafra now, like Biafra then, runs on breathless emotions. In such campaigns, sobering facts are killed and buried.
There is a sweet claim — that the Civil War was a northern ploy to subjugate the East; and that the West, under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, merrily played Judas.
But Nigeria, at independence, opened with a North-East conspiracy to subjugate the West (see Hansard of the parliamentary debate of 29 November 1960, as quoted in Awolowo’s book, The Travail of Democracy and the rule of Law).
At that session, Northern People’s Congress (NPC), with National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) partisans pushed for a federal take-over of the West, under the ruling Action Group (AG). That would crystallize in the 1962 emergency.
Besides, how do you justify the 1963 creation of Midwestern Region from the West, without a corresponding carving, for minority elements, in the North and the East?  Because the two formed a coalition federal government?
So, when did two ganging up against one become a crime — since the East became a victim?
In recounting the horrors of old Biafra, perhaps to justify a new one, emotive words like massacre, genocide, et al are freely deployed.  But seriously, can there be “genocide” in a shooting war, where you either kill or be killed?
And guess the pre-war sabre-rattlers? Ojukwu accused Awolowo of “platitudes” in a May 1967 Enugu rally to avert war.  He further bragged: “I am no longer speaking as an underdog, I am speaking from the position of power.”. It turned out a costly bluff that consumed thousands of lives.
Compare Ojukwu’s sabre-rattling back in 1967 with Kanu’s impassioned hate today, against the non-Igbo in what he dubbed the “Nigerian zoo”, and you would perhaps realize how little a once-bitten people have changed over a 50 year-period!
But why go into these notorious though harsh historical facts?  Simple: the demagoguery of Fayose and Kanu creates catastrophes from small problems. Yet, it claims to gun for a solution!
Ekiti would feel Fayose’s rascality, maybe in another 25 years, when his blind flight to Stone Age would have matured.
Kanu’s sweet demagoguery may well inspire a future fresh and sweet South East mono-tales. But then, it’s a democracy, and choice is free!
Still, between Fayose and Kanu is an emotional plane. It leads nowhere but avoidable perdition.