Just as antiquity was enthralled by the real-life glorious tragedy of the Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 in 480 BC, the modern literary world has been gripped by the wilful tragedy of Okonkwo, Chinua Achebe’s fictional creation in Things Fall Apart, his 1958 classic.
As Leonidas and his men fought to the last man at the pass of Thermopylae, in a Greco-Persian War, the fictional Okonkwo sacrificed self to resist creeping Christian (read European) incursion into his pristine Igbo world.
Many say Okonkwo was rash and brash. Others say he, as a rule, acted first, thought later. Still, others insist his tragedy was avoidable, had he been less impulsive.
But after all said, Okonkwo hanged, so his Igbo essence could live. Indeed, the Okonkwo mystique was chaffing at the living dead, making shameful peace with the new “abomination” — for what is a people’s life sans their culture?
Given how some Igbo leaders in Lagos played their numbers game in the March 28 presidential/National Assembly and April 11 gubernatorial/state legislature elections, it was as if Okonkwo leapt from his pristine Umuofia, landed pat in the Igbo dominant areas of 21st century Lagos, and hollered: “meeennn, a new sheriff is in town”!
The only difference though, was that while the original committed self-martyrdom over a just cause, this grotesque, Lagos Okonkwo manically launched into a dubious one; suggestive of rank covetousness of Lagos, that instantly brought out the virtual beast in their Yoruba hosts.
Brash, rash and impulsive, the war-cry of this herd was spewing fictional history, bawling dubious statistics plus insensate boasts, and threatening, in concert with a pressured Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), orchestrating a hateful campaign of opponents’ demonization and ethnic baiting as own survival strategy, to take over Lagos! One, Tony Nwulu, now an Oshodi-Isolo House of Representatives-elect was even quoted in the media as threatening that, should he lose, he and his group would make Lagos ungovernable!
Yet, at the end of it all, it turned a damp squib. When the dust cleared, both at the presidential and gubernatorial elections, all the bragging about making up 30% of Lagos could only notch a win in five out of 20 constitutionally recognised local governments!
Though this “win” fetched the Igbo in Lagos a couple of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Lagos House of Assembly, that such was attained by perceived ethnic gang-up makes such gains pyrrhic, given the rupture of an age-old Yoruba-Ndigbo amity, despite that ethnic tensions were never too far from the placid surface.
Besides, it takes no especial acuity: an Igbo representative in Lagos, propelled almost solely by the votes of fellow ethnic Igbo, to the chagrin of their ethnic Yoruba hosts, is a journey to nowhere.
The reason is simple, even if unpalatable to dreamy-eyed democrats, or even worse: the so-called “de-tribalised” (whatever that means!) Nigerians. Unlike the United States, which is a settler community, Nigeria is a country of indigenous peoples, with each passionate about its own space. Besides, before democracy, there was sociology; and before sociology, there was anthropology.
So, it is patently shallow to claim playing democracy, without grasping social formations and showing acute sensitivity to the indigenous people’s aspirations, mores and values, especially in indigenous communities like Nigeria’s, no matter how big or cosmopolitan, as is the case with Lagos.
In the Lagos case, it was especially politically costly. Aligning with PDP which had ruined the central government, against APC, which had built Lagos was, to many Lagosians, brazen betrayal.
Which brings the matter to the Oba of Lagos, Riliwan Akiolu’s alleged Lagoon fatwa — alleged because the Eko Palace had tried to tone down its menacing import — which generated quite a huff.
On the political/democratic plane, the threat was awful — and you could tell by the way it immediately put the Lagos All Progressive Congress (APC) establishment on the back foot, disowning the royal and placating the hurting Igbo; and the way the Lagos PDP latched onto it, like some Deus-ex-machina making a divine appearance, to breathe fresh life to a doomed project.
But not so, on the sociological/anthropological plane. When Jimi Agbaje, the Lagos PDP gubernatorial candidate told cheering Igbo traders at the Lagos Trade Fair complex to, with their votes, drive the rival APC into the Atlantic Ocean, it was a devastating and recklessly irreverent pun, telling his own Kabiyesi to himself go jump into the lagoon!
That moment, his bid probably received a fatal kiss. For one, the Oba in Yoruba culture is Kabiyesi — he who cannot be questioned. For another, Nigeria is a democracy that cohabits with feudalism, in delicate dialectics. After all the excitement on the campaign stumps, and all mythical claim to free speech, you would still go prostrate to your monarch in private — so decrees culture!
But the most lethal of the Agbaje gaffe was setting himself up as putative Afonja of Lagos — a toxic tag. Afonja was the personage in Yoruba history, whose treachery helped the Fulani to put Ilorin, hitherto a Yoruba town in the Oyo Empire, under Fulani suzerainty.
The Trade Fair charge bolstered the cheering but obviously distraught Igbo, despite their overt braggadocio. But it also galvanised a piqued Yoruba population, furious at “Jimi’s [alleged] conspiracy to gift Lagos to the Igbo”. So, while comparatively the Yoruba appeared to have come out in their numbers, the Igbo rather seemed to recede.
In three short months of electioneering — or even less — Mr. Agbaje had, therefore, morphed from the decent and avuncular neighbour next door, to a putative betrayer of his own people! But that cannot be true! Mr. Agbaje needs urgent help to throw off this unflattering, if not fatal, tag.
The fact, however, is that, for the umpteenth time, the swashbuckling Ndigbo in Lagos blundered into the maelstrom of a brutal power play, both nationally and in Lagos. But they ended up as merry fall guys.
President Goodluck Jonathan started the noxious campaign, way back in 2011, when he suggested in Lagos that if Lagos non-indigenes banded together, they could politically usurp the native Yoruba. Pre-2015 election, he followed that up with campaign stops to churches, posturing as an endangered Christian president, waiting to be undone by vicious Muslims. That was the long and short of Lagos PDP’s electoral strategy: ethnic baiting and religious divisiveness.
On the Lagos front, not a few business gentries and free-wheeling political aristocrats, progressive, conservative and reactionary, who hate the guts of Bola Tinubu, the APC national leader, cooked their own plot.
Mr. Agbaje, always hinting at “vested interests”, was the smiling, brilliant and decent face of that ugly plot. A more discerning Okonkwo in Lagos should have seen through the booby trap, and not recklessly blundered into it, as if it were its own. But alas!
This is no triumphalism — no! It is rather truth, frankly and painfully told. The Ndigbo, for too long have been mixed up in needless crises. The Lagos debacle is the latest.
It is high time their leaders had some introspection, if they must attain their ultimate in the context of a just, fair and equitable Federal Nigeria.
