Tag: South East governors

Earlier in the week, a friend had posted on his Facebook page his reading of the no contest between the bunch of stick-wielding IPOB militia and the Nigerian Army. In the decidedly a one-sided narrative of what he would acknowledge as a David versus Goliath mismatch, the army was cast as the lone aggressor, the clash between the modestly armed youth and a well kitted army is presented as a heroic new normal in the quest for self determination.

The daily spectacle of quasi military parades by IPOB and its leadership meant nothing, the buildup and priming of the obviously misguided youths for an inevitable showdown was supposed to be fair agitation as in war. The images of the Biafra Secret Service, the Lion Brigade and other paramilitary assemblages counted for nothing. Add those to the threats to burn down the zoo; the order by Nnamdi Kanu to his equally unhinged supporters to kill anyone who dared to come near to take him in.

Juxtapose these with the venomous frothing which has gone on the for years on Radio Biafra against the inhabitants of his Nigerian zoo, the ethnic and religious baiting, the delusions which bordered on the schizophrenia the climax of which was the threat and overt mobilization to stop the election in Anambra; all of these were deemed to be cowboy affairs – and, ostensibly for some – supposedly more tolerable of the countless moral equivalences symptomatic of the many dysfunctions of our diseased polity!

I beg to differ. Understandably, a lot has been made of the unbridled militarization of the civil space as evidenced by Operation Python Dance and its many hybrids across the Nigerian federation. I would of course agree that the situation is deplorable as it is. It does not matter whether it is Operation Crocodile Smile in the South-south and parts of South-west, Operation Harbin Kunama II in the North-west and parts of the North-Central, aberration is the word. I will argue that the developments are merely a window into the grave distortions that have made our federation experience such a nightmare – a topic for another day.

The psych-op deployed against the IPOB leader is however a different kettle of fish. The one, although by far inexcusable, is tolerated because the Nigerian state failed in the duty to equip the Nigeria Police; the other, a necessary measure in the face of direct and sustained affront to the territorial integrity of the Nigerian state by a group whose declared mission is to break up the country.

Conflating the military show of force against bandits, kidnappers and murderous Fulani herdsmen with the psychological operation against the secessionist band in the circumstance would seem plain cheap and opportunistic!  Those who see the army’s so-called ‘provocation’ in Kanu’s neighbourhood as anything more than a signal warning to a putative foe and so indulge in the fancy semantics and dubious legalese about IPOB being ‘non-violent’ only because it has not opened up its armoury for review or formally commissioned its fighting brigades are entitled to their delusions. As the Yoruba is wont to say – you do not wait for the stubborn gouge your eye; you take steps to remove it from a safe distance!

One does not have to be an authority on military psychology to understand why the army would not take kindly to the threat that Kanu and his IPOB have come to represent; perhaps only in the Kanu’s vacuous universe of thoughtless followers could that kind of scenario be contemplated.  This is perhaps what the army set out to prove. It certainly “helped” that Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB, jointly and severely, crossed innumerable treasonable red lines. Even at that, the timing of the ‘confrontation’ would seem a matter of operational convenience – coming few days before the September 15 kick-off of Operation Python Dance.

Where do we go from here? At this stage, the answer is hard to hazard. One thing seems clear though:  things will never remain the same for IPOB and its leader Nnamdi Kanu. In the first place, the operational symbolism of the psych-op apart, the action by the military has somewhat demystified the IPOB leader; for now, it appears to have created a dramatic effect of enabling the constitutional authorities regain the initiative –assisting the South-east governors to pull the chestnut out of their fire. With IPOB proscribed by the South-east governors and the federal government going as far as declaring IPOB a terrorist organisation, there is perhaps now a remote possibility of a more productive discourse if not engagement – among and between different regions – on the contending issues at the heart of the crisis of our nationhood. By hurling all manners of invectives against other ethnic groups, Kanu and his co-travellers would appear to have foreclosed that prospect or possibility in his pet Biafra project.  Apart being tragic in the circumstance in which the nation currently finds itself, it is, as current developments seems to dictate, proving to be fatal to his Biafra quest.

Now, I do not by any means underrate the capacity of the group for mischief; a lot would of course depend on well the Buhari administration is able to respond appropriately in the coming months. However, it does seem highly likely that the world will, going forward, insist on measuring the atavism of the group against its latter-day pretensions of being non violent. For the South-east leadership many of whom had been thoroughly embarrassed by the antics of the group, including those browbeaten into silence, (I am not talking about closet IPOB diehards who obviously see the appeasement of Kanu as the only way out), it seems about the best of times to step out to offer contributions.

At the moment, the buzz word is restructuring. Like I observed sometime ago on this page: “while most of us – in some form or the other – somewhat agree that Nigeria, in its present form, is not only a political, but also an administrative, nightmare. That whereas Frederick Lugard and company may have designed it to secure maximum benefits for the colonial authorities, the structure has neither served to integrate the people nor fostered development; and that while the in-built dissonance is itself potentially fraught with challenges, our situation has been exacerbated by the crisis of governance that has dogged her since independence…”

My warning then bears relevance even today: we must be wary of the current champions of unbridled ethnic nationalism. Yes, a new architecture of governance is desirable; in fact, it has become imperative in the circumstance to remove the suffocating hands of the centre from the states to allow them to be more productive. Nothing is to be gained by the secessionist cry as championed by IPOB.