The Igbo claim on Lagos, by Rotimi Fasan

A Yoruba saying has it that when siblings leave a family gathering smiling, they have obviously not spoken the truth to one another. We are in such times of a family indaba and some truths, no matter how inconvenient, are in order. It was just last week that Nigeria’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, led a diplomatic mission to Ghana to douse rising tension between citizens of both countries.

Ghanaians had staged ‘Nigeria must go’ protests across their country, calling for the mass expulsion of Nigerians for involvement in unfair trade practices, kidnapping for ransom and ritual purposes; disregard of local customs and the people, aggressive and acquisitive purchase of land etc., all conduct inimical to good relations. 

It is certain that these allegations cannot be as cut and dried as presented. It is probable that those complicit cut across several if not all Nigerian ethnicities domiciled in Ghana. It is, however, instructive that the Igbo was the only Nigerian ethnic group directly mentioned in the protest. Against this background, Igbo would appear to be a synecdoche for Nigeria/ns. What happened in Ghana mirrored similar happenings in South Africa and a few other parts of Asia. The Igbo are Nigerians as we all are and wherever and whenever an Igbo person or the Igbo, like any other Nigerian ethnic group, are the focus of unfavourable attention, we should all as Nigerians feel concerned and where necessary rise in defence of one another. When we get behind the door thereafter, we should be honest enough to tell one another the bitter truth as members of a responsible family unit would tell an erring member. 

No group holds the franchise for bad behaviour but in the fraught context of Nigerian ethnic politics, it is always a difficult proposition to call out members of an ethnic formation without people getting overtly defensive. Then would some construe any criticism as yet another instance of ethnic baiting or profiling. Let the truth be told, some criticisms like this indeed amount to profiling, particularly where there is an established and undeniable pattern of behaviour. Such criticism often cuts deep, feels like a personal rebuke and requires the mature response of a person or group confident enough to know that as a tree does not make a forest, a part may look like but is not necessarily the whole. 

What has been said of some Igbo expatriates in Ghana, South Africa, Singapore or Malaysia is what is being said about some of them in some parts of Nigeria where they are domiciled outside the South-East, especially Lagos in the present time. It is a graver version of what is being said of some Yoruba people in parts of London. What a responsible family does is to see a situation like that as one for self-appraisal and introspection, a moment to find out what they might be doing wrong, not get defensive and double down on the identified misdemeanor in an unseemly fit of algorithm-driven anger, one that only serves to reinforce other people’s perception about the offending family. This is a job for the enlightened segment of that family. But what I have observed about the vocal section of the Igbo elite or that segment of its intelligentsia that speaks in the name of the group is a tendency to be defensive, rally the troop to explain away the bad behaviour of some of their people or pretend that nothing happened. 

The few who are bold enough to speak against such behaviour are variously labelled sell-out, efulefu, quietly isolated or bullied into silence. There is always that sense of besiegement which in some context I find very understandable for a people who have gone through a life-altering civil war (a pity for us all) with the rest of the country. But it should not be an excuse for a pattern of execrable conduct perpetrated by some in the name of the whole. The Yoruba are in my view better at calling out such misconduct. It is the failure of the Igbo to do this that gave rise to the likes of Nnamdi Kanu, Simon Ekpa and the monstrosities that have been spawned from their campaigns of terror, or the extraversion of alien practices such as monarchs and monarchies that are created for the nonce by some money-miss-road Ezes and Igwes in open challenge of indigenous governance systems. 

It is what would make some of them excuse the polarising presence of Peter Obi whose desperation for power and posturing as the Great Igbo Hope is widening the fissures of identity acrimony across Nigeria’s social formations. Let nobody be deceived by Obi’s dovish look or the lachrymal evenness of his voice that is part of his gbajue package. The reaction to his brand of politics has been fuelling ethnic tension across the country, especially between the Igbo and the Yoruba in the last three years. The failure of the vocal section of Ndi Igbo to step up to their historic role, call it manifest destiny (pun intended) if you will, by telling one another some home truths is the reason why someone like Dr. Obi Nwakanma would in his Sunday Vanguard column run into the discursive bind and circular argument in which he retails second hand anecdotes as history in his imagined ‘Lagos and the Yoruba…’.

That excursion into revisionist history is in addition to being vacuous also an unnecessary insult to the Yoruba. He should leave that job of historical reconstruction to those trained to tell it best and limit himself to the name-calling that is the refuge of his online kith and kin. He could bet his ‘last farthing that Dr. Fasan is a JJC to Lagos’ as is the Bariga LCDA chair who for him licks ‘the hind’ of Bola Tinubu, owner of his so-called JCO- the typical name-calling, crass disregard and unprovoked attack of others common to Igbo online rodents. Such stuff and nonsense. They impose on others standards they couldn’t be bothered to keep.   

Obi Nwakanma should comb through my article and address the particulars of my submission and how they play out in South-East Nigeria or generally where the Igbo can be found. But just so he doesn’t lose his ‘last farthing’ in heedless gambles next time around, I will say this in my English translation of a Yoruba idiom: I walked into Lagos on my head and have retained my contact with the city ever since. Let him ask one of his beer-guzzling friends to translate that for him if he cares. But he is the JJC, atohunrinwa who slipped into Lagos, carrier bang under his armpit, probably on a night bus. Space will not let me expand on this fully but I will for now stop here.   

The post The Igbo claim on Lagos, by Rotimi Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.