Anti-Igbo rhetoric is on the rise inside Nigeria. Only a few days ago, the country’s President retired army General Olusegun Obasanjo called some Igbo leaders insane for demanding a frank discussion of Nigeria’s federalism and stating that secession was preferable to being victims of pogroms. His Minister of Transport called Ndigbo idiots for making the case for an Igbo as President. The Minister of State for the Navy called Ndigbo traitors. Inspired anti-Igbo articles are flooding the newspapers. For instance, Reuben Abati of The Guardian (Lagos) wrote a two-part article entitled “Obasanjo, secession and the secessionists” (The Sunday Guardian, December 16 and 23, 2001). All he did therein was to denigrate Ndigbo.
Normally, the abuses rained on Ndigbo may not ring alarm bells. Were they not always everybody’s whipping boy? However, there is something sinister in the rising tirades. For seeking a shot at the presidency, Ndigbo were called idiots. For demanding compensation for Nigerian soldiers who fought for Biafra, a topic initiated by the Federal Government, they were called traitors.
It is pointless joining issues with political appointees, those amplifiers of ‘His Master’s Voice’ who may hold no personal opinion on anything and whose relevance disappears the moment they are ditched in a cabinet reshuffle. However, it is different when a journalist/commentator plays himself up as a conceited ignoramus. Abati mounted the rostrum (of The Guardian’s editorial page) to call Ndigbo criminals and nincompoops. Why?
Ominously, Abati warns that his kinsman Gen. Obasanjo is standing by with his pickax, ready to chop off additional Igbo heads as if that should be in an elected President’s mandate. Nonetheless, this young man (Abati) should be taken seriously who has openly acknowledged his partisanship as the President’s bulldog. It is important to note that the newspaper he works for, The Guardian newspaper (Lagos), was put on a solid foundation by Igbo brains. Is it appropriate for this organ, owned by a now born-again Christian (Alex Ibru), to be used for assailing Ndigbo with such vicious bigotry and falsification of history? It all adds up, of course.
Abati claimed that his write-up was to address “the issues” bordering on secession. His words: “Always, from President to my ‘washaman’, we should all be interested in the issues, for if there is anything that unites us all, it is the expectation that this country called Nigeria will serve our purpose by guaranteeing our safety and happiness. Safety and happiness: those are the two things that the average Nigerian wants. When we do not focus on the issues, we trivialize critical aspects of our own lives.”
How does the above justify Abati’s subjection of Ndigbo to obloquy? This is Reuben Abati: “After all, Ibos now sell land in Lagos and Kaduna, and they are in charge of commerce, “419” and ‘international trade.’ But there is a problem of leadership. Every Ibo man who has access to the media, and some money in his pocket thinks that he is an Ibo leader.” When this fellow renders sentences such as these, could he be seen to be promoting “safety and happiness” which, according to him “are the two things that the average Nigerian wants.” (By the way, it’s not ‘Ibo’ but Igbo)
Let’s examine the illogicality of the sentences. How could it be sensibly said that Ndigbo now sell land in Lagos and Kaduna when they were into that long before Abati was born? Why should the selling of land in Lagos and Kaduna by Ndigbo be an issue? Are there no Hausas, Yorubas and indeed people of other nationalities who sell land in Abuja, Kaduna, Lagos, Port Harcourt and elsewhere?
Ndigbo, says Abati, are in charge of “419” in Nigeria. Where is the evidence to support this wildness?
What respectable part of journalism or scholarship allows people to throw unsubstantiated statements around like confetti? “Every Ibo man who has access to the media, and some money in his pocket thinks that he is an Ibo leader”, asserts Abati. Pray, how did he come by this? In any case, why should anyone be afflicted by insomnia even if every Igbo person sees himself as a leader of his ethnic group? Yet, another Abati claim: “The biggest disease in Ibo land is money.”
What is the biggest disease in Yorubaland? What is the biggest disease in Hausaland? What is the biggest disease in other lands of Nigeria? How does Abati monitor and quantify these pandemics? Clearly, Abati’s irrationality is calculated to fan anti-Igbo feelings. Witness a few of the lies he concocted and inflicted upon a gullible public simply to pursue his wickedness:
• On the action of January 15, 1966, Abati writes that:
“The coupists were mainly Ibos, they killed mainly Northern officers and no single Igbo man (except perhaps, Lt. Col. A. G. Unegbe, the Ibo Quarter-master General who was killed because he refused to surrender the keys to the armoury).” But Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe was not killed for refusing to hand over the keys to the armoury. As QMG, the Colonel held no armoury keys, and The Guardian’s top-flight commentator/staff ought to have known this. Also, what are the brackets in Abati’s sentence for? When he says “perhaps” in that context, is he alluding to some doubt as to Unegbe’s fatality in the January 1966 action?
“And Ironsi not only made the mistake of surrounding himself with Igbo advisers, including the strong-headed Francis Nwokedi, under him nearly every major department – Education, Railway, etc. was dominated by Igbos and he was not willing to deal with the coupists of Jan. 1966.”
Fact is that Ironsi did not surround himself with Igbo advisers. Recent books have quite thoroughly discredited that lie. What are the grounds for referring to Francis Nwokedi as “strong-headed”? In Reminiscence, his 1989 biography published by Malthouse, Lagos, General David Ejoor states that Ironsi’s Supreme Military Council (SMC) of which Ejoor was a member decided on the trial of the January coup makers (p39). Also, in ‘The Barrel of a Gun: The Politics of Coups d’Etat in Africa’ which was published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London in 1970, Professor Ruth First attributes the following to Hassan Usman Katsina. “By July (1966), the minutes of the SMC recorded that the young majors were to be court-martialed not later than October. The proceedings were to be in public.” (p. 307).
General Hassan, another member of Ironsi’s SMC, lived for over 25 years after First’s book was published but never denied the statements credited to him. Ironsi was assassinated months before the October date slated for the court-martials. Yet, Abati maintains that the General “was not willing to deal with the coupists of January 1966.”
Ironsi was in power for six months, as against Yakubu Gowon‘s nine years. Why does Abati and his ilk not ask Gowon the reason he failed to try the coup makers of January 1966 and the counter-coup makers of July 1966?
Abati says that the Igbo “even had a song, Celestine Ukwu’s ‘Ewu Ne Ba Akwa’ (meaning ‘Goats Are Crying’) with which they taunted the Northerners. That song was not the work of Celestine Ukwu. That song was not the work of an Igbo artiste. That song was on vinyl long before the action of January 1966.
Abati writes that Ojukwu, whose compound name he misspells time and again, fled to the East in the wake of the July 1966 counter-coup. But it is a matter of public record that then Colonel Ojukwu was in Enugu from January 1966 as the Military Governor of the East.
Abati claims that Isaac Adaka Boro was an Ogoni man, that he was a student of the University of Nigeria (Nsukka) when he declared a “Republic of the Niger Delta”, that he had no army. These are lies by Abati. Boro was Ijaw. Boro was on the staff of the University of Lagos when he struck. And, yes, Boro had an army.
Abati claims that Gowon announced his12-state structure the same day as Ojukwu declared Biafra.
That is fallacious.
Of the Igbo intelligentsia, Abati says, “They had lived all their lives either in the West or the North.” This is nonsensical. None of the Igbo intelligentsia lived abroad? None taught at the Enugu and Nsukka campuses of the University of Nigeria? None found gainful employment elsewhere in the East?
Only a diseased sense of history and the pursuit of an inglorious agenda can teem these lies and illogicalities. Abati’s article and all those other anti-Igbo statements amount to a fresh attempt to posit Ndigbo as the problem with Nigeria. In 1966 when this lie was first sold, 50,000 Ndigbo were massacred across Nigeria, not to talk of the civil war that followed. For Abati, that bloody pool of Nigerian history is something to gloat over. He forgot that the action of January 1966 aimed to install Awolowo, a Yoruba, as Prime Minister of Nigeria. He forgot that when that coup took place, there was calm in the Igbo country and ascendancy of the Igbo ethnic group whereas Yorubaland was in flames with many of its leaders, including Chief Awolowo, in prison.
Ominously, Abati warns that Obasanjo is standing by with his pickax, ready to chop off additional Igbo heads as if that should be in an elected President’s mandate. Nonetheless, this young man (Abati) should be taken seriously who has openly acknowledged his partisanship as the President’s bulldog. The fact is The Guardian newspaper (Lagos) was put on a solid foundation by Igbo brains. Is it appropriate for this organ, owned by a now born-again Christian, to be used for assailing Ndigbo with such vicious bigotry and falsification of history? It all adds up, of course.
The collective sin of Ndigbo is their refusal to be content with “buying and selling” which Obasanjo’s deputy minister of defence and daughter of Yoruba chieftain Abraham Adesanya, Mrs. Dupe Adelaja insists is their place. Rather, the Igbos have the effrontery to ask for a stint at the presidential palace, something intolerable to those intent on making Aso Rock a place of permanent abode.
It is, therefore, imperative to contain the troublesome lot, and to amputate those arms stretched for the handshake across the Niger, especially as 2003 is around that bend. That explains the new wave of anti-Igbo sentiments being fanned across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
When the Holocaust was in the offing, every means was used to portray the Jews as evil and despicable. The Jews ultimately paid an un-owed debt to the staggering tune of six million lives. A reality of this New Year is that Ndigbo are being readied for the first holocaust of the new millennium. Should Ndigbo and, indeed, the whole world allow it?
Note: This article, written by Chuks Iloegbunam, an award-winning investigative journalist, was first published as a commentary for USAfricaonline.com on December 31, 2001. It served as a rejoinder to Reuben Abati’s controversial two-part article titled “Obasanjo, Secession and the Secessionists,” published in the Sunday Guardian on December 16 and 23, 2001. In his commentary, Iloegbunam addressed what he described as blatant falsehoods and ethnic biases against the Ndigbo community in Abati’s piece.
Over two decades later, Abati is once again under scrutiny for making similar remarks, which have sparked widespread criticism. His recent comments echo the same ethnic provocations that prompted Iloegbunam’s original response. Critics argue that Abati’s persistent rhetoric amounts to unrepentant ethnic bias, reflecting a visceral animosity towards the Ndigbo people.
