Lately, there has been an eruption of kings and kingdoms among the Igbo people across Nigeria and other parts of the world. If these occurrences were not being normalised, they would be easier to ignore.
Some months ago, I wrote that the two tribes militating against Nigeria’s progress are the Fulani and the Igbo. On the surface, they appear different, but their core ideology is the same.
I wrote a five-part essay on how the Fulani people achieved their dominance in Nigeria. They used religion. They are colonisers and only want to be Nigerians if they are in charge.
The Igbo people also only want to be part of Nigeria if they are in charge. The South-East people aim to achieve this through commerce and psychological warfare. Where the Fulani are quiet, the Igbo are haughty. You can hear their steps from miles away. The Fulani are austere, while the Igbo are the opposite. They proclaim they are the best and that Nigeria cannot progress without them. They engage in de-marketing campaigns to prove their point.
Nnamdi Kanu started by declaring Nigeria a zoo. His acolytes escalated his campaign against Nigeria to a higher level, creating fictitious, gory films about the country. They flooded the blogosphere with negative news about Nigeria. Most of the negative stories about Nigeria overseas stem from a well-oiled propaganda machine run by Biafrans.
They claim Nigeria is bad because the Igbo are not in charge. While the Fulani plot a comeback, the Igbo resort to blackmail, claiming they are marginalised. They make no effort to collaborate with others to contest for power, believing it will be surrendered to them through blackmail and harassment by their irregular forces under Nnamdi Kanu’s control.
The recent proliferation of kingships in Igbo land, both in Nigeria and overseas, is part of this agenda. They cry victim, and the world comes to their support. This behaviour confirms that the Igbo have little respect for the rights of their hosts.
From Dallas to Lagos and China to Pakistan, they seek to establish kingdoms and undermine their hosts. If this were not a threat to innocent Nigerians, it would be insignificant. This behaviour has led many to distance themselves from Nigerians, as they cannot distinguish who is who. These kingdoms have been associated with a high level of predation. This elephant in the room is too big to ignore. All politics, they say, ends at the water’s edge.
This means that whatever divisions we have at home should stay at home when we cross the seas as Nigerians to foreign lands. In this way, we subsume our local identity for the national identity. The Igbo have refused to do this since the end of the civil war. Igbo nationalism became the norm after the civil war. Nigerians have been reluctant to push back, fearing a reminder of the bitter past.
This lack of pushback is a mistake that has emboldened Biafra proponents to preach the rightness of their cause. Any attempt to tell the real history of the conflict is met with revisionist history, where every Nigerian becomes a villain and cannot muster arguments to challenge the Igbo’s aggressiveness and unwarranted provocation.
They have spread lies and innuendos to obfuscate the reasons for our present discontent. The generation of Igbo people alive during Biafra passed down lies to their children, who now view Nigeria with anger and bitterness. Their most popular claim is that all Igbo were stripped of their wealth, genocide was committed against them, and they were given only twenty pounds at the end of the civil war. With those twenty pounds, they used Igbo ingenuity to create massive wealth in a Nigeria that allegedly hates and discriminates against them.
This Horatio Alger story is something only children would believe, yet it is the narrative the Igbo embrace. Since these children grew up, there has been no counter-narrative of the Nigerian Civil War. Nigerian children consumed this history and became uninformed, unwittingly cast as villains in this macabre dance. This is the history that produced figures like Nnamdi Kanu. This revisionist history fuels their propaganda against the Nigerian state and their righteous indignation. They began preaching Biafra with the authority of ignorance. Due to this ignorance, many Nigerians did not know how to react to these new Biafra proponents, who gradually adopted psychological warfare tactics. Any attempt to correct their lies is labelled “Igbophobia.” To avoid this label, many opinion leaders ceded the discussion to this uninformed Nnamdi Kanu generation, who began running wild in Igbo land. By the time the authorities realised what was happening, Nnamdi Kanu had a full-fledged army and a Biafran passport for his followers. He started declaring holidays and punishing anyone in Igbo land who opened their shops or violated his criminal directives.
This was the failure of the Nigerian government to secure peace after the civil war. If the leaders of the Biafran rebellion had been punished, reason would not have been toyed with by those aware of the war’s damage to Nigeria.
Nnamdi Kanu was placed under house arrest but escaped to London, where he resumed his position as the Commander-in-Chief of the Biafran Army. He gave orders that were carried out in Igbo land. His influence became so far-reaching that elected officials became his subordinates in Igbo land. This explains why no prominent Igbo person can vociferously challenge Nnamdi Kanu’s rebellion. The naive and uninformed Igbo have made him their messiah, donating generously to establish a Biafran state.
He was arrested for the second time in Kenya and brought to Nigeria for trial. Unfortunately, Nigeria struggles to compartmentalise crimes. Nnamdi Kanu’s trial should have been a straightforward criminal case, not requiring excessive time or the president’s attention.
In Nigeria, a criminal was made a martyr due to unnecessary political intervention. Instead of being tried and sentenced, decisions were ceded to the political arena.
This is wrong. An unrepentant criminal will repeat his crimes. His deputy was arrested and convicted in Finland within six months. The Finnish people prioritised justice and did not care about being labelled “Igbophobic.” Justice was dispensed. From the court proceedings, the criminality of these Biafran activities could not be denied. Simon Ekpa was convicted.
Where are the Igbo opposed to this criminality? Why are they so quiet? They cannot speak because Nnamdi Kanu controls the foot soldiers who dispense merciless justice in Igbo land. Nnamdi is the product of Nigeria’s lackadaisical attitude toward nationhood. This is what happens when a nation refuses to punish those who try to dismember it. Surreptitiously, groups like Nnamdi Kanu’s have been undermining Nigeria.
They have used psychological tactics, labelling any opposition as “Igbophobia.” Well-meaning Nigerians have succumbed to this emotional blackmail, leading to a paralysis of analysis regarding the struggles of the average Igbo person in Igbo land. The insecurity created by Biafrans has led to the emptying of the Igbo land, as people flee the South-East geopolitical zone.
The more people flee, the more they aggregate in certain locales. It is acceptable to settle in new places—that is the story of humanity. However, what is disturbing about these new Igbo settlers is their propensity to establish Igbo kingdoms wherever they go. We have never seen this level of Igbo nationalism before. What is happening in Igbo land?
Historically, there was no monarchy or centralised governing system in Igbo history. Why the rush to become kings in other people’s lands? Why do Igbo people think it is acceptable to set up their kingdom in another’s domain? In some cultures, such actions are considered an act of war. To be a king, one must conquer the territory.
Two kings cannot rule one domain. These actions have gone unchallenged in Nigeria, leading many Igbo to believe they can replicate this behaviour overseas. They were unprepared for the consequences of such proclamations. This confirms that the Igbo had no monarchy in their history; if they did, they would understand the bloodletting required to achieve royalty.
In the past, I said the Igbo complain most about tribalism. My observation is that the Igbo are the most tribalistic people in Nigeria.
This tribal propensity drives them to establish tribal hegemony wherever they settle.
Why is it necessary to tell an Isoko man that his ancestors are Igbo when historical facts contradict this?
Why is it necessary to tell an Ikwerre man he is denying his Igbo ancestry? It is rude for an Igbo person to tell an Isoko or Itsekiri that their lineage originates from Igbo land. This is a direct assault on these people’s history. The claims by some Igbo are so absurd that they strain credulity.
Recently, an Igbo man on YouTube claimed that they were in Ile Ife before the Yoruba arrived. How can Yoruba people take such outlandish proclamations seriously? Many unsubstantiated and outlandish remarks by Igbo scholars make it difficult to discern what to believe. The Igbo claim they are the lost tribe of Israel, yet there is no DNA evidence to support this. The farthest east their DNA traces is to the Bantu tribes of the Congo. The people in the Horn of Africa have direct lineage to Palestine, but do not use it as a bragging right.
From the above, I am beginning to see that the Igbo are still in a tribal stage of development, where tribal identity is paramount for survival. Most other tribes in Nigeria originated from empires and have shed the tribal cocoon necessary to form a nation, making it easier for them to adapt to new realities.
The Igbo are still trying to form a nation from their disparate tribes. This process was interrupted by colonialists. It is possible that the Benin Empire could have conquered and annexed the Igbo land if the British had not invaded. Forming a country is a union of nations. The Benin Empire, Oyo Empire, Kanem-Bornu Empire, Mali Empire, and others were nations within the Nigerian space.
The Igbo were a group of disparate tribes that had not yet become a nation when the colonialists arrived. The present struggles reflect attempts to hold onto an identity in a changing world. This is the atavism we see today.
If the Igbo succeed in establishing Biafra, they will still need to negotiate these intricacies to form a united Biafra. These painful negotiations require patience and diplomacy—qualities they need to embrace instead of using bellicosity as a tool of diplomacy.
Dr AUSTIN ORETTE WRITES FROM HOUSTON, TEXAS
