Okenyi Kenechi
On Thursday, Dele Momodu, a veteran journalist interviewed the Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu to shed more light on his agitation and fight to restore the defunct Biafra Republic. Kanu, by his utterances and suspicion of motives, is one of the most loved men and also the most hated in Nigeria. Loved by the majority of the Igbo youths who are members of his group and hated by the majority of non-Igbo who see him as a threat to the unity of the country. The reasons are not far-fetched.
The interview by Momodu shed more light on his struggle and huddles before him, while many who initially dismissed him as a rabble-rouser were trilled by his grasp of the ills of the Nigeria nation, his eloquence and thorough understanding of the quest which he is pursuing and methods he thinks will be used to achieve them.
When asked where he wants the border of his dreamed nation to terminate, he said that borders will terminate at the end of the borders of every Igbo speaking nation outside the five South-East states. According to him, his Biafra borders will terminate at the borders between the Igbo-Speaking tribes in Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Benue, Cross River, Edo, Delta, Kogi, and Rivers. It is such a big huddle if you ask me, owing to the fact that it is more than 50 years since these groups of persons were carved out of the Eastern region.
The drums of 2023 are beating louder than required, deafening the ears less than three years to the expiration of the tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari. The period between 2015 and 2023 could best be described as the year of the locusts when the country made no significant gains in the advancement of democracy or reasonable infrastructural development, yet was plunged into a recession and crippling debts. Anyone who takes over after Buhari has a big mess to clear and reunite an already fragile country. But I am afraid that the upcoming elections will lead to further division along ethnic lines.
Events in the last 5 years should call for introspection by Nigerians and lead to the demand for a country that truly works for everyone irrespective of creed or ethnicity; a country where leaders fear the led and not the other way round; a country with a peoples’ oriented constitution – or call for a peaceful dissolution. However, it seems we all are walking into the same trap that has held us down for years with eyes wide open and all smiles only to resume our mass complaints later.
The choice of who replaces Buhari came at the front burner of national discourse immediately after the 2019 general election. Different regions have been agitating for the presidency to be seceded to them, with reasons why they deserve it. Expectedly, whoever the choice has loads of work to do, especially returning Nigeria to a manageable level of sanity where poverty will no longer become a government’s policy, and lives and property will be secure.
Many people, especially from the All Progressives Congress fold, have thrown their hands up, albeit indirectly – through their actions or by their henchmen throwing up their names randomly, or by forming political pressure groups in preparation for 2023. Many of these people were the same flock that sold the trojan horse of integrity and worked for the success of the election of the incumbent, a fly on the nation’s testicles that people don’t know how to remove. One is eagerly waiting to see what turn their campaigns will take. Will they campaign on continuing the policies of the incumbent which have proven to be a disaster or go against it? Yet, there is still contention over the unofficial zoning arrangement between the North and South, and whether the North should file another candidate from any of the two dominant political parties after the end of the locust years or should it be the exclusive preserve of the South.
South East’s political elites, a region that has not produced a president for the country in over 50 years, have positioned the region as the region to beat. There is a larger group that believes that for justice to prevail, the Igbo Nation should be allowed to produce the next president, a position which has been trailed by controversies of interests.
Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, the current minister of transportation, by his body language and by the activities of his henchmen, has indirectly thrown up his hands to run for the office the president. Amaechi, a two-term Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly; two-term governor of the state and currently serving his second term as minister has been positioning himself to contest in 2023 on the yearning for an Igbo presidency.
His presidential ambition has sparked debates on social media with some questioning whether a majority of Ikwerres will ditch their Bini ancestry and agree that they are Igbo or not as the Ogbakor Ikwerre leadership was quoted to have said during the Justice Chukwudifo Oputa’s panel that Ikwerre is not Igbo but an ethnic group of its own, a position they have held up till date. Some others have questioned whether Ogbakor Ikwerre will reverse its earlier assertion for Amaechi’s political ambition. While others say Amaechi is Igbo – a position he has never denied himself, they, however, say that going by Nigeria’s political delineation, Amaechi has been carved into South-South and should not take what “rightfully belongs to the South East”.
His ambition poses many challenges for the Ikwerres who have over the years, said they’re not Igbo. Will they now accept being Igbo because of Amaechi’s political position? If Amaechi gains the support of the larger Igbo Nation, will the Ikwerres go back to their Bini ancestry when it all ends? Won’t the larger Igbo Nation feel manipulated or cheated?
It also poses many challenges for the larger Igbo Nation, especially members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, who are trying to create a large nation by co-opting Igbos in Bayelsa, Rivers, Delta, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Kogi, and Benue into their struggle. If Amaechi is rejected on the premise that it is the turn of the South East and not the turn of the Igbo as a group, won’t it send a wrong signal to Igbos in those other regions that, perhaps, the larger Igbo Nation does not want them?
