For the Igbo, adversity is an elixir, a powerful antidote to the mediocrity and melodrama that envelope many parts of modern-day Nigeria.
It was in 1967 that Nigeria’s southeast region, whose people had until then wanted nothing more than the stability needed to preserve their proud entrepreneurial heritage, became embroiled in a devastating civil war. For thirty months, missiles rained down on the region in a battle that pitched David against Goliath. At least a million people died to mark the bloodiest page in Nigeria’s history as a country.
After the botched Republic of Biafra surrendered in 1970 after a series of crushing losses, a seemingly magnanimous General Yakubu Gowon, who was military president then, declared that there had been“no victor and no vanquished.”
It Is not clear whether Gowon who is now an octogenarian meant that Nigeria could heal or if he simply underestimated the wounds of war. More than forty years later, those wounds continue to fester.
Ndi-Igbo have recovered admirably from the losses they cupped during the war. It was not always beyond a people whose culture is driven by adversity to bounce back. Today, Nigeria’s smallest region is not just competing with the rest of the country for economic relevance, it is thriving.
However, in Nigeria to thrive is not enough; neither is it enough to mind one’s business. Nigeria’s convoluted politics of ethnicity and religion, and the many fault lines that litter the country ensure that, as the Igbo say, “If one does not catch something, their wrapper would.”
In 2015,a historic election defeat for the People’s Democratic Party(PDP) brought the All Progressives Congress (APC) into power. Under the flag of the APC, a triumphant President Muhammadu Buhari was more than happy to alienate the Igbo. Being more military than democratic, and showing that it is in vain that the leopard tries to change its spots, Buhari had put the Igbo on notice that they could not expect much as they had not voted for him massively.
Even as he prepares to leave office, that ill-advised statement which featured an exclusionary moment has been the philosophy of his administration whenever attention has turned to Ndi-Igbo and the Southeast.
It has dictated the treatment Nigeria has meted out to Nnamdi Kanu and the IPOB; it has informed how the restiveness in the Southeast has been handled. Most importantly, it has shaped how the Igbo have come to be perceived by the Federal Government and the APC in the past eight years.
If there was any doubt that premeditated adversity is the lot of the Igbo in Nigeria, events in Lagos State during the last election eviscerated those doubts.
As discussions have shifted to the future of the country with all the uncertainty foisted by the last election, Ndi-Igbo are not at all in doubt about the pattern of exclusion and discrimination that is bound to continue by those who have held the reins of power but have failed woefully to develop Nigeria.
An adversity-driven culture has helped the Igbo to thrive in a country that has become unrecognizable from vision of its founding fathers.
When it comes to building for Nigeria the formidable structures and institutions that underpin a developed democracy, Nigeria’s patronage politicians seem to think that it is by sharing political positions that a country can be built.
It Is rather by justice and equity that serious countries have been built. There is no shortcut if Nigeria ever wants to grow.
If other regions of the country feel included because one of their own occupies a posh post in government, the Igbo are always keen to see differently, and in fact always manage to see differently.
When indirect rule disastrously failed in the Southeast during the colonial era it was because the Igbo who have always been fiercely independent and fair-minded were able to see through the devises of a system that sought to enrich the minority and exclude the majority.
Nigeria has been set up in that manner today and for the Igbo, the adversity that fighting injustice breeds is much welcome necessity.
Without it, Nigeria would risk falling under the control of those for whom injustice is a way of life.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
Abuja.
