Re: Kaduna declaration: Disheartening issue

Prof. M. M. Nguru’s rejoinder, with the above title, in the opinion page of D/Trust Monday June 19, highlighting some of the deliberate issues at stake in Nigeria today is highly desirable and well articulated. The Nigerian political environment has for long been under siege because it has been hijacked and held hostage by some insular characters whose negative mindsets and rigorous pronouncements of mischievous propaganda against the North has reached boiling point giving rise to some impulsive backlash of unfavorable exchange of biles and negative vitriolic.

The spiral consequences of these unwarranted cycles of separatist agitations and hateful speeches by Igbo youth against the North and its humility-sarcosant population trigerred an emotional response by a coalition of young Northerners under the Aegis of Arewa Youth Coalition.

On the surface, this Biafran demand looks normal. But the unpalatable ugly irony linked to this tragic quest is the disdainful and abusive assaults and needless insults on the North and its innocent inhabitants whom the Biafran agitators irrationally drag and vilify all the time, despite the incontestable and incontrovertible evidence of verifiable statistical facts that show the North serving as comfort havens for the Igbos in particular as well as Nigeria’s largest and most prestigious trade free one and alternative habitat for all and sundry without discriminatory terms or exclusive boundary limitations as practiced elsewhere by others especially in the South eastern part of Nigeria whose wholesale contempt for Northern Nigeria citizens is legendary not to talk of the outrageously disdainful apartheid-type hostilities visited on host Northerners living as migrant workers and petty traders.

It is within this context that this emotional issue has become one of Nigeria’s contentious topics of discourse. The question that becomes imperative is to ask the basis for the Igbos subjective aggressions and spite against the North despite the historical records of political and economic ties going back to the colonial era.

It is also funny to observe Nigeria’s endemic state of hypocrisy and bigotry to note that while Biafran offenders have for years freely been allowed to hype and indulge in perpetual propaganda, feigning persecution and invoking all sordid images of pity and apathy, Northerners have been indiscriminately and indecently reprimanded and treated as the instigators rather than the victims that they truly are.

All said and done, all the good patriotic Nigerians like Prof. Ango Abdullahi and others, who spoke out in favour of Nigeria, deserve our collective support and commendation as against the condescending and condemnable open support of sponsors and silent conspirators as well as the hypocrites in our country whose dubious indifference, I believe, has energized the far seeking Biafra juvenile agitators to sustain their seditious clamor and treasonable declaration, unrepentantly and without remorse.

Finally I want to call on all Nigerians, especially members of the Coalition of Arewa Youth, to eschew all forms of hostile reactions, by demonstrating maturity and objectivity that goes with civilized conduct which is a good trait that is customized and imbibed as a cultural treasure, particularly in the North, regardless of the painful intensity of provocations.

Abdulkarim Muhammad Abdullahi, Keffi, Nasarawa State 08034262633.