The python’s dance

Iwon’t ever buy a fairly used crisis management tablet from His Excellency, Olusegun Obasanjo. The reason is simple: the two-time commander-in-chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces is a man of very short fuse who recommends the longest of fuses to others. I chuckled when I read, the other day, that the former president was recommending ‘dialogue’ as the solution to the IPOB dance with the python in the Southeast. And I said, “Et tu Baba!”

Now let’s clear the cobwebs, for we live in dangerous times of innuendoes, barefaced ethnic hate and vile propaganda. There is a militant in every one of us who wants this country to be better governed and the resources and opportunities more equitably shared. Youth must protest in order for the society to make progress. We did our bit in our own time. Let today’s youths answer to their generational responsibility.

However, when the handshake of agitation crosses the boundary of hate vending to pull at the life-string of our collective sovereignty, then the game has transmogrified to kick-boxing or worse. My fear, when IPOB was ratcheting up its rhetoric of building an army, buying weapons, invading Abuja and wiping out the security forces - was that we could easily slip into war mode. With videos suggesting the harassment of non-natives in the Southeast making the rounds, I was in mortal dread of retaliation in the North.

It is easy to pontificate after the military had quelled the initial rumblings. Oh, the police should have been deployed instead. Really? The corpse of a police officer lies in the morgue as I write these lines, alleged victim of IPOB militants who have now been charged to court.

Before the current Operation Python Dance II being conducted by the military in the Southeast, there had been Python Dance I last year. So, the dance of the military python was not hurriedly put together. I thought it was patently unwise of Nnamdi Kanu and his fellow IPOBists to dare the military by pretending to run a new sovereign state complete with a ‘secret service’, army recruits on parade, threatening the person of President Buhari and other such sad jokes.

It begs the question whether Kanu actually had the capability to carry out his threats of violence against the rest of Nigeria. Who is to swear about that? Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram, was supposed to be harmless when he was assembling his hypnotised mob. Today, Boko Haram is still holding territory in Nigeria in spite of the valiant efforts of our military.

With disclosures about IPOB’s international slush accounts in Paris from which “funds were being drawn for the organisation’s activities at home and abroad”, with inflows from Holland, Hungary, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Turkey, Singapore and other parts of Europe; IPOB members’ demonstration at the UN, Spain and Hong Kong - one is not so sure that Kanu could be ignored anymore.

My heart goes out to all those who were caught up in the skirmishes. Sadly, when the rain of armed intervention falls, it does so on both freeborn and slave, on the hawk and the dove, on pacifists and warmongers alike.

We should also thank God for little mercies. When I remember what happened in Odi and Zaki Biam, I thank God on behalf of IPOB that the aforementioned Chief Obasanjo is not the president in these times. As president, he took no prisoners. There was no one to negotiate with at the end of the operation because he had virtually erased them from the map. That is why I won’t even buy a fairly used idea on this matter from him.

Don’t get it twisted. Protests are legitimate - as long as they don’t contravene the law, or rend the social fabric, or fuel primitive stereotypes and hate; as long as they are conducted with civility. One of the hallmarks of IPOB apologists in the social media and real life is wanton lowlife rudeness. You can hardly sustain a discussion with them without being insulted.

The governors of the Southeast and the Ohaneze Ndigbo were right to ban IPOB. Every section of Nigeria has elders and political leaders. When young people don’t respect their elders and political leaders who had stood by them when the going was rough, you wonder who could minister to them. Kanu was taking on the federal, local and traditional authorities headlong. Something had to give.

Now that the flames of mistrust between brother and brother have been stoked and re-stoked, what is the gain? Isn’t there a sense in which the IPOB style has alienated other ethnic nationalities? Has the amity that existed between Igbos living in other parts of Nigeria and their hosts not been stabbed in a delicate place?

I have always insisted that President Buhari should run a more inclusive government. His government should champion a return to true federalism instead of the crisis-prone unitary contraption we have now. And he should have a serious dialogue with political leaders from the Southeast - the governors, Ohaneze Ndigbo, federal legislators, political personages and traditional rulers - to address their complaints. There are two sides, in my view, to the coin of governance: (a) benevolence/carrot; (b) ruthlessness/stick. The extent to which a leader dispenses one or the other or a combination of both at the appropriate time determines how successfully he would navigate the treacherous waters of political leadership.