Nnamdi Kanu, Ndigbo and Nigeria
The young Yoruba man was leaving office early to go and receive his visiting Igbo wife undergoing her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) primary assignment in a neighbouring town when he encountered a co-worker who planted in him the seed of doubts that eventually destroyed a beautiful union and set his own life crashing down. The careless remark that would play in his head again and again was that he was being naive to believe that his wife would remain faithful, especially considering that “she is young, she is a corper…and she is Igbo!”
The predilection to stereotype and label people by blaming the conduct of one person on an entire group he or she belongs (age, class, religion or ethnicity) is for me the central message in Tunde Kelani’s movie, ‘Magun’ (Thunderbolt). It speaks to a time like this in our nation when some Yoruba and Igbo irredentists are promoting hate speech in the name of a meaningless superiority war that glorifies some distorted accounts of the past.
The cast of the movie, written by Professor Akinwunmi Isola, included seasoned professionals like Adebayo Faleti, Bukky Ajayi, Uche Obi-Osotule, Lanre Balogun, Wale Macauley, Ngozi Nwosu and the Dr. Larinde Akinleye. The story is woven around Ngozi, (played by Uche, one of Nigeria’s most adored actresses who for some inexplicable reasons, doesn’t feature much in Nollywood) and Yinka (played by Lanre Balogun). The duo met and fell in love at the NYSC orientation camp.
With the insinuation that an Igbo woman could not be trusted and feeling rather insecure and jealous—notwithstanding the fact that he actually met his wife a virgin—Yinka eventually sought the diabolical power of ‘Magun’, the mysterious chastity control which instantly terminates the life of any man who dares to ‘climb’ a straying wife. The snag though is that if the woman played no ‘away game’ within a specified period while still being laced with ‘Magun’, she stood the risk of death. Being a faithful wife, it was Ngozi’s life that was in danger in the movie.
‘Magun’ is fatal and remedies are rare and often not foolproof. So the efforts to break its life-threatening effect on Ngozi provided the entertainment and the drama of existence captured in the movie. But in the final analysis, Ngozi’s redemption came from the family of her irresponsible Yoruba husband, the Yoruba native doctors, her local Yoruba guardian and finally the love-struck Yoruba medical doctor who offered himself as a guinea pig to test the efficacy of ‘Magun’ on the altar of a five-minute enjoyment. He was lucky to survive with an experience he would never forget!
When her tribulation was over and she was confronted with the prospect of another Yorubaman as suitor, Ngozi, quite naturally, was hesitant but her father, who started out as a Yoruba antagonist, saved the day by advising her to follow her heart. He said it would be wrong to blame a whole ethnic group for the misconduct of one man, before giving us that memorable line: “A man is a man; and a race is a race”. =============================== I wrote the foregoing on this page on 22 August 2013 in my piece “Yoruba, Igbo and Media Warriors” at the height of the Igbo-Yoruba verbal confrontation following the unfortunate ‘deportation’ to Anambra State of some Nigerian citizens by the Lagos State government at the time. The “Igbo this, Yoruba that” argument that dominated the period, I argued in my piece, “is unhelpful and detracts from what should be the focus of our attention. I believe it will serve us well if we return to what the real issue is, or at least should be: Whether they are Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba and regardless of their ‘state of origin’, no Nigerian should be discriminated against in any part of the country on account of his or her social status. It is time we put an end to the on-going nonsensical debate between some Igbo and Yoruba commentators and face the real issues of poverty, development and national unity.”
Eventually, sanity prevailed but the madness resurfaced after the 2015 presidential election. With the defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan who was heavily backed by South-east voters and the public declaration by President Muhammadu Buhari that the distribution of opportunities would be according to the number of votes he got in each region, there was always going to be trouble. Then came Nnamdi Kanu who, as I said on Monday, was “egged on by the mob, comprising mostly okada riders with online support from several of his kinsmen in the Diaspora” and was “allowed to take hate speech to an unprecedented level, even by the standards of our country”.
Before I go further, let me commend the Senior Pastor of the Covenant Christian Centre, Pastor Poju Oyemade for his vision in bringing critical stakeholders together every year on the anniversary of our independence so that we can share our fears and aspirations while provoking national engagements for the peace and progress of our country. Every year, people look forward to ‘The Platform’ where I was privileged to speak for a record sixth time on Monday. Meanwhile, some sympathisers of the so-called Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), who were evidently not happy with my presentation, have asked me to explain what I meant by saying Kanu is spreading hate speech.
Hate speech, as I understand it, is any verbal or written statements deliberately meant to offend, insult, intimidate or threaten a person or group of individuals based on ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation etc. In case that sounds a bit vague let me try to be more direct. Basically, if I say ‘I hate this Yoruba man because he is a thief’ that does not qualify as hate speech but if I say ‘because this Yoruba man is a thief all Yoruba people are thieves’, then I am on a slippery slope. That is the kind of things Kanu has been saying about non-Igbo Nigerians. For instance, when Kanu says “anybody attending a Pentecostal church with a Yoruba pastor is an idiot, a complete fool and an imbecile” before adding, “if your pastor is Yoruba, you are not fit to be a human being” or “Pastor Kumuyi should be stoned and dealt with thoroughly if he comes to Aba for his planned crusade”, am I expected to clap for him?
Whatever may be the disposition of anybody to this government, it was bad politics to have allowed Kanu to run riot the way he did, saying unprintable things about several people, including the president. So, when some grandfathers under the aegis of Arewa Youth issued an ultimatum for Igbo people in the North to quit the region, it was obvious that they were responding to the fact that Kanu was allowed to abuse, malign and threaten other Nigerians without anybody in the South-east restraining him.
Therefore, it was on the basis of the foregoing that when on Tuesday, I got a rather instructive mail from a regular reader of this page who lives and works in Canada, I decided to raise a critical point about Kanu and the Ndigbo question to which he also responded. With his permission, I want to reproduce our exchanges: ============================== Dear Segun, I read with dismay President Buhari’s independence message where he premised the recent calls for secession to be based on calls for restructuring. Unfortunately, Nigeria is missing another opportunity to truly evolve into a nation by refusing to answer the Biafra question sincerely; not by brute force but by serious engagement, with a genuine intention to repair and reconcile.
To be clear, I am not in favour of Nnamdi Kanu’s method or message but any objective observer cannot deny identifying with his sentiments on the place of the Igbo in Nigeria. For perspective, the US after their bloody civil war engaged in deliberate healing which included accurate history of events regardless of who would be portrayed as the villains and heroes especially since the events leading to the civil war pertained to slavery. Regardless of their intentional efforts, the flashpoints of the civil war still remain as we have seen recently with the controversies surrounding the confederate monuments that defined that era. We are talking about resurrecting an event that occurred over 150 years ago!
Last month, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, stood before the UN general assembly, not to advertise Canada to the world or promote her contribution to international fights against terrorism or humanitarian crisis but rather to apologize for the ill-treatment meted out to the indigenous people when the Europeans first arrived Canada. Trudeau apologized for an event that occurred over 150 years ago because the hurt is still being felt among the indigenous population and has always haunted the country since. Germany only healed from the World War II because of deliberate efforts at reconciliation and reconstruction but even at that, we are seeing a gradual resurgence of such sentiments from the results of the last parliamentary elections. The agitation of the Scottish people from the larger UK is rooted in hundreds of years of acrimony between both peoples.
Therefore, the premise that the hurt from the Nigerian civil war will dissipate with time is simply childish and whoever subscribes to that idea has failed to learn from history - our own history and the history from elsewhere. The civil war is only 50 years old and we somehow expect the emotions from it to be overtaken by events without any deliberate efforts to address both the factors that led to the war and the fall-outs thereof. And it is most expedient for Nigeria to confront this monster because there seems to be no unbiased documentation of that dark history.
Unfortunately, the history will still be passed on from generation to generation with the added consequence that such oral transmission will be mixed with emotions on both sides thereby deepening the hurt. Little wonder, unarmed IPOB members, most of who did not witness the war will stand and confront armed military men during the last Operation Python Dance. That many Igbos have moved on to establish businesses and residences across the country does not negate the emotional hurt they still carry.
While it seems more convenient and lazy to ignore this past and pretend it did not happen, the consequences will be greater for future generations to handle. The blanket statements and ideological underpinning of non-negotiable Nigeria may ultimately result to her implosion…
NOTE: Interested readers should check the online edition (www.thisdaylive.com) for the continuation.