CLANNISHNESS AND CRONYISM AMONG ANAMBRA PEOPLE

Nigeria is a nation of nations what with more than 250 ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups. It was Lord Lugard who cobbled Nigeria’s many different ethnic groups together for administrative convenience. Upon our attainment of political independence in 1960, we opted for federalism as it is believed to be suitable for countries with diversities in many areas. Many federal states had collapsed, however. Think about Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and others. Nigeria would have dismembered but for divine intervention. On many occasions, it came to the precipice only to be pulled back from it. Didn’t Nigeria experience a fratricidal civil war between 1967 and 1970? And the Maitatsine religious uprising in the 1980s threatened the corporate existence of Nigeria as one united and indivisible country. More so, the annulled June 12, 1993 Presidential election bifurcated the country into opposing groups and stoked up political tension in our country.

Till now, Nigeria has not known true peace as the Boko Haram insurgent group and other separatist groups are engaged in centrifugal deeds in the country. The members of the Boko Haram group want to create and install theocratic Islamic caliphate in the country, which will stretch from the North to the South as they believe that they’ve the divine right to rule Nigeria. And the IPOB separatist group is with the notion that the Igbo people are being given a raw deal in Nigeria. So, Nigeria, as at now, is gripped and held by the jugular of ethnic hatred and distrust, which undermines the peace and unity of the country.

But, sadly, as it is at the national level so it is at the state level. And Anambra State readily comes to my mind. When Mr. Peter Obi was in the saddle of power, and at the tail end of his leadership of the state, he carried out recruitments into the state civil service to strengthen and beef it up. But the recruitment exercise was tilted, skewed, and made to favour people who hail from a particular town. Merit was sacrificed on the altar of clannishness, nepotism, and cronyism. And, it should not be the practice of some civil servants in the top cadres and other influential people in the states of the federation to help their kith and kin to become heads of units at the expense of more qualified people. Our people’s favourable disposition to nepotistic attitudes and tendencies undermine the effectiveness of the civil service in many states of the federation. Have we forgotten that the civil service is the pivot and engine room of the government as civil servants help to formulate government policies and execute them, too?

It is not only in the area of the state civil service that primordial clannishness manifests and rears its ugly heads. When it comes to politicking and the election of our governor and representatives in the National Assembly, Anambra people will be unduly influenced by the factors of consanguinity and clannishness. Those who refuse to pitch their tent with their kinsmen vying for elective positions are considered and deemed to be oafs, nitwits, betrayers, and unprogressive elements.

In the run-up to the Anambra central senatorial election in 2011, I lent my unqualified and unalloyed support to the late Professor Dora Akunyili, Nigeria’s former Minister of Information. My supporting her candidature in the election became an invidious task for me. I was ribbed and severely criticised for backing her candidature. And her political foes threatened to liquidate me via fetish and mystical means. So, when I had a bus accident, and my right hand was caught between the body of the bus and a big drainage, not a few people attributed it to the fetish malediction purported to have been invoked and placed on me by our political foes and rivals.

But my love for Professor Dora Akunyili stemmed from the fact that she executed altruistic deeds during her headship of NAFDAC. She checkmated the influx of noxious and substandard drugs into our markets. And she saved Nigeria from implosion when she called for the invocation of the doctrine of necessity during the troubled and uncertain times of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s leadership of Nigeria. Professor Akunyili hailed from an area which is different from mine, although we both are Anambra natives.

In the recent past, I wrote an open letter to Chief Osita Chidoka, my kinsman, advising and urging him to shelve his political ambition for now because the time is not auspicious. However, recently, a pal of mine is visibly irked by my writing to Chief Chidoka.

In civilised countries, a son may belong to a political party different from his father’s without their being at dagger’s drawn with each other. And, did Barack Obama become the President of America based only on the coattail of the support and votes of black Americans?