Osinbajo’s peace building
Ihave a prophecy: Nigeria will endure. Amity will trump hate. Peace will wrestle down strife. Nation-builders will arise and send tribalists out of business. The scales will fall from the eyes of the younger generation and they will see the futility of inheriting their ancestors’ impassioned mistakes. Those who are waiting to replay the fratricidal horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia in Nigeria will wait until they expire.
Three separate developments within the past week convince me that Nigeria is not the basket case naysayers have always branded it to be. First was the viral video of a robbery incident at a bank in Owerri in which a policeman of Igbo extraction and father of eight, Sergeant Chukwudi Iboko, was killed. His family cried out for help as the authorities were tardy in responding to the family’s immediate needs.
Lagos-based Punch newspapers and social activist Kayode Ogundamisi led 390 noble Nigerians to demonstrate overwhelming love and fellow feeling by setting up a GoFundMe account through which Nigerians from different parts of the world raised over $16,000 for the family of the slain sergeant within the first 24 hours.
The platform for donations for the fallen Igbo cop was set up by elements from Southwest Nigeria but the subscription to the noble cause was pan-Nigerian. Check out a few of the donors: Adefemi Olagunju ($300); Uche Onyema (100); Nosa Egharevba ($50); Abubakar Mohammed ($5); Bolaji Akinboro (800); Praague Gideonn ($100); Mariam Imoisili ($100); Ifeoma Mba ($200); Elkanah Chawai ($150); Odemi Sagay ($20); Adebayo Olufemi ($300); Adam Eisen ($500); Ifeoma Mba ($200) and several anonymous donors of $1,000 each.
What more proof does one need that there is inherent goodness in Nigerians, away from the manipulations of political carpetbaggers and merchants of hate whose sole claim to relevance is their capacity to sow seeds of suspicion and inter-tribal derision.
One Ekugo Andy was so impressed by the GoFundMe success that he wrote: “An Igbo policeman who faced armed robbers in Zenith bank in Owerri got killed… Now a Yoruba man, through Punch Newspaper (Owned by a Yoruba family) brought the story to the front burner and started GoFundMe for the late cop’s family. Within 2 days, over $16,000 had been raised and in the list of names of people who donated were Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and every other tribe and tongue in Nigeria… While we hated, cursed and called each other names, underneath that madness, our humanity rose above hate and bigotry and we came together as one indivisible family….
As that was going on, Acting President Yemi Osinbajo was holding discussions with Northern leaders followed by their counterparts from the Southeast. The parley was on the heels of the recent Biafra agitation and the retaliatory quit notice issued to Igbos to vacate Northern towns and cities by a coalition of Arewa Youths. For a change, it was commendable that the government saw the need to quickly nip the seed of hate in the bud before growing out of proportion.
In my column of 16 June 2014, “Beware the Diet of Hate”, I did warn that “the older generation of Nigerians seem to be handing over their traditional ‘enemies’ to their children in a classic case of transgenerational perpetuation of ethnoanthropophobia and naked primitive narrow-mindedness”. I went on to assert that “Nothing could be more dangerous than the raging war going on quietly in cyberspace and rending our social fabric — No guns, no bombs, no arrows, no armoured carriers; just well appointed words of derision and hate dispensed over and over again until one is left with no choice than to conclude that if those haters ever got their hands on lethal weapons and had the opportunity of translating their passionate revulsion into action, they would depopulate whole sections of the country”. Thank God, Nigeria is now listening.
It ought to be possible for leaders of various persuasions in Nigeria to sit together in a civilised setting and share perspectives towards finding common grounds. The parley with those leaders helped douse tension. The government must respond with similar alacrity to other such problems especially the scourge of armed herdsmen terrorising farming communities all over Nigeria. If that is not stemmed, it could lead to a conflagration far worse than the averted tribal war aforementioned.
The third cheering development that warns you to write off Nigeria at your own peril was the capture of the billionaire Tzar of armed robbery/kidnapping in Nigeria, Chukwudubem Onwuamadike, a.k.a. Evans whose empire spread from the Southeast to the Southwest of Nigeria. I don’t want to spoil the police party by asking why it took seven long years to cage the professional criminal, but the police authorities will now have to look inwards for collaborators within their ranks who must have given cover to the felon to make him invincible for so long.
If his last victim, Mr. Donatus Dunu, a pharmacist from whose family the negotiated sum of N150 million was collected with the kidnappers reneging on their side of the bargain, demanding additional N300 million before release— if that man had not escaped and tipped off the police, would they be singing hallelujah today? By his own admission, Evans raked in over N3 billion from kidnapping and robbery in less than seven years!
All the same, congratulations to the Nigerian police even as we know that Buhari’s broom still has quite a bit of sweeping to do.