Ibime:

Woji? Woji was not populated before now

Abagworo, me and you should be mate (late 20's)

20 years ago, all these other places you mentioned did not even exist.

Did these people spring up from the ground? Its all recent immigration.

90% of people you meet are Ikwerre? Abags come on!

Ikwerre do not make up 25% of the population even in their own villages!!!

Biafra4tharmy: The ijaw territories and land belong to the Igbos . Biafra stretched to the atlantic ocean and across the Niger to some part of Delta. Those who have problem with that should swim across the ocean to resettle elsewhere. Ijaws are our beloved run away brothers even Mr President is an Igbo man Mr Ebele Azikiwe Goodluck Jonathan. When Biafra come we must unite with our beloved Ijaw brothers

belvo: So we are then to assume that gej is now enjoying the iboman quota at aso rock,so therefore the presidency will now have to go round again b4 an ibo man will rule again.yoruba-hausa-ibo

belvo: So we are then to assume that gej is now enjoying the iboman quota at aso rock,so therefore the presidency will now have to go round again b4 an ibo man will rule again.yoruba-hausa-ibo

Biafra4tharmy: Nigeria divided us in 1967 to break the might of Biafra resistance and sow the mortal seed of discord between brothers. Until the government re-addressed this issue;after GEJ the south east takes the next slot to aso rock.( however i'm more concern about Biafra)

alj harem:

Hmmmmmm but Nigeria also divided the yorubas as well thanks to Nnamdi Azikwe. I can't recall yorubas being anger like this

Biafra4tharmy: and i cant recall any yorubas fighting a civil war against Nigeria for 30 months?huh?

alj harem: Oturugo aka Andre Uweh I can see you are watching LOL

The issue of the inconsiderate division of Nigeria into three major ethnic hegemonies in line with the dissection of the Nigerian landmass into three by the Niger-Benue rivers is an issue that has not go down well with the rest of the over three hundred major and minor ethnicities in Nigeria.
The division of Nigeria into a tripartite geopolitical entity with an indiscriminately selected major tribe to dominate each of the three geopolitical zones is actually a callous invention of the colonial masters who were always employing their inglorious divide and rule tactics to foment internecine rivalries.
This callous division of Nigeria along ethnic lines have, incidentally enough, become quite useful to the successive Nigerian administrators who have consequently done little to stem the tide of this undue tripartition of Nigeria.
All these are just by the way. The main discussion I engaged in inside this book that centred on the question of whether the so-called three major tribes are really majority tribes in Nigeria.


[b]Are the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba and the Ibo the three most populous tribes in Nigeria?
This book is a scholarly and irrefutable answer of a definite, an exclamatory and a capital ‘NO!’ to the question above[/b].

A careful and detailed analysis of the question of demographic majorities in Nigeria easily refutes and explodes the oft-repeated claim that the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba and the Ibo are the most populous people in Nigeria.
In fact this book is this careful and detailed analytical refutation of the claim that there are only three major tribes in Nigeria and over three hundred minor tribes in Nigeria.
For instance it is a common knowledge among even the lay man on the street that the Hausa people do not constitute a majority ethnic group in Nigeria the moment they are separated from the Fulani and so many other Northern Nigerian peoples who because they spoke the Hausa language as a lingua franca identify themselves as the Hausa people.
In fact that it has become a unwritten common practice to always refer to the Hausa people as the Hausa-Fulani instead of simply as the Hausa. Without the Fulani combination the Hausa people have not the demographic might or the population numbers to constitute a majority ethnic group in Nigeria.

I discussed in this book that the point is that the archetypic Hausa man does not even exist. Professor J.E.G. Sutton, and many other formidable authorities, have repeatedly demonstrated the fact that Hausa is more or less a language and not a people. The Hausa people do not exist in the anthropological sense of the word. What exists for real is a Hausa language which is a West Africa-wide lingua franca.
Who are the Hausa people?... The answers is definitely not the Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara or Kaduna people. All these Northwestern people are not Hausa peoples. But neither are the Bauchi, Gombe, Yobe or Borno peoples Hausa. These Northwestern peoples of Nigeria also not Hausa peoples.
It is only the remaining small group of the Northern states of Katsina, Kano and Jigawa can be referred to as Hausa peoples. But in this book I proved that the Katsina, Kano and Jigawa people are not Hausa peoples.
When all is said and done we are left with the harrowing thought that the archetype Hausa man does not actually exists!
This same manner of the discussion I had on the Hausa people I applied also to the Yoruba and Ibo peoples who are the two other ethnic groups claiming to be majority tribes in Nigeria.
Due to circumstantial and historical incidences during the colonial era the Ibos were unwittingly identified as the majority ethnic group in Eastern Nigeria.

The greater part of this book is actually centred on my subject matter: the fact that the Nupe people are the majority ethnicity in Nigeria. I did not waste my time challenging the majority statuses wrongly claimed by the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo hegemonists. I simply focussed my attention on demonstrating the fact that the population of the Nupe people is actually greater than that of the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo people.

I began this particular discussion by pointing out the fact that the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo people are not the only major ethnic groups in Nigeria. I pointed out the fact that in the East the population of the Ijaw people is more than that of the Ibo people; that in the West the population of the X people is more than that of the Yoruba people; and that in the north the population of the Tiv people is more than that of the Hausa people.
It is really startling, and it strongly smacks of a deliberate conspiracy, that few people, if any body, has ever notice the obvious fact that the Ijaw are more populous than the Ibo; that the X are more populous than the Yoruba and that the Tiv are more populous than the Hausa.

And this is just the beginning. There are some other similar major Nigerian ethnicities, apart from the ones mentioned above, who have been deliberately relegated to the position of ‘minority tribes’ by some mischievous power blocs. I listed and discussed all of these ‘marginalised majority’ peoples in this book.
I pointed out that the Nupe people are more populous than any other ethnic group in Nigeria. Yet the Nupe people have consistently been referred to as a minority people by tribalist propagandists.
The heinous practice of portraying the Nupe people is not the invention of modern Nigerian authorities. It was the colonialists, headed by Sir Frederick Lugard ‘The Anti-Nupe’ and Sir George T. Goldie ‘The Devil’, who initiated this virulent campaign of demographic genocide against the Nupe people.
I actually dedicated a detailed chapter to the anti-Nupe crimes against humanity committed by the trio of Sir Frederick Lugard, George Goldie and the Royal Niger Company.
Nupe is a nation of various sub-tribes including the Dibo, Kakanda, Gupa, Kupa, Basa Nge, and many other peoples. But mischievous census authorities always have a way of carving these Nupe peoples out of the overall Nupe population and thereby demographically reducing the Nupe people to just the speakers of the Bini dialect of that are found mainly in the Zone A section of Niger State.
My complaint is that while the different Nupe sub-tribes are been consciously separated and disunited one from the other, the reverse process is what is being carried out among the so-called three major ethnic groups of Nigeria. In this context I used the Yoruba people as a case study.
Yoruba is heterogeneous collection of different ethnicities and tribes that historically have no ethnic or tribal affiliations whatsoever. Until the imperial conquests of Obalokun at the height of the glory of the Oyo empire, the Ekiti, Ijesha, Ondo, and many other non-Yoruba peoples who are claiming to be Yoruba today had no any ethnic or tribal affiliations with Yoruba whatsoever. Only the Oyo people are truly a Yoruba people.
But then all these historical and sociocultural facts are deftly overlooked by Yoruba propagandists in their mischievous efforts to claim that everybody in Western Nigeria is a Yoruba man.
I pointed out that there is nothing wrong with claiming that the Ekiti, the Ijesha and many others are Yoruba as long as they themselves don’t object to the practise of effacing their heritages and true historical identities in favour of a fictitious Yoruba super race. But then my complaint is: if this can be vigorously pursued for the sake of boosting the image of the Yoruba people why is the reverse of the this practice being imposed on the various Nupe peoples who are actually and really affiliated ethnically and tribally to one another?
Why are the Kakanda, the Dibo, the Gupa, the Basange and many other Nupe being deliberately separated from the Nupe nation?
I pointed out, in some details, that in the hands of the Nupe people lies a potential population power that will transform the Nupe Nation into the First Force in Nigeria.
Apart from the extensive discussions on the demographic and population potentials of the Nupe people I also discussed, in equally comprehensive details, the latent and potential powers that lay on the finger tips of the Nupe Nation and that can readily be channelled and harnessed by the Nupe people to transform the Nupe nation into the most powerful phenomenon in the whole of Nigeria.
The other powers of the Nupe Nation that I discussed in exhaustive details include the Nupe people’s political, religious, historical, sociocultural, literacy rate, and otherwise powers.
The political history of Nigeria is, surprisingly enough, dominated by the shadowy powers of eminent Nupe politicians. From the era of Alhaji Aliyu Makama and Abubakar Dzukogi through the regimes of the General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida and General Abdulsalam Abubakar to the times of Professor Jerry Gana and Mrs Sarah Jibrin, I discussed the untold political impact that Nigerian national leaders who are Nupe have exercised on the course of the political development of Nigeria.
I parenthetically digressed to point out the fact that two of Nigeria’s heads of state, namely General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida and General Abubakar Abdulsalam, are Nupe men.
KinNupe is the home of the most religious people in Nigeria; I demonstrated the fact that the most zealous Muslims, the most passionate Christians and the most committed traditional religionists in Nigeria are to this very day be found only in KinNupe.

afam4eva: I grew up partly in port-hacourt that's dominated by the indigenous Ikwerres(Igboid), Eastern Igbos and Ijaws. PH is like the lagos for the old eastern ethnic groups which also inclued Efik/Ibibios, Ogonis, Ekpeye et al. When i came to lagos, it was very hard to come across an Ijaw person and i saw Ijaw as one of thos eethnic groups that were small in number and were only noticeable in Rivers and Bayelsa states. Fast-forward 2012, the name Ijaw is on everybody's lips. They have come from being a nonentity(not an insult) ethnic group, to being the proclaimed 4th largest ethnic group in Nigeria. Where does that leave the Ibibios and other minorities. I can tell you that Ibibios are more noticeable in Nigeria than Ijaws, so, how did Ijaws come to become the next big thing after Hausa, Igbo(Ibo) and Yoruba.

ekt_bear: So I forgot Kanuri too.

In my opinion, this is what population in Nigeria looks like:

1/2/3. Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa-Fulani in some ordering
4. Akwa Ibom/CR groups
5. Edoids if you consider them one group
6. Tiv
7. Kanuri
8/9. Igala/Nupe
10. Ijoid groups?

Something roughly like this, I suppose?

Basically even if you consider Akwa Ibom/X-river folks as all distinct ethnicities, Edoids all as distinct ethnicities, clearly Tiv, Kanuri, Igala and Nupe are legitimate significant population groups, each more numerous than Ijaw.

ekt_bear: So I forgot Kanuri too.

In my opinion, this is what population in Nigeria looks like:

1/2/3. Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa-Fulani in some ordering
4. Akwa Ibom/CR groups
5. Edoids if you consider them one group
6. Tiv
7. Kanuri
8/9. Igala/Nupe
10. Ijoid groups?

Something roughly like this, I suppose?

Basically even if you consider Akwa Ibom/X-river folks as all distinct ethnicities, Edoids all as distinct ethnicities, clearly Tiv, Kanuri, Igala and Nupe are legitimate significant population groups, each more numerous than Ijaw.

seunfly: i think the problen with tiv, nupe, igala, kanuri and co is that they tend to hide behind hausa/fulani population. This have reduced thier importance and prominence rather it transfer all relivance to hausa /fulani e.g a man from niger, nasarawa, taraba, pleatue, adamawa, kaduna, gombe etc will be asumed to be hausa/fulani. Whare as in south, ijaw stood alone, ishekiri, ogoni, kwere, calabar etc also stand alone this give them identity and relivance in political considration and don't forget every thing is politic (population figure, resource, religion, language and ethnicity). Other thing is that ijaw tend to have more children than any other tribes in southern Nigeria so in the last 20years they came from little to explosion.

killayut:

Many people always mistake Port Harcourt to be the ABA road they drive in to Rivers State from because That is the only part of Rivers State linked by Road. And so when many of them would never say Obosi is Onitsha or Nekede is Owerri or Oba is Onitsha They want to quickly say Oyigbo is Port Harcourt and so on. Before Port Harcourt was founded in 1912 by The British All the Ikwere villages,Okrika villages and other Villages within were existing and having traditional leaders. Port Harcourt is not a Territory but a Town . Isiokpo town which is an Ikwere village is not Port Harcourt. Elele ,Rumuola,Rumuigbo,Elekahia and all the Obio AKPOR are not Port Harcourt But places of their own. Igbo people for their claim of Port Harcourt have at last tried to call all the Igbo or pro Igbo areas of Rivers State Port Harcourt so as to stupidly make the Port Harcourt an Igbo town. The city of Port Harcourt is dominated by the KALABARI Ijaw followed by the Okrika aborigins and then the Ibanis. The Ikweres live in their Ikwere towns that are mainly in Obio Akpor Local government area. The urbanization of Rivers State is only spreading to the North and so making many of the Ikwere towns urbanized. This Urbanization is what is making Igbos refer to every new Urban Ikwere town Port Harcourt which trend would soon extend to Igbo settlements in Imo and Abia states and perhaps eventually make the whole Igbo land Port Harcourt.. The City of Port Harcourt is just Borikiri new lay out, Port Harcourt town which is called Town for short, The satelite town calleed Diobu, Abuloma and the European quarters which became Old GRA. aNY OTHER PLACE is out side the city of Port Harcourt. I am a Rivers man and I know my state Better. Port Harcourt is not like any Lagos to any Eastern group but an Okrika town owned by the Okrika Ijaws and never even disputed by the Ikweres and with very little Ikwere population. When I was in secondary school in Government comprehensive Borikiri Port Harcourt there were very very few Ikweres in the school cos they were all schooling in their villages at County grammar school Ikwere Etche, Eneka, Choba, Rumuomamsi, Elele, Isiokpo, Igwuruta and so on. Eleme, Onne, Oyigbo, Okrika maintown, Igwuruta, Choba are all now Native towns that are urbanized near Port Harcourt and in their respective Local government areas led by various traditional rulers.. They are all different towns.

afam4eva:
Please stop spreading falsehood. Ijaws are not even up 20% of Rivers state. Port-hacourt as it is known today includes those where is called town and those Ikwerre villages. Those Ikwerre villages make up 70% of what is called port-hacourt today.

torkaka:

people are going to astronomical limits to prove a lie! ijaws are not as much as what people are trying to paint them to be!

torkaka:

you missed the point, the reason why people are calling ijaw now is because of political headship and oil! if you doubt look back 15years ago, did anyone mention ijaw in political,social or reasonable discuss? tivs,nupes and igalas were heard of! and just to correct you, it is nupes that hide behind hausa/fulani influence! the tivs of benue don't speak hausa and don't have affirnities with them! the same can be said of igalas who lean more southwards!

seunfly: well you seem like you did not get me i said it before that everything is politics if you read it very well. Howeve tivs and igala or otherr may not speak hausa just like other tribes in the north but politicaly they have not break away from hausa/fulani, today tell me an 5igala man or 5tiv and any other tribe from north that stand alone as his tribe in politic and office especialy fedral institution. Igala man tend to be southern outside office and politic likewise other tribes in the north and this tend to give more relevance to hausa/fulanis and reduce thiers.

DRANOEL: the census figures did not give the ijaw high numbers. ijaw being the 4th largest tribe is just mischief!

consider this, 2006 census figures:

bayelsa(all ijaw)-1.6million people. approximate another 1million for ijaw populations in delta and rivers. you get a total of 2.6million people.

benue (total population)-4.3million.
benue (tiv areas)-3.2million. approximate 1.5million for tiv populations in taraba,nassarawa,plateau and cross rivers(bachave). you get a total of 4.7 million.

so with what magic has ijaw now become 4th largest?
even funnier, who gave them 12million people when the total populations of all ethnic groups in bayelsa,rivers and delta doesn't sum up to 10million

afam4eva:
Please stop spreading falsehood. Ijaws are not even up 20% of Rivers state. Port-hacourt as it is known today includes those where is called town and those Ikwerre villages. Those Ikwerre villages make up 70% of what is called port-hacourt today.

afam4eva:
You're right. Prior to the Niger Delta militancy, many people had never heard of Ijaw but now they're claiming to the the 4th largest ethnic group which i think is a lie. I pity for the Efik/Ibibios and those tribes in the middle-belt.

killayut:

You have never heard of Ijaw cos of your ignorance.or you did not know the people you heard about were Ijaws .LOL. Ijaw miss Nigeriassssss.. IBINABO FIBERESIMA, SISTER JACK, AGBANI DAREGO, DAMIETE GEORGEWILL, IJAW ACTRESSES UCHE JUMBO, OMONI BOLI,HILDA DOKUBO, LATE J.T WEST, and so on, Ijaw owned night clubs in Lagos pyramid, club towers, Princes night club in federal palce hotel long long time ago. IJAW men were the first and last Mr Nigeria held in Lagos OSIMA DOKUBO and co. Check out Ijaw Generals in the armed forces.. More than what Igbos have. JUST A FEW....

killayut:

The 5 Million people based on the population does not mean 5 million Hausa Fulani people. What about the Population of Lagos ? Does it stand for Yoruba population in Lagos ? Why black people no dey fit use their head ? 1.6 million people in Bayelsa. Meaning There are no Bayelsa people elsewhere abi ?

alj harem: BTW Andre and Abagworo I have gotten the name now

His name is HRH Alex Sikaboro

Actually his title is Izon Pere of Lagos HRH Alex Sikaboro

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/04/ijaw-relationship-with-yoruba-blessing-monarch/

belvo: So we are then to assume that gej is now enjoying the iboman quota at aso rock,so therefore the presidency will now have to go round again b4 an ibo man will rule again.yoruba-hausa-ibo