IGBO AND THE PROVERBIAL RAINFALL

Permit me at this point to invoke an ancient African idiom which has its roots in Igbo wisdom: onye na amaghi ebe mmiri bidoro mawa ya, agaghi ama ebe o kwusiri (He who does not recognise the point at which the rain began to beat him would not recognise when the rain ceases to fall altogether).For Igbo people in Nigeria, the rainfall ensued in the early 19th century when the British first explored the Lower Niger (I will put aside, for today’s purposes, the preceding hellfire that was black African slavery and the Igbo’s share of hell in it).The rain began to beat us from January 1914 when Lord Fredrick Lugard completed the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates into Colonial Nigeria and became its first Governor-General. The Igbo did not have a say as to whether they desired to become a part of such a contraption or not.The clouds lifted ever so briefly and the Igbo enjoyed a brief sunshine in Nigeria in the decade before and a few years after independence. Having embraced Christianity and western education with enthusiasm, they quickly rose to hold sway in the federal civil service, military, academia, commerce and industry – the Jews of West Africa were on the march, toiling, sweating and swinging upwards, to the envy and hatred of their compatriots.

The Igbo in Nigeria became quickly drenched in that awesome rain by way of separate episodes of pogrom: the Jos massacre in 1945, the Kano massacre in 1953 and the September 29, 1966 massacre in which tens of thousands of Igbo men, women and children were slaughtered. This last event led directly to the civil war of 1967-1970, which in turn resulted in mass starvation and deliberate anti-Igbo genocide.And the rain has not abated. The bloody rain has continued to beat Igbo people, resulting in organised anti-Igbo massacres in Kano in 1980, Maiduguri in 1982, Yola in 1984, Gombe in 1985, Kaduna in 1986, Bauchi in 1991, Funtua in 1993, Kano in 1994, Damboa in 2000 and the Apo 6 massacre in 2005.The ongoing nihilistic slaughter of Igbo people by an extremist militant group known as Boko Haram is yet to be documented. But there can be no question that a disproportionate percentage of the thousands of victims, dead or maimed or permanently impoverished, is made up of Igbo people.The foregoing non-exhaustive examples occurred exclusively in northern Nigeria.

They also represent occasions when Igbo people had been massacred by northern Nigerian Muslims who had been provoked not by any direct misconduct by the Igbo but perhaps because the Prophet Mohammed was insulted in Denmark by some European artist or because Allah’s name had been taken in vain in Los Angeles by an American satirist.There is, therefore, a sense in which by simply being Igbo, Christian and entrepreneurial, the Igboman is adjudged guilty and vengeful punishment is indiscriminately and randomly applied on a recurring basis.THE COUP THAT CONDEMNED US ALLOn 15 January, 1966, a few young Nigerian army officers led by an Igbo officer, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, carried out Nigeria’s first coup d’état. This resulted in the deaths of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, a prominent northern Nigerian of the Fulani ethnic stock and the Prime Minister, Sir Tafawa Balewa, also a northern Nigerian Fulani.

Although the coup was foiled primarily by another Igboman, Nigeria’s first Major-General in the Colonial Army, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, nevertheless, the belief prevailed in northern Nigeria that Hausa leaders were singled out for elimination by Igbo people who had a grand design for political dominance.This situation gave rise to a retaliatory pogrom in which tens of thousands of Igbo people were murdered in northern Nigeria. This led to the mass flight back to the Eastern Region of as many as two million Igbo people.It is conceded that the execution of the coup in question resulted in unintended consequences. The ethnic composition of the putschists, the ethnic origin of the individuals killed, as well as the eventual assumption of power by Gen. Ironsi, himself an Igboman, created the erroneous impression that the coup was an ethnic-biased putsch organised mostly by Igbo officers in furtherance of Igbo hegemonic agenda.However, I must insist that the coup was purely a military affair and that the civilian Igbo population knew nothing about it and had absolutely nothing to do with it.Gen. Ironsi himself was not part of either the planning or the execution of the coup.
Once the coup plotters lost control of events, General Ironsi was invited to take office as the military Head of State by the circumstance of his position as the most high-ranking military officer and the General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army at that time.There was neither a grand Igbo civilian conspiracy to overthrow a northern-controlled government nor to impose a unitary system of government, the phantom charges for which the Igbo people have paid and continue to pay a terrible price in Nigeria today.It must also be noted that there have been several military coups in Nigeria since January 15, 1966 and yet the ethnic kinsmen of the perpetrators of such coups were not subjected to mass slaughter or wanton destruction of their property and places of worship.But above all, on July 29, 1966, the northern officer corps themselves executed a retaliatory counter-coup in which the Head of State, Gen. Aguiyi Ironsi, was killed and over 300 military officers and men of Igbo origin were massacred. Why didn’t matters simply end there?Eventually, the crisis reached its peak in May 1967 with the secession of the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region from Nigeria.

The Republic of Biafra was declared and it was headed by the British public school- and Oxford-educated Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegu-Ojukwu.The secession quickly led to a civil war after talks between former army colleagues, Yakubu Gowon and Ojukwu and the Aburi peace deal collapsed.The Republic of Biafra lasted only until January 1970 after a campaign of starvation by the Nigerian Army with the support of Egypt, Sudan and the United Kingdom led to a decisive victory for the Nigerian side.

You have not written anything new. The only thing you people do in all your life is complain and whine! If you can't compete in Nigeria then you are screwed! And what is the 'Jews of Africa'? You are not proud to be Ibo again? Where is that picture of the alibi Jews with big women handbags?? LWTMB!