₦airaland Forum

NIGERIA’S restive Southeast is right to be bothered by the postings to military formations in their region that seem to indicate that the federal government has an axe to grind with them. Last week, they listed the postings, including names of officers, and wondered whether it was not a pretext for something more sinister, like a general clampdown far more excessive and provocative than the hundreds of checkpoints that riddle and suffocate their region. Someone even controversially listed some 11 security and presidential officials from the core North who exclusively met in the nation’s Security Council to deliberate on how to solve the south-eastern question. Other regions were, however, represented in the meeting, including Vice President Yemi Osinbajo; but it is a testimony to the anxiety and tension bifurcating the country that someone tried to insinuate a sinister agenda into the presidency’s countermeasures.

The burning of police stations, murder of policemen and soldiers at checkpoints, and the rambunctious exhibitionism of IPOB’s Eastern Nigeria Security Network (ESN), particularly in the past few weeks, seem to have persuaded the federal government to propose new but so far undisclosed security measures to deal with the problem. Consequently, the region now fears a brutal clampdown that would project and reinforce the alleged ethnic antipathy President Muhammadu Buhari and his administration supposedly show towards the Igbo. This is the impression the administration’s attitude towards them has created; and perhaps it does not matter whether they are right or wrong. For instance they have groaned under innumerable checkpoints in the region far in excess of the ones in banditry and insurgency-prone regions. They think it is deliberate; as indeed the EndSars dynamics and its aftermath showed when it emerged that police operations in some northern states were, and probably still are, less severe than experienced in the Southeast.

Violently confronting law enforcement paraphernalia in the Southeast inevitably attracts a fierce response from the government. But how that response is calibrated will demonstrate the sophistication and depth of the government, including how adept they are at administering a complex and multiethnic society, and how exquisite their vision of a united and prosperous country really is. The National Security Council resolutions that authorised new but undisclosed measures against the violence in the Southeast are a product of the perspectives of the security officers and administrative officials who attended the meeting. While it is true that not only Hausa/Fulani officers attended the meeting, the Southeast believes the meeting was still skewed in favour of the former, and that its resolutions were an indication of the worldview of the core North and a reflection of its poor appreciation of the Igbo worldview. The Southeast, not to say other regions, also fear that the administration has not presented a great track record of analytical capacity to help produce fair, concise, coherent and visionary solutions to contemporary challenges dangerously morphing into ethnic and religious dissent.

The rather flamboyant but fiery rhetoric of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, may in fact have triggered and reinforced the Buhari administration’s attitude to the crisis in the Southeast. Mr Kanu has a sharper tongue, more charismatic and resonating rhetoric, more presence, and more daring than the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) from which his group broke off. He is probably more superficial than the MASSOB leader, Ralph Uwazuruike, and even more grandiloquent and egotistical, but he has captured the imagination of the disaffected in the region, and has spoken to their base and nostalgic notions of Biafra. Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe speaks of the nuanced and intellectual Biafra of the mind; but Mr Kanu speaks sadly more piercingly of the more tangible and gratifying Biafra of the physical. It takes humongous campaigns to persuade the oppressed and deeply marginalized people of the Southeast to follow the much better perspective and narrative of Sen Abaribe.

So far, despite the lack of enunciation of the new measures, there is nothing to show that the federal government and the Security Council have a proper understanding of the crisis in the Southeast or of the causes of the lawlessness now suffusing the region. They will in all probability be predicating their countermeasures on the wrong understanding of the problem and, worse still, will undergird them with even wronger parameters. The burning of police stations and murder of security agents, assuming these can be put down to IPOB and ESN, mask and distort the crisis and are symptoms of much larger and deeper fractures, some of them harking back to decades of political and cultural animosities. A sensible and enterprising administration will assemble the right brains to examine the crisis, lay bare the dynamics of the problem, and suggest solutions. Nothing indicates that such tasking and rigorous exercises were done by the Security Council, or that emotions did not becloud their reasoning and judgement when they reportedly met thrice to look at the widespread breakdown of law and order. There is also nothing to suggest that the administration is not about to sleepwalk into another insurgency in the Southeast probably deadlier than the unresolved bloodletting in the Northeast.

It is not an exaggeration to doubt the capacity of this administration to understand and manage the ongoing crisis, and not out of place to even cast aspersion on them for bungling past crises. They persisted in supporting and propagating the merits of open grazing to the point of turning a blind eye to the mayhem, killings and land seizures that accompany it; they pontificated on and embraced the ideas of seizing states’ water bodies and other resources not granted to them by the constitution; they suborned law enforcement and security agencies to placate and excuse herdsmen who pillaged communities and flagrantly bore arms, until their host communities began to procure arms to defend themselves; and they have structured federal appointments in such a way as to burnish the credentials of core North technocrats and officials almost to the total exclusion and alienation of officials from other parts of the country. It is difficult to see how the current crisis in the Southeast or any other part of the country can be solved without addressing these deep-seated grievances and fundamental notions of the federal government as a bias and spiteful entity.

If this column is right, the acceptability of Mr Kanu and IPOB, even in the Southeast, is limited. Many south-easterners view him with distrust, see him as a tinpot megalomaniac, object to his scornfulness and supercilious air, suspect he is simply feathering his own nest, and fear that power in his febrile hands would be more misused than the worst dictator could attempt. But the federal response to the burning of police stations and murder of security officers has seemed to be sadly conditioned by Mr Kanu and IPOB’s theatrics, not to say the faceless unknown gunmen running rampant in the region. A better approach will be to sift the wheat from the chaff, and like true leaders and statesmen seeking to understand what the crisis in the Southeast is telling the nation and the government in particular, find ways to remedy the grievances, and put together conciliating policies devoid of guns and bombs.

If the administration is not too far gone to reflect on how badly it has itself contributed to the crisis in the Southeast, and if they will humble themselves to listen to the remonstrations of the Igbo, they may yet hear from their high horses and make amends. But if they will not hear, let them take care not to wilt before the bitter and withering lessons of history as they trigger insurgencies on two fronts when, like Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 in their invasions of Russia, they have not been able to pacify the first front.

https://thenationonlineng.net/mismanaging-ipob-southeast-crisis/

longetivity:
It is very clear, Fulani don't like the IGBOS

If this column is right, the acceptability of Mr Kanu and IPOB, even in the Southeast, is limited. Many south-easterners view him with distrust, see him as a tinpot megalomaniac, object to his scornfulness and supercilious air, suspect he is simply feathering his own nest, and fear that power in his febrile hands would be more misused than the worst dictator could attempt.

Asapchris:
it’s clear but Igbo’s to doesn’t help themselves, by insulting and hating on yorubas. You guys needs to wise up and create a strong ally with yoruba so that you guys won’t be as isolated later on. Fulani hates you and you too hate your southern brother is there sense there?

Asapchris:
it’s clear but Igbo’s to doesn’t help themselves, by insulting and hating on yorubas. You guys needs to wise up and create a strong ally with yoruba so that you guys won’t be as isolated later on. Fulani hates you and you too hate your southern brother is there sense there?

Igbochief001:
We hate yorubas we voted obj
We hate Yorubas abiola got over 40% votes in every igbo state even when our son was vp to tofa

So me which igbo man got 20% vote from Yorubas even zik ?

And u are here talking about hate

Which tribe in Nigeria has invested more into yoruba land more than Igbos ? What has yorubas ever done for Igbos

You would talk about abandoned property ..lamo lagos was the capital area there was no how federal government could allow that in the face of international community watch ...if the building were in ibadan u would have done same

alfasexy:
Ally with backstabbers? Satan forbid.

Asapchris:
Forget about the %vote I know many Igbo guys and woman that used to abuse Yoruba very well here in Lagos. Even Ezinne lose her job because she called one Yoruba guy efemanu which her Binni manager heard saying and the manager sacked her same day bro. I knew a lot of them like that not to mention.

Igbochief001:
We hate yorubas we voted obj
We hate Yorubas abiola got over 40% votes in every igbo state even when our son was vp to tofa

So me which igbo man got 20% vote from Yorubas even zik ?

And u are here talking about hate

Which tribe in Nigeria has invested more into yoruba land more than Igbos ? What has yorubas ever done for Igbos

You would talk about abandoned property ..lamo lagos was the capital area there was no how federal government could allow that in the face of international community watch ...if the building were in ibadan u would have done same

IGBOSON1:
When i hear a Yoruba or Fulani accuse Igbo of hate, i just laugh! When i hear such accusations, i always tell them we can list actual cases of hate by Igbos towards them and vice-versa, and then see exactly who hates who! Once i say this, they japa and i don't hearf rom them again!

Probably, what they want is for Igbos to lie down before them, accept the lower class status they want to impose on us and our region, and then pledge our unalloyed allegiance to 'one Nigeria' no matter how unfavourable it has been towards us from the late 60s to date!

Asapchris:
Forget about the %vote I know many Igbo guys and woman that used to abuse Yoruba very well here in Lagos. Even Ezinne lose her job because she called one Yoruba guy efemanu which her Binni manager heard saying and the manager sacked her same day bro. I knew a lot of them like that not to mention.

Asapchris:
Forget about the %vote I know many Igbo guys and woman that used to abuse Yoruba very well here in Lagos. Even Ezinne lose her job because she called one Yoruba guy efemanu which her Binni manager heard saying and the manager sacked her same day bro. I knew a lot of them like that not to mention.