Igbos: Suffering From Collective Amnesia?

By Chuks OLUIGBO

The other day I read a comment on facebook by someone I presume is a concerned Igbo person. It said: “I have said it several times, let Igbos leave the northern states and come back home. There are so many towns in the east where they can settle and do their businesses. They have the population which is an economic advantage. They can engage in manufacturing to cut down massive importation from China. Any Igbo who remains in the north chooses to commit suicide.” And I thought, with all the killings going on in parts of the North at the moment, is it possible that any Igbo person would actually wish to remain there? We will return to this later.

Igbo people, no doubt, are known to be among the most widely-spread and travelled ethnic groups in Africa. Today, there is hardly any part of the world that the Igbos are not found, so much so that it has been said that if men live in the moon, Igbos are there. In Nigeria, they are in a clear lead in internal migrations. They are seen in all other ethnic areas, even in the remotest parts, doing one business or the other and contributing to the socio-economic growth and development of their host communities.

This migratory trend among the Igbo will seem to have been going on long before colonialism. However, from the early years of colonial rule, Igbo migrations gathered momentum. The construction of roads and railways, the emergence of new urban centres in Nigeria, the establishment of cocoa farms in Yorubaland, the rise of Lagos as a major trading centre, the quest for Western education, the establishment of the Nigerian Civil Service and the attendant quest for white collar jobs were among the forces that pulled the Igbo out of their traditional homeland into other parts of Nigeria then. By the time of independence in 1960, many Igbo people from different communities had settled in various places outside Igboland. Writing in 1957, R. J. Harrison Church asserted that the “Ibo are found in temporary work all over Nigeria, and some 20,000 are employed in Fernando Po”.

This trend among the Igbo may seem to be an advantage, but it has also been a source of colossal loss to the people as they are jealoused and hated wherever they have found themselves in other parts of Nigeria, particularly in the North where they have been victims of several calculated attacks. The example below illustrates this point. In February-March 1964, during the sitting of the Northern House of Assembly, honourable members of the House variously urged the then Minister of Land and Survey, Alhaji Ibrahim Musa Cashash, to revoke all Certificates of Occupancy formerly issued to the Igbo people resident in the region; to stop the Igbo from building hotels in the region; to extend the application of Northernisation policy to petty-traders; to send the Igbo in the Post Office in the north back to Igboland; to repatriate all the Igbo working in the Civil Service of Northern Nigeria; to desist from awarding contracts to Igbo contractors in the North; and to give foreign firms in the North a deadline within which to replace all their Igbo staff with people from other ethnic groups.

The events of 1966-1970 – the Igbo genocide of May-October 1966, and the Nigeria/Biafra Civil War – therefore provided a vent for these pent-up grudges against the Igbo. These events severely affected the Igbo people, mostly those who were resident outside Igboland at the outbreak of the civil disturbances. In their hundreds and thousands, Igbo people scattered in all the nooks and crannies of Nigeria began to troop back to Igboland in search of a safe haven. The influx of refugees in Eastern Nigeria, from a conservative estimate, ranged between 1,000,000 and 1,200,000 from the North and half that number from the other two regions – the West and the Mid-west. The death toll is better explained by the assertion that “the resultant genocide is recorded to be second in magnitude only to the Jewish experience in Hitlerite Germany”.

The Igbo people who fled from other parts of Nigeria abandoned everything they had laboured for in the process. Most of those properties went with the war. In the minority areas of Eastern Nigeria, especially Port Harcourt, where 90 percent of the houses were said to belong to the Igbo, the governments of those states seized all Igbo belongings which they branded ‘abandoned property’. But the lessons of the civil war seem to have been lost on the Igbo. We shall elaborate on this later.

Since the end of the civil war, the intimidation, harassment, maiming and killing of the Igbo in the North have not ceased. The Igbo and their property have been the target whenever there are “religious riots” in the North. In many cases, the Igbo have been made to bear the brunt of conflicts among Northern groups and communities. Cases in point are the civil disturbances in some local government areas of Bauchi State between 20-24 April, 1991 in which many Igbo people were killed, despite the fact that the cause of the conflict had its roots in the age­long differences and disagreements between the Hausa/Fulani and the Sayawa ethnic groups of Tafawa Balewa L.G.A. The killing of the Igbo and other non-Muslims in the Sharia-motivated violence in the North in 1999 and thereafter is a further demonstration of this point of view.

Besides these killings, Igbo traders in the North are often made to pay discriminatory shop/store fees. Some state governments have also introduced discriminatory market and taxation policies against Igbo traders. In 1993, for instance, hundreds of Igbo traders in Kaduna took to the streets to protest against the imposition of prohibitive tax and business laws on them. Part of these laws required Igbo petty-traders to supply audited accounts, record of sales and evidences of remittances to the Board of Internal Revenue; original copies and photocopies of Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE); with-holding tax, sales tax and entertainment tax. The protesting Igbo traders closed down their businesses in the metropolis and demanded a review of the obnoxious policies.

Igbo people in Lagos have equally faced similar bitter experiences. For instance, many Igbo traders who began to hawk electronics and allied products in Lagos and its environs at the end of the civil war were often harassed and their wares seized or vandalised by overzealous Yoruba officers and thugs. It was such intimidations that led them to found Alaba International Market. But even in this market, which was built solely by the Igbo, they are still constantly harassed and attacked. For example, in the 1993 demonstrations following the annulment of the June 12 presidential elections purportedly won by a Yoruba, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, Igbo traders at Alaba and in other parts of Lagos had their wares stolen or vandalised and many of them were attacked, maimed or killed.

In the past nine months or thereabouts, the North has again become a danger spot for the Igbos: first, following the post-election violence in parts of the North, and recently, following the Boko Haram bombings. The series of coordinated attacks on Christmas Day 2011 at some churches in the country left several people dead, many of them Igbo. The attacks continued on December 28, 2011, January 5, 2012 and January 26, 2012. In the first week of February 2012, Nigerian newspapers reported the pathetic story of the mass burial in Adazi-Nnukwu, Anambra State, of 13 Igbo victims of Boko Haram attacks. The victims, 12 men and a woman, were reportedly killed by gunmen in Mubi, Adamawa State, while planning for the burial of two of their own who had been killed in the earlier attacks.

Within the same week, Awhum community in Udi Local Council, Enugu State, received six corpses – Steven Offia (a panel beater and spare parts dealer in Yobe State), his wife (Nneka), their three children, and their house-maid. The victims were fleeing from their residence in Damaturu, the Yobe State capital, back to their hometown, Awhum, in a bid to escape Boko Haram’s bloody attacks when their car collided with a trailer coming from the opposite direction at Otukpa in Benue State. They were crushed to death by the trailer. Only the second son of the family, identified as Chibuzo, survived the crash, but he was said to be on the danger list at a hospital in Otukpa. These are just few examples.

Since the Boko Haram resurgence, a number of Igbo people and groups have been making frantic efforts to evacuate Igbos who are stranded in parts of the North. First, the chairman of G.U.O. Motors, Chief Godwin Ubaka Okeke, had taken the lead by sending 20 buses which successfully evacuated a number of Igbos from Maiduguri, the Bornu State capital, accompanied by heavy military escort. Some of the returnees also confirmed as at then that many more Igbos were still stranded in Maiduguri and that the killings were being carried out from house to house. Many too, especially corps members, were said to have been sleeping in the motor park for as long as 4 days, with no means to leave the state. Some Igbos who left on their own without escort were reportedly ambushed and killed on their way.

Also, on Thursday, February 2, 2012, over 150 Igbo citizens who were stranded in Maiduguri, Borno State, arrived at Ninth Mile Corner, Enugu three days after the same number of persons returned home due to the upsurge of Boko Haram activities in Northern Nigeria. The free luxury buses were provided by Igboville, a social network group of Igbo professionals in Nigeria and the Diaspora. Some of the returnees who spoke to reporters said they relocated to the bush for many days until they got hint of the free buses.

While receiving the returnees, founder of Igboville, Emeka Maduewusi, who spoke through Mrs Nelo Fina, implored them to quickly resettle in the South-East while the government sorted out the security situation. He called on the South-East governors to ensure that school children among the returnees were absorbed into different institutions in the zone and also pleaded with politicians and well-meaning Nigerians to assist in evacuating Ndigbo still left in the North from danger spots, adding that the evacuation of Igbo people would continue until every Igbo that is willing to leave is enabled to leave.

From all this, the pertinent question is: What, really, is wrong with the Igbo person? From all that the Igbo people suffered in other parts of Nigeria, especially in the North, in the immediate months preceding the civil war, and their harrowing experiences during and immediately after the war, who would have thought that they would ever go back to those areas where their brothers and sisters had been brutally massacred in their hundreds and thousands, and where they had been forced to abandon all that they had worked for barely a few years earlier? But that is exactly what has happened.

So, are the Igbo people suffering from collective amnesia? Is it possible to count how many Igbo lives that have been lost in riots in Northern Nigeria since 1953 when the first Igbo massacre occurred in Kano? Can anyone quantify in monetary terms Igbo investments destroyed in the North within the same period? How many times have the Igbo people been made to abandon all their belongings in other parts of Nigeria to seek safety in their homeland? How many times have they been evacuated from particularly the North? How many times more are they ready to face such evacuation? Why do they keep going back there? What is the attraction for them? Why would any Igbo person prefer to remain in a zone where he is hunted like game? What is in those areas that Igboland is lacking? How can these things be provided to bring the Igbo back to their homeland? How much longer will the Igbo people continue to develop swamps in the West and deserts in the North while Igboland continues to suffer gross undevelopment? What is wrong in developing Igboland and returning home to do business in Igboland?

For those Igbo investors who claim they are waiting for the South-East governors to create enabling environment in Igboland before they could go to invest in their homeland, what enabling environment did the Lagos governor create for you that you are so willing to acquire a swamp for N25m and sand-fill it with another N25m? What enabling environment did you find in the North where your investments are burnt down at the slightest provocation, and your life is not spared too? And for those who claim that they are attracted to Lagos, Kano and other parts of Nigeria because of the population there, how come you have not realised that you are the ones boosting the population of those areas? Have you not noticed how deserted a city like Lagos looks during Christmas when many Igbos travel home? Have you ever imagined what Igboland would be if half of the Igbo investments in Lagos alone were brought down to Igboland?

But there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the Igbo person. I am tempted to call it foolish wisdom. It reminds me of this folktale in our childhood days about a sheep which had three children. She asked them one after the other: “How many times will something happen to you before you learn your lesson?” “Three times,” the first answered. “Two times,” answered the second. But the wisest of them all, Ebule Ako, said: “As it is happening to me that first time, I’m already learning my lesson.” True, a wise person does not strike his foot against the same stone twice. Unfortunately, while the Igbo people keep thinking they are wise, they have actually allowed the same stone to hurt them a million times. While claiming to be the proverbial Ebule Ako, they have in reality acted like the first two foolish sheep. No wonder Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, that great lover of the Igbo race, during his visit to Igbo traders at the Lagos Trade Fair Complex, addressed them as foolish goats. “Ewu kwenu!” he greeted them several times, because they had again allowed themselves to be used to develop from the scratch the three major markets at the complex – ASPMDA, Balogun and Progressive.

Ndigbo must at this point begin to think home. They must begin to internalise the age-old wisdom that east or west, home is the best, stop pursuing an ever-elusive pan-Nigerianism and invest at home. Unless they do this, they will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past, and Igboland will be worse for it.