The ‘truth’ Fani-Kayode told the Igbo

CHUKS OLUIGBO

If you want to hear the truth about yourself, the best person to ask is always your enemy because your friend wouldn’t want to hurt you. It’s most likely your enemy who would be bold enough, in a fit of anger, to call you ‘smelly mouth’, and then you would be so ashamed that you would go look for the best and most effective mouthwash in town to cure your halitosis. Your enemy would have done you a world of good. I think this is what Femi Fani-Kayode (FFK) has done for the Igbo, even though I don’t believe he is an enemy.

I will not dwell on all the points that the former aviation minister raised in his article “The bitter truth about the Igbos”, which, understandably, has gone viral on the internet and social media. Just to say that while he was wrong on many counts, choosing to stand history on its head, on the issue of ownership of Lagos, he merely re-echoed what Alhaji Usman Liman said in the Northern House of Assembly in February-March 1964: “North is for Northerners, East for Easterners, West for Westerners, and the Federation is for us all.” Here are portions of Fani-Kayode’s article to illustrate my point:

“I have never heard of a Yoruba wanting to give the impression to the world that he is an Igbo, an Ijaw, an Efik or a Hausa-Fulani or claiming that he is a co-owner of Port Harcourt, Enugu, Calabar, Kano or Kaduna. Yet more often than not some of those that are not of Yoruba extraction but that have lived in Lagos for some part of their lives have tried to claim that they are bona fide Lagosians and honorary members of the Yoruba race. Clearly, it is time for us to answer the nationality question. These matters have to be settled once and for all...

“Lagos and the southwest are the land and the patrimony of the Yoruba and we will not allow anyone, no matter how fond of them we may be, to take it away from us or share it with us in the name of ‘being nice’, ‘patriotism’, ‘one Nigeria’ or anything else. The day that the Yoruba are allowed to lay claim to exactly the same rights and privileges that the indigenous people in non-Yoruba states and zones enjoy and the day they can operate freely and become commissioners and governors in the Niger Delta states, the north, the Middle Belt and the south-east we may reconsider our position. But up until then we shall not do so. Lagos is not a ‘no-man’s land’ but the land and heritage of the Yoruba people. Others should not try to claim what is not theirs...

“Guests, no matter how welcome, esteemed, cherished and valued they are, cannot become the owners of the house no matter how comfortable they are made to feel within it. Those guests will always be guests. Lagos belongs to the Yoruba and to the Yoruba alone. ALL others that reside there are guests, though some guests are far closer to us than others. The Igbos are the least close, the most distant and the least familiar with our customs and our ways.”

Well, I think Fani-Kayode has given the Igbo a raw piece of his mind, and he made sense to me. I’m not particularly interested in what the Nigerian constitution guarantees Nigerian citizens; the constitution has hardly protected any citizen at critical moments. You may also argue that, as a former federal capital, Lagos is a peculiar case, but does that make it any less a Yoruba territory? So, beyond the insults, half-truths and the outright distortion of history that he dished out, what I think FFK has said to the Igbo is this: you may have contributed to the development of Lagos, but you really have no stake when the chips are down. So, go back home and develop your homeland.

If we understand it this way, then it will boil down to the very same thing some of us have been telling ourselves for aeons. Some months ago I did a two-part piece “Igbos, think home!” published in BusinessDay. Before then I had asked, “Are Igbos suffering from collective amnesia?” In “Igbos, think home!” particularly, I urged the Igbo Diaspora to begin to think of returning some of their investments to Igboland. This is basically because, following ugly incidences in many parts of the country in recent times, not a few Nigerians are asking: can this country ever be one? They are right in asking – don’t mind the hullaballoo about centenary celebration.

This is certainly not what we all desire, but for now it’s the reality we know. The Nigeria of our collective dream has yet to happen – a Nigeria where every citizen, irrespective of his ethnic nationality or state of origin, can freely live in any part of the country without any fear of molestation, and be counted as a bona fide citizen of that area and have equal rights and privileges with every other person there without any discrimination, without being constantly reminded of whence he or his father before he came. Until then, let’s continue to think along ethnic lines; let’s continue to live with these primordial divisive sentiments – the very sentiments that Femi Fani-Kayode’s article has again brought to the fore.

So, while we wait for that Nigeria to happen, I continue to urge my Igbo brothers in Lagos to heed Fani-Kayode’s warning and desist from desiring Lagos as their own. Lagos does not and cannot belong to the Igbo. Igbo people in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria should remember that they are in those places to make money. Make your money quietly and go back home to develop your homeland. Let’s stop arousing hatred and jealousy through ostentatious flaunting of wealth. Let’s shed off this forgetfulness, this amnesia that has eaten deep into our fabrics. And let’s stop pursuing an ever-elusive pan-Nigerianism and invest at home. In the Nigeria that we know, Igboland is all we’ve got.

And then, I have to say that I do not believe that FFK spoke for the Yoruba people. But at the same time, I do not doubt that he already has a large followership among the Yoruba youth. If you doubt this, google FFK’s article and read the reactions trailing the post. That is why I expect well-meaning Yoruba elders, in the coming days, to dissociate themselves from FFK’s article and tell him to stop preaching hate. Not to do this is to arouse suspicion of complicity.

To conclude, what I said in the first part of “Igbos, think home!” can bear repeating here: “Supposing, just supposing, considering the vagaries of our daily existence in this hole of a country, something happens to Nigeria right now? Sorry to say, but given the unquantifiable loss the Igbo have suffered, in man and material, in riots across Nigeria since 1953, it would be most tragic if, this time around, the Igbo are caught napping, with all their eggs in one wrecked basket.” A word should be enough for the wise.