PeeCeeJay By Jideofor Adibe Why Jibrin Ibrahim was wrong on the ‘Igbo Question’ Email: pcjadibe@yahoo.com Twitter: @JideoforAdibe I thought I was done with writing about Biafra –
after three articles on the subject that sought to address the issue from
different perspectives. However following the bold effort by Dr Jibrin Ibrahim to re-frame the Biafra discourse and the
flurry of reactions it elicited especially from Professors Chidi Odinkalu and Okechukwu Ibeanu, I had a
strong urge to weigh in on the conversations.
For me, when I read any article on the agitations
for Biafra, there are usually two questions in my mind: How do we frame the
agitation? And what should be the prognosis for action? In his widely circulated article last week,
‘Resolving the Igbo Question’, Dr Jibrin Ibrahim (Jibo), contends (rather cynically) that the “Igbos we are
told need emancipation from an oppressive Nigeria which has been oppressing
and marginalizing them since independence. Karl Marx would ask them if all
groups in Nigeria have not been oppressed and marginalised as well.” Jibo further argues
that what “the Igbo intellectual class has done”, is to “develop a coherent
marginalisation thesis, which the Igbo lumpen proletariat took and is running
with.” He concludes by arguing that the “biggest failure of the Igbo elite is
the incapacity to play the political game.” Chidi Odinkalu, in his response, which is replete with
‘rhetorical flourishes’ and a few inaccuracies (such as accusing Jibo “conflated race and geo-politics” in his analysis –
when Jibo is as Black as they come) accused Jibo of being a latter day convert to identity politics,
arguing that being “a long-standing advocate of inclusive civics, this
article corrodes coexistence and disappoints on many fronts.” My friend Professor Okechukwu
Ibeanu in his rejoinder, ‘Resolving the Igbo
Non-Question: Pitfalls of Jibo’s Single Strand
Ethnic Narrative’, accused Jibo of “a single strand
ethnic narrative”. Ibeanu
contends that “the Biafra agitation is more than relations between an ethnic
elite and ethnic lumpen youths. Those young people are framing a struggle
steeped in their material conditions of life – unemployment, poverty, etc.
The leadership of their States (and nation as well) has failed them, but not
because they are Igbo leaders, but because of broader issues of political
economy, which you very well understand” I have issues with both Jibo’s
article and the interventions by Odinkalu and Ibeanu. Contrary to the arguments of Ibeanu
and Odinkalu I do not see anything wrong in using
ethnicity to frame what Jibo called the “Igbo
question”. There are group dynamics in politics all over the world which is
why even in the USA people will talk about the Hispanic votes, the Black
votes or White votes. Ethnicity, regionalism and religion (in no particular
order) remain the main organizing principles in Nigerian politics which
cannot be wished away. Jibo rightly argues that all
ethnic groups in Nigeria are marginalized but failed to use the premise to advance the discourse further such as by articulating a causal hypothesis
of why some Igbos are agitating for Biafra while other ethnic groups
apparently are not doing so. This failure led Jibo
to develop several checklists of why the Igbos are
unable to play ‘the political game’, without telling us which of the
checklists are causal factors and which are aggravating factors. Jibo was also unable to tell us whether the Igbos’
supposed inability to “play the political game” is structural (i.e. caused by
the structure of the country) or something essentialist among the Igbo
political elite. In particular one will be at a loss whether the assumption
of a certain co-ownership of the Jonathan government by the Igbo elite and the prominent role they also played in
the Obasanjo regime was because the Igbo political elites once were able to “play
the political game” but lost that art along the line. Jibo
was equally wrong to assume that winning the presidency is the Holy Grail
that will resolve what he called the ‘Igbo question’. One may in fact be
tempted to ask whether producing a President and Vice president of Yoruba extraction
(i.e. Obasanjo and Osinbanjo respectively) has been
able to assuage the Yoruba agitation for sovereign national conference –
which could mean anything from a meeting to agree on a looser federation to a
meeting to dissolve the Nigerian federation? While I disagree with Ibeanu
that ‘the ethnic’ cannot be used to frame the ‘Biafra question’, I agree with
his charge of “single strand ethnic narrative” and “ethnic reductionism”
because Jibo failed to go beyond the ethnic to tell
us how the other ethnic groups are responding to their own perceived senses
of marginalization or develop a robust causal relationship among his
checklists on why the Igbo elites are unable to “play the political game”. Ironically while Ibeanu
accused Jibo of ethnic reductionism, he was himself
guilty of ‘economic determinism’ because for him those “young people are
framing a struggle steeped in their material conditions of life –
unemployment, poverty, etc.” I disagree that poverty and poor governance can be used to
frame the Biafra agitation. Though all
states in Nigeria are poor (despite the portraiture by some ‘Internet Warriors’
that their parts of the countries are el Dorados),
it is possible to talk of ‘poorer’ and ‘less poor’ states. Certainly none of
the Igbo states can come under the category of ‘poorer states’. Similarly in terms of Internally Generated
Revenues (which are also indices of economic activities in states), all the
Igbo states will come within the top ten bracket. Equally when it comes to governance,
there is no evidence that the quality of governance is better or worse in the
states in Igbo land than you find in other places. We must therefore seek
explanation for the Biafra agitation elsewhere, not in the poverty and poor
governance argument. The truth is that the desire for some nationalities
that make up a diverse country to be independent is natural. For instance
despite being part of the United Kingdom for over 300 years Scottish
separatism has remained a feature of the politics in the United Kingdom. In
the USA there has been a movement for the secession of Texas from the country
since the 1990s. In Nigeria groups that have threatened secession in recent
times include Arewa People’s Congress for Arewa Republic, Movement for the Emancipation of the
Niger Delta and Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force for Niger Delta
Republic, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People for Ogoni country, Oodua Peoples’ Congress for Oduduwa
Republic and Boko Haram for the Islamic Caliphate. You can call the natural desire by some
nationalities to become independent the causal factor of the Biafra
agitation. But it is not even clear to me that what the agitators want is Biafran independence. In addition to the causal factor you have the
aggravating factors such as the fact that in newly democratizing states,
there is often a tendency for pent-up feelings that were not allowed
expression during periods of dictatorships to be released under the freedom
of speech guarantee of liberal democracy. Also Nigeria’s inability or
unwillingness to deal with what they often call the ‘national question’, has
led to the erroneous belief that only groups that can hold the state to
ransom by an overwhelming claim to certain entitlements will have their
grievances addressed. In a public lecture at the Institute for Security
Studies, Pretoria, South Africa, in January 2012 entitled ‘Boko Haram as a
symptom of the crisis in Nigeria’s nation-building’, I argued that Boko Haram
was the clearest manifestation that groups and individuals were feeling
alienated from the Nigerian state and delinking into primordial identities
often with the state as the enemy. I also argued that there was no difference
between Boko Haram and the politicians who steal us blind, or law enforcement
officers who turn the other eye at a little inducement because each group
regards the state as an enemy and attacks it using
the means at its disposal. It is precisely because I see both Boko Haram and
the agitations for Biafra as springing from the same crisis in the country’s
nation-building with the consequent delinking of groups and individuals from
the state into primordial identities (often
with the Nigerian state as the enemy) that I disagree that the fundamental
problem of the country is fighting corruption. For me, unless the stalled
nation-building is restarted and properly serviced any solution thrown at our
problems will only end up compounding the problem more. ____________________ Jideofor Adibe is Associate Professor of Political Science at Nasarawa State University Keffi,
a columnist with the Daily Trust and Publisher, Adonis & Abbey Publishers
Ltd (www.adonis-abbey.com). |