PEOPLE
AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Uwazurike, Kanu and the
rest of us Probably
the greatest headache the nearly six-month Buhari administration
is suffering from right now is the Biafra resurgence, bar, of course the
country’s sharp economic downturn arising from the collapse of the price of
oil, the country’s single biggest source of public revenue. The
administration, of course, suffers from other headaches, several of them very
acute, notably Boko Haram insurgency, mostly in the North-East, and violent
clashes between Fulani cattle rearers and farmers
in most parts of the country. None of these headaches, however, seems of
recent to have received as wide a media publicity as the Biafra resurgence.
None certainly is as rooted in the popular imagination – grand delusion, is
the more accurate description – of a huge chunk of a section of the country’s
youth as the Biafra resurgence. Consequently, it has the greatest potential
for defying any quick fix among all the problems with Nigeria. Former
president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, obviously thinks otherwise. “This,” he
told reporters at his Abeokuta Hilltop residence late last month, “is fake
agitation. You people make a mountain out of a molehill.” Obasanjo was
probably right to say that those spearheading the Biafra resurgence are fake. “The people who are doing this,” he said, “are the
same people in the 419 business, they are the same
people you will find in drugs all over the world. To them this is another
source of making money.” I
do not know about 419 and drugs, but it speaks volumes about the motives of
the spearheads of the Biafra resurgence that Nnamdi
Kanu, the proprietor of the London based pirate
Radio Biafra and the immediate source of the new Biafra headache, would, in
effect, dismiss his erstwhile boss, the leader of the Movement
for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Ralph
Uwazurike, as a carpetbagger. (Kanu,
until he became estranged from Uwazurike, was the
London coordinator of MASSOB). In
perhaps the longest news feature on the issue to date, the Saturday Sun (November 14) quoted Kanu as accusing Uwazurike of
deceit and self-enrichment. “I can tell you today,” Kanu
reportedly told the newspaper “even MASSOB members are revolting now because
they know that their leadership is fraudulent and decaying.” One of such
fraudulence, Kanu said, was that whereas Uwazurike printed and sold Biafran
passports to his people, he himself always travelled abroad with his Nigerian
passport. MASSOB
was founded in 1999 and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) eight years
later by Kanu as a breakaway faction. Since MASSOB,
among other fraudulent activities Kanu spoke at
some length about in the Sun
interview, had always printed and sold Biafra passports while Uwazurike used Nigerian passport, one must wonder why it
took Kanu all the intervening years to realize that
his former boss was fake. Chances are, it wasn’t any moral principle, high or
not. So,
I agree with Obasanjo and many like him who believe the leadership of the
Biafra resurgence is fake. Even then I disagree with
him that expressing concern about the resurgence is making a mountain out of
a molehill. That was what many of us thought of Boko Haram in its early days
– and look where it has landed us since 2009 when we thought we could quickly
dispatch its headache with military sledgehammer. Uwazurike
and Kanu, like many in the leadership of Boko Haram
who denounced science and modernism but relished in their fruits, may be
fake. But then we now live in a world where “verisimilitude matters more than
veracity,” to quote The Economist
in article it published in its edition of December 18, 2010 on global public
relations, entitled “Rise of the image men.” To rephrase the magazine, we
live today in a world where the appearance of truth matters more than the
reality of truth itself. Uwazurike,
and even more so Kanu, are clearly good students
and disciples of Edward Barnes, a nephew of the famous 19th
Century German psychologist, Sigmund Freud, and widely regarded as the father
of modern public relations. Barnes, like his uncle, believed people responded
best to images and emotional appeals rather that to rational arguments. Hence
Uwazurike’s and Kanu’s
appeals to the effective emotion, but grand delusion, of a Biafran El Dorado that never was and is unlikely to ever
be even if Biafra is to become a reality. Their
Biafran dream is obviously based on the illusion
that all the so-called peoples of Biafra, defined by Kanu
as “the Idoma people, the Igbo people, the Efiks, Ibibios, Anangs, Ijaw, Itsekiris, the Urhobos and the Anioma people” are the same but completely different from
other Nigerians. This is clearly a false assumption. Of course, we do differ
in race, beliefs and tongue. But even within each of these three categories,
there are also differences, at times great. Take,
for example, the assumption that all Igbos are the same. Nothing debunks it
like a lengthy interview I had with the great late Dr.
Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1979 at
his Nsukka residence when he was the presidential
candidate of the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) in that year’s general
election. Responding to a question I asked him on his role in Biafra, he said
he did his best to keep his Igbo people in Nigeria in spite of their
misgivings about their welcome in the country. His efforts, he said, were in
the end thwarted essentially because some of the advisers of the late Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, as Biafra’s
military head of state, persuaded the man that he should be wary of Zik as an Onitsha man. These
advisers, he said, told Ojukwu that Biafra was
holding its own militarily and so did not need any conference to sort out his
difference peacefully with General Yakubu Gowon,
the Nigerian head of state. They told Ojukwu, he
said, that “he should be very very careful with me
as an Onitsha man because they thought that I was using him as a means to
give publicity to myself internationally and that time will come when people
will look more to me than himself. Well, as a young man, human, he fell for
the flattery.” The
moral of Zik’s inferred contention that Biafra was
not inevitable should be obvious; there are no differences, individual or
group that cannot be ironed out, if only we can, as individuals, get our egos
and self-interests out of the way. After all, whatever our race, belief or
tongue, we are all part of God’s humanity, with more shared needs and values
than differences. Related to this is the moral that there is no end to our
differences if we chose to focus on them. People
like Uwazurike and Kanu
who harp on our differences and try to divert our attentions away from our
common humanity may be fake. But their capacity to
appeal to our emotions makes them particularly dangerous and thus makes it
necessary to handle them with the greatest care. In
a world in which the internet has made image more important than substance,
it is difficult to solve problems by appealing to human rationality. However,
in the long run there is simply no substitute for doing exactly that. The
practical implication of this is that we must address the differences the
likes of Uwazurike and Kanu
seek to exploit and at the same time respect due process in bringing them to
book for their attempts to exploit those differences by criminal means. And
MASSOB and IPOB, whatever their leaders and supporters think, are simply
illegal, if not criminal, enterprises, just like Boko Haram. Unlike Boko
Haram, they may not have resorted yet to arms, but the hate speeches they
spew against other Nigerians are criminal, and recognised as such by our laws
and by international laws as well. In any case, given Kanu’s
appeals last September to Igbos in diaspora to support his cause with guns
and bullets at the Igbo World Congress in Los Angeles, USA, it is only a
matter of time before at least IPOB resorts to arms. Perhaps
it was inadvertent, but in urging all Igbos outside the South-East to return
home, MASSOB’s National Director of Information, Mr Uchenna
Madu, gave the game away when he said “MASSOB has
vowed to stop kidnapping, armed robbery and other criminal tendencies in Igbo
land because there is no place in Nigeria like Igbo land (Saturday Vanguard, November 21). No
doubt there is the need to handle MASSOB and IPOB firmly as illegal
enterprises. However, because they have succeeded in tapping into the
popular, some of them legitimate, disaffections of a large section of the
country’s youth, there is an even greater need to scrupulously respect due
process in dealing with the Biafran resurgence. |