PEOPLES & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Igbos, Biafra  and the Presidency

kudugana@yahoo.com

The letters page of this week’s edition of TheNEWS (October 25) should interest the keen observer of the place of Igbos in Nigeria’s politics. The magazine’s editors devoted the page entirely to reactions to its cover story of October 4 titled “PRESIDENCY: IGBOS DIG IN; It is Now or Never.” There were 27 letters in all, 15 in support of an Igbo presidency in 2007, five against and seven somewhat neutral.

The editors’ choice of the magazine’s “Letter of the week,” compared the problem of the Igbo in Nigeria to the parable of the snake. “It is,” the letter said, “because snakes do not move in unison that allows each to fall prey to the hunter’s stick.” Samuel Odion, the author of the letter, then concluded that “If the Igbo’s deal with their disunity, no force can stand between them and the presidency in 2007.”

Many of the letters, regardless of their position, agreed with Odion that the greatest obstacle against an Igbo presidency is their disunity. Perhaps this was why the editors chose  Odion’s letter for their weekly prize of  1000 Naira.

If it was, the editors, in my opinion, got it wrong. Disunity, depending on how you define it, may detract from the ability of the Igbos to occupy the presidency, but it is not the greatest obstacle. The Igbos, after-all, are not the only ethnic group that suffer from disunity, no matter how you define it. The leaders of every tribe in this country, from the biggest to the smallest, can regale you with tales about how their tribes’ various interests have been undermined by disunity and lack of a single leader.

Of course the degree of disunity differs from one tribe to the other but, human nature being what it is, no tribe can have unity in the sense of uniformity in all aspects of life. Harmony, yes, but uniformity is certainly impossible. And it seems uniformity is what those who talk glibly about the Igbos’s disunity have in mind.

Over 26 years ago, the late S. G. Ikoku, one of Nigeria’s leading political thinkers-cum-activists, gave what was probably the most accurate insight into this issue of ethnic unity as a condition for success in politics. In an article titled “The place of Igbos in post-military politics,” in the Enugu-based Weekly Star of June 25, 1978, Ikoku argued that “Social stratification, political awareness and political sophistication have gone so far since the First Republic that the concept of one ethnic group one political leadership has become neither attainable nor desirable.”

In the article, he concluded that the future for the Igbos in Nigeria’s politics had to be sought in the context of a modernized Nigerian political community. “Political success will come our way”, he said, “only if our political aspirants play a credible and vital role in the formation and operation of truly national political parties. This then is the challenge posed to Igbo political aspirants by the realities of our historical epoch. This challenge just cannot be met by pretences by one or the other of our politicians that he has been consecrated THE IGBO POLITICAL LEADER.”

Two days before this article, the then editor in chief of the paper, the novelist Cyprian Ekwensi, had carried excerpts of an interview with Ikoku in his column Cash On Delivery. The interview dwelt on the same vexed subject of the apparent marginalization of Igbos in the country’s politics. The solution, argued Ikoku in the interview, lay in reaching across ethnic divides rather than in building barricades round one’s tribe. “If each group,” he said, “falls back into its little area and builds a barricade round it, that would be the path to self-destruction. The Igbos have a leeway to make up. That must be done within the State. It is only in the pursuit of  NATIONAL INTEREST that the Igbo man can establish his own interest and not vice versa, that is, not by pursuing Igbo interest per se.”

Ikoku’s insight couldn’t have been more accurate, not just for the Igbos, but for all the ethnic groups in Nigeria. The insight was, of course, not without its flaws. One such flaw is the assumption that each tribe has uniform interests for all its people. This assumption is false when you look at it closely. A tribe can have uniform interests only if all its  people belong to the same religion, the same social class and speak only one dialect, etc. This is well-nigh impossible.

However, whatever flaws Ikoku’s insight might have had, it was accurate enough to serve as a guide to the type of politics that Nigeria needs if it is to make any progress. Unfortunately Nigerian politicians, right now Igbo politicians in particular, do not seem to see things the Ikoku way. Their leaders have become so desperate for high office, they don’t even seem to know how to get it.

In this respect if I were the editor of TheNEWS, my choice of the magazine’s letter this week would not have been Odion’s, but that of one Bayo Oguntase. Oguntase,  I thought, hit the nail squarely on the head as far as the problem of the Igbos in Nigeria’s politics is concerned. “You cannot,” said Oguntase, “wish for Biafra and the presidency of Nigeria at the same time. You cannot have your cake and eat it. You cannot approbate and reprobate at the same time.”

If the Igbos have failed so far to clinch the presidency and look set to fail again and again, it is not simply because they lack unity. They are, afterall, not the only tribe that lacks unity. In any case, a tribe does not need unity, in the sense of uniformity, to throw up credible candidates for the highest office in the land.

This may sound rather harsh, but if the Igbo have failed so far to clinch the presidency and look set to fail again and again, it is mainly because they do not seem to be sorry for trying to break up this country.

The Igbos are, of course, not the only major tribe to have threatened to break up this country. They are, however, the only one to have carried out their threat. This difference cannot be easily dismissed.

They can, of course, argue that their rebellion was justified because they were victims of a pogrom in mid-1966, especially in the North. But if they are honest enough with themselves, they will also admit that the pogrom did not occur in a void. It was a consequence of the cold-blooded killings of virtually the entire northern military top brass, the killing of the Sardauna and the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in the Igbo coup of January 1966. The pogrom was also partly the consequence of a very malicious and very vile propaganda by the American CIA. Let me explain.

On January 20, last year, a very disturbing article by Charles Sharp, the founding managing director of the New Nigerian, appeared in the paper. The article, titled “The story that got away,” deserves to be read and re-read by every Nigerian especially the country’s political leaders and its men of intelligence. It deserves to be read and re-read because it is a pointer to the danger of the assumptions of those in authority that  we can entrust our destiny to the  West, an assumption very much evident in President Obasanjo’s decision, early in his first term, to hand over our armed forces to the Americans, lock, stock and barrel.

In this article, Sharp narrated his encounter with one John Thorne in Florida, U.S.A., in 1978. It was during this Florida encounter, long after Sharp had retired to his British home, that he discovered  that Thorne was actually an American spy. Thorne had worked in Kaduna in the sixties as the bureau chief of an American radio monitoring station in the city.

They had just finished dinner in Thorne’s Florida home, said Sharp, when his host invited him to a “den” in the house, following Sharp’s enquiry about Thorne’s abiding  interest in radio communication. The “den”, said Sharp, was packed with expensive equipment, but it was the many framed citations of Thorne’s outstanding service mounted on the walls that attracted Sharp’s attention. “They all bore the signatures of men who had been directors of the American Criminally Intelligence Agency, the CIA. Such names as Dulles and Elms. All testified to the outstanding service of one of their top agents, the former cricket-loving, easy-going John Thorne...The Kaduna radio monitoring station, bestowed with boundless munificence on an unsuspecting Nigeria to enable Africa talk to Africa, was in reality a top-flight CIA field cell.”

While still in the “den”, said Sharp, Thorne brought out and played several recorded tapes which, to Sharp’s greatest shock, including one that contained his telephone conversation in 1966 with Chief Babatunde Jose, then executive chairman of Daily Times, over what to do about instructions from Lagos that both newspapers should black out the story of the killings in the North, and another of his summons to Government House, Kaduna, over the same story. Sharp, in other words, now saw proof that his office and many others throughout the country, including the British High Commission, had been bugged by the Americans.

“Why Thorne chose to behave in this fashion I don’t know,”, said Sharp, “but he was a committed heavy drinker and had plenty to drink that evening, and, as I said, he was clearly enjoying himself.”

It was during this encounter, said Sharp, that he also discovered that what triggered the mid-1966 killing of Igbos, especially in the North, was as much the result of a malicious CIA propaganda as it was the result of revenge killings. Nigerians old enough during the period will recall that there were rumours that  a  radio station in Cotonou, in neighbouring Benin Republic, had carried reports that Igbos were massacring Hausas in the East. These reports became a crucial factor in the escalation of the killings in the North and ultimately in the civil war.

To Sharp’s greatest shock, he discovered during his encounter with Thorne that there were indeed never any Cotonou reports! How was he sure? “Because”, said Sharp, “the man who created and used his skill and professional expertise to spread the rumour told me. ‘It was fiction put out by us, nothing more…’, so declared the former Kaduna monitoring bureau chief, my old friend, John Thorne.”

If I have bored you with my narration of Sharp’s encounter with Thorne, I am sorry, but it is important to do so because it helps to contextualize the events that led to Biafra. It shows that mistakes were made on both sides and that there were victims on both sides. It then means that it serves no useful purpose for the Igbos to continue to use the resurrection of Biafra as a tool of blackmail against other Nigerians, as if they were the only victims of our civil war.

If the Igbos wish to be taken seriously in the contest for the country’s No. 1 job, they should reject the political posturing of self-promoting political leaders like Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, and my good friend, Chief Orji Kalu, the governor of Abia State, whose stock in trade seems to be to reprobate and approbate Nigeria in the same breath. Igbos should also reject the MASSOB crowd that thinks it can recreate Biafra without bloodshed or even stress.

Igbos, like all other tribes in this country, need Nigeria more than Nigeria needs them. Indeed the Igbos probably need Nigeria more than any other tribe in this country for the simple reason that their population density and individualism has forced them, more than any other tribe in the country, to seek for their livelihood outside Igboland. There are, in any case, more Igbos doing well for themselves outside their homeland in Nigeria than other Nigerians doing well for themselves in Igboland. To rephrase a question raised by  one of the letters in TheNEWS’s letter page, How many Yoruba, Ishan, Hausa, Efik and Idoma can you find making a living in the Ariaria market of Aba?

The sooner therefore Igbos heed the words of the late Ikoku, the sooner and the better their chances of producing a president of this country. With all their Western education and sophistication, Igbos should be in the forefront of the rejection of the ideology of turn-by-turn politics because, turn-by-turn politics is the very anti-thesis of the genuine democracy that this country needs to make progress. The fact is that unless we shed the idea of having presidents - or for that matter, governors, senators, etc - who come to office because it is the turn of their tribes to produce them rather than because they have worked hard at courting the trust of their constituencies, we will always remain economically and politically backward.