•Onitsha, South-East Nigeria on first day of the protest as people went about their businesses
While the organisers of the protests were making their plans, agents of the government didn’t have any plans to assuage their anger or address their demands to forestall a breakdown of law and order.
What they thought best was to pin the protest on Mr Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in the last election and on Igbo people. They thought that the best way to stop the protests was to get the Igbo people not to participate. In their infantile mind, the Igbos must be scapegoats for everything that is wrong with this country. They had to point their fingers at their supposedly biggest rivals.
Late Chinua Achebe, writing in his book, The Trouble with Nigeria, said that “Nigerians will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo”.
That has always been the case. The Igbos are seen as the cannon fodders by the rest of Nigeria when political decisions are being made. In hating them and singling them out for their enterprise and itinerancy, which has developed many parts of the country, Nigeria has remained the biggest loser, even if those propagating the hate do not want to admit it.
They forgot that despite their newfound alliance with their hitherto political foes, years of political miscalculation, and the births of many out-of-school and hungry youths in the North meant that the protests would fester in new grounds, especially now that it is their ‘awaloken”.
So, they met and determined that the best way to stop the protests from assuming the EndSARS dimension was to draw Igbo people out; to pin it on Peter Obi who is Igbo.
Enter the agent provocateurs led by Bayo Onanuga and some faceless, mushroom groups threatening Igbo people with eviction from the South West which they call home.
They went to town and couched very cheap statements warning the Igbo people not to dare organise any protests in their area. Unbeknownst to them, Igbo people are smarter. They allowed them to engage in blabber-mouthing while the people from the land of the rising sun pulled one of the smartest moves yet – ignore their tantrums.
While the focus was on the Igbo people, even as petulantly as hanging the destruction wrecked by criminals who hijacked the EndSARS protest on them, the bigger problem lay somewhere else: the North.
Once the protests began, the Igbos remained quiet wherever they were found. Nowhere else was the quietude even more defining than the Southeast geopolitical zone inhabited by Nd’Igbo. They guarded their markets and their tongues and watched from the sidelines as those who were told that they were the problems unleashed mayhem.
From parts of the South West to the North, the protesters made their voices heard and made their points even as lame as they could in some instances.
The Northern elite, who had been at the forefront of emasculating the Igbos and gerrymandering the polity to an advantage, leaving the Igbos out, suddenly woke up from their miscalculated slumber to now remembered that they had failed their people. Television screens showed Northern leaders bemoaning their fate and miscalculation.
The once revered traditional Emirs couldn’t help tame the rampaging mob. Even they are fighting to ward off the rampaging political class that is baying for blood for their revered stool. At the last count, two Emirs are struggling for the control of Kano Emirate. The once very powerful Sultan of Sokoto has been cut to size by politicians who stripped him of powers to appoint local Chiefs.
Millions of their youths are uneducated, hungry, and angry, and angry they display even crudely.
They went after signboards, roofing sheets, drainage covers, police armoured cars, bags of essential commodities, and so on. To them, these were symbols of oppression, which they were protesting against. They ignored their leaders who have spent the greater part of their political lives teaching them to hate the Igbos. They now see them as the oppressors.
I have been watching from my small corner to see what the Onanugas of this world and those motely tribal irredentists will say of the protests. Nothing! They have lost their voices. Their plans of roping in Nd’Igbo and Peter Obi into the protests fell like a pack of cards.
Now, will they learn? I don’t think so because they’re bereft of any solutions to the myriad of problems bedevilling this country. They think the Igbos are the cause. No! The Igbos are rather part of the solution because wherever they are, they call home and develop. They have paid a heavy price to keep this country united. They fought a war of survival and lost it. But they survived the war faster than many could have imagined. They will always survive the shenanigans of tribal bigots.
Those hoping to lure the Igbos into the impending political fight have lost it. They should look at the real problems. If they do, they’d realise the Igbos are not their problems, but that they are the problem of the Igbos.
Ka Chineke mezie okwu.
