By Emeka Umeagbalasi
The suspension of today’s sit-at-home across Igboland as announced by IPOB has recorded substantial failure or non-compliance as conscientious Igbos defy same and cocoon themselves at home. In Anambra State, major markets including Onitsha Main Market, Bridgehead, Ogbaru Relief, Electronics, Ochanja, New Parts, Ogidi Building Materials markets and others are all deserted by traders. Even when some of them have their main entrances opened by market officials and market security, traders still stayed away and did not open their shops. Though major schools are on holidays in Anambra State, but those in river-line areas that are supposed to open for classes are also deserted with their puppils and students staying at home. Across other major Igboland’s blue-collar areas and cities, including Aba and blue-collar parts of Imo, Ebonyi, Enugu,Delta and Rivers, the story is the same. Prior to today’s (Monday’s) botched suspension of sit-at-home, on Saturday (14 August), for instance, traders and transporters were seen in clusters discussing and insisting that they must stay off their markets and shops today. Many of them also held that the sudden suspension of the sit-at-home was suspicious and on their own, observing same is their own little way of contributing to the struggle for the protection and emancipation of the Great Igbo Ethnic Nationality which had since 2015, in particular, been facing exterminable threats on the grounds of their birth, existence, ethnicity, development, culture and religion.
Lessons From Today’s Botched Suspension Of Sit-at-Home In Igboland
According to Anwal Ibrahim, Malaysia’s onetime political guru, “the true conscience of a man is geater than the iron bars of the prison”. The defiance and continuation of the sacred and conscientious sit-at-home today is a strong message to the present Government of Nigeria that not even the indiscriminate use of ‘Malthusian depopulation killer-strategy’ can deter the present generation of the Igbo Nation, numbering over 60 million across the globe, excluding native Igbos of Barbadoes, Jamaica, Cuba, Germany, UK, USA, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, etc. What happened today also clearly showed that IPOB is only a symbol or ladder through which the struggle is pursued momentarily and will continue to be so as long as the platform and its drivers defy compromises and sell-outs, same way MASSOB was once perceived and used. In other words, the struggle can be realised through the platform or another in years to come, especially if ‘the Comes Fails to Come to Become’. The struggle is therefore generationally surpassing and has become a religion, as Deng Xiang of China once immortally put it: “it does not matter whether a cat is tall, short, tin, fat, black or white so long as it catches a rat”.
Today’s conscientious sit-at-home also addresses or corrects the wrong notion that Igbos know no other language except ‘money’ and ‘do not have followers or leaders’. Truly speaking as a researcher and investigator on origin of Igbo and their ancient ways of life versus their present ways of life, I have long found that Igbos are still Igbos they were millenias ago but seemed distorted and tainted in present times only at their leadership positions, chiefly on account of the rise of emergency rich people and bastardisation and corruption of their culture by swindlers in the Jesus Courtyard.
This present Igbo generation is still gifted or blessed with the likes of Eze Nri Obalike, the Dunkwus of the Ekumeku, the Eaglets of the Aba Women Revolution, the 75 Mgburuchis of the Igbo landing in USA, the Great Barbadian of the Barbados, the Okwara Ozumba (Jaja), the Olaido Equiano and many other gloriously departed Igbo heroes and heroines. What we are suffering today is the same thing that happened to the Eze Nri sacred throne in 18th century when the emergency rich people emerged and stained the sacred throne leading to bastardisation of the sacredness of the throne with emergence of two crookedly rich slave trade enablers who wangled their ways to the sacred throne but died ominously one day, or when another noble Eze Nri was assasinated by cattle thieves who did not know that he was the one randomly killed, or in 1911 when the British colonialists and malevolent Christian missionaries forced noble and majestic Eze Nri Obalike to desacrate the Holy Igboland by performing ‘a ritual of nsube nsoani’ or abolition of codes of sacrileges and abominations; or when in 1906 Fathers Duhaze and his colleague from Portugal pronounced their historic visit to Eze Nri Obalike as “a successful attack on Satan in His Citadel”.
This is exactly what we are passing through today in Igboland: so many criminals and emergency rich people filling the supposed cradle of nobility and dictating the pace and bastardising our noble ways of life. But today, men and women of nobility are back and gradually uprooting the accursed trees. Collectivism is gradually but speedily taking over and displacing riotiousness, vices and life-for-money culture. When a man is faced with survival and wealth, he will be very stupid to choose the latter.
Congratulations the Great People of the Great Igbo Nation, or ‘Biafra Nation-State’, if you like.
•Emeka Umeagbalasi. Proudly Igbo and boss @ Intersociety. Dated 16th August 2021.
