Caution–we’ve all been set up!

Garba Deen Mohammed’s article last week threw up this issue and I felt I had to respond somewhat.  The crux of the article titled ‘Niger Delta: Decoding Odumakin’ was that the Western part of Nigeria supported what MEND was doing since the West is arguably the most ‘viable’ part of Nigeria.  So the West wants […]

Garba Deen Mohammed’s article last week threw up this issue and I felt I had to respond somewhat.  The crux of the article titled ‘Niger Delta: Decoding Odumakin’ was that the Western part of Nigeria supported what MEND was doing since the West is arguably the most ‘viable’ part of Nigeria.  So the West wants a break up.  The Eastern part of Nigeria, he asserted, also wants to re-enact Biafra and run over the South-South; a theory I found rather simplistic since the entire Nigeria cannot even ‘run over’ the South-South in such a casual manner today. Malam Garba Deen, therefore was making a sort of clarion call for the North to have its own agenda along those lines too.  Something along the lines of preserving Abuja as its own gain and so on.  It’s really a pity.

What would happen to Nigeria if the breakup being predicted by Garba Deen and others is this; powerful people like Dangote and Co, will purchase enough connections to protect their investments wherever they may be in Nigeria.  People like Obasanjo will protect their farms all over the country with all military might possibly acquirable.  We will then see the rationale behind the mad spate of private jet acquisition by our elites.  The ‘big men’ will just move out immediately there’s trouble and coordinate their affairs from the skies.  That will leave the rest of us poor people and middle income earners to sort ourselves out.  The international community will come and evacuate their people and continue ‘blowing grammar’ as we ‘Rwandanise’ ourselves.  

With the sort of linkages that people have established in this country, the scale will be twenty times that of Rwanda.  I’m not talking of inter-tribal marriages alone.  Everybody in Nigeria is angry, and everybody thinks his next door neighbour is his problem.  With the kind of sentiments making the rounds now, we would be foolish to expect another ‘Ogbunigwe’ war.  First of all, so much sophisticated arms and ammunitions pour into this country daily and they end up somewhere or the other.  The other day, police stopped a yellow cab in Lagos and found about 200 automatic shotguns stuffed inside bags of beans.  Politicians openly arm their thugs with truckloads of weapons during and after campaigns.  

Say, do we know that among the constituent tribes of this country so much disdain exists?   Can the Ibos truly live with themselves in a Nirvana called ‘Biafra’?  All the big men from the East have abandoned their village mansions for Lagos and Abuja, collecting their old parents in tow.  Those ‘big men’ cannot return any time soon.  Abia and Imo State indigenes will not allow Anambra to ride roughshod on them.  In the West, the Ondo and Osun people will not allow Ogun State to dictate to them.  The war among ‘brothers’ will then brew and bubble over.  And that is even worse.   

The clamour for ‘break-off’ has spread all over the country.  Every village has its own reasons for disdaining their next door neighbour.  That is not all.  Garba Deen must realise the fact too that he, being educated and savvy and ‘rich’ man, is a target in the kind of game that is afoot.  What do we do if people that have been disenfranchised and abandoned in the educational system, decide that those of us who were somehow privileged, are the problem?  Who will want to know on that day of madness, how you struggled through school and worked so hard to be able to rent a decent accommodation for your family and purchase a ‘second-new Tokunbo’ car to push around?

My take is that such views merely react to the symptoms and not the root causes of our present morass.  The reason we are where we are today, each one of us apparently aiming for one another’s jugular in an impending game of genocidal madness, is that we have been set up to react in exactly this way.  The elite who have held the reins of governance in this country have houses in France and Dubai and Australia.  Many of them are already citizens of those countries, like it or not, by virtue of the amount of money they inflowed (or is it outflowed) there.  They will finance the wars from there.  It’s the rest of us that do not have means that will turn on ourselves when such a day comes.  I shiver to imagine what will happen.  In breaking up Nigeria as is being suggested, the bargaining chips will be the lives of millions of innocent people.   

I propose that at least from our level as writers, we should resist the tendency to generalise and fan ethnic tensions.  The innocent people of this country do not hate themselves.  Not every Yoruba or Ibo man subscribes to this mantra that ‘the North is a parasite and a drag to the rest of the country’.  The anger they feel is as a result of the inability of their ‘leaders’, past and present, to weave a strong intellectual and structural fabric for the nation.  And also the mad scramble by those leaders for the nation’s commonwealth.  Nigeria lies prostrate as a fallen Elephant.  Everyone produces their knives and machetes to cut as much as possible of its flesh for their personal pots of soup.  Still I believe that if the present government has not beclouded its view with inanities and irrelevances, it could actually drive the required revolution.  Driving a revolution has nothing to do with the legitimacy of a government.  I wish Yar’adua could seize the day.

I cannot stop wondering if on the day of monumental madness I will be able to explain that I’m an open-minded person; that I do not discriminate among tribes or religions.  I hope I’ll be able to meander my way through if stopped by a mob, like my brother was stopped and almost lynched in Jos several years ago.