MASSOB and the consequences of leadership failure

It was bound to happen. Actions invite reactions. It is the law of nature. Now, because our leaders refused to take the ranting of the young Igbo ethnic champions and their misguided challenge to the Nigerian state seriously, we have allowed ourselves to be pushed into the political equivalent of the oven. The heat is […]

It was bound to happen. Actions invite reactions. It is the law of nature. Now, because our leaders refused to take the ranting of the young Igbo ethnic champions and their misguided challenge to the Nigerian state seriously, we have allowed ourselves to be pushed into the political equivalent of the oven. The heat is on. Verbal, yes, but all political heat begins from the heat generated by the tongue.

Last week, northern youths operating under the umbrella of the Coalition of Northern Youth Groups reacted to their Igbo counterparts operating as MASSOB and IPOB and gave Ndigbo in the former Northern Region an October 1 deadline to leave – and probably return to Biafra and realise the actualisation of the failed secessionist bid led by the late Lt-Col Emeka Ojukwu that Uwazurike began to champion as soon as the country returned to civil rule in 1999.We are facing a combustible situation, something the worst enemies of our country would not wish on us. But we tend to wish it on ourselves.

Those who thought the MASSOB agitation for whatever would peter out and disappear into the cluttered cupboard of our many errors of head and heart, and was, therefore, not worth bothering about, merely allowed themselves the luxury of being unrealistic. We have all now woken up, I am sure, to the realities of the agitation and where it could possibly lead us and our country to once more.

In taking it upon themselves to order the Igbo to leave the north, the northern youths have, quite sadly and quite inadvisedly, turned the MASSOB agitation into northerners versus Ndigbo. It should not be so. MASSOB agitation is a problem for the Nigerian state, not for the north. And the Nigerian state should be allowed to resolve it. Their appearance on the scene as a counterforce can only exacerbate feelings and fan the fire. 

My friends have been asking me: what is happening? I have repeatedly demonstrated my incompetence in sensibly responding to this important question. What, indeed, is happening? 

The quit notice is no solution to the MASSOB agitation. And I am sure the northern youths do not have mandate of the northern elders to issue it. Sure, I am aware that Professor Ango Abdullahi, former ABU vice-chancellor, lent his support to the quit notice on the grounds that MASSOB enjoys the support of Igbo leaders and elders. So, logically, he, a northern leader, believes he has a moral duty to support the northern youths. After all, his fellow professor, Ben Nwabueze, received Kanu and praised him as the greatest Igbo man alive today. It was irresponsible. 

Still, there are two ways to look at the quit notice by the northern youths. We can see it as a possible natural reaction to the agitation in the sense that many people are fed up and irritated by the Igbo youths trying to treat the Nigerian state as if they have the key to either its survival or dismemberment. Or we can see it as youths versus youths in a show of force against force. Neither of these gives us much comfort. None removes the fear the quit notice has generated, not just among Ndigbo, but in the rest of the country. It gets messier.

As I see it, what is happening is squarely the failure of leadership. Last week, the acting president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, met with northern leaders as well as Igbo leaders in an honest and level-headed attempt to lower the heat to a bearable level. But the MASSOB challenge to the Nigerian state was allowed to fester. Never mind that the two leaders of the agitation, Uwazurike and Kanu, spent time in detention on court orders. Their detention did not stop the agitation; nor the yearly order to Igbo traders to lock up their shops, an order usually obeyed either out of fear of the consequences of disobedience or in tacit but unvoiced support for the agitation. 

On November 23, 2015, I published a column in this newspaper in reaction to President Buhari’s off-handed dismissal of the MASSOB agitation as “a joke.” In the said column, Is MASSOB a joke? I argued that it would be a mistake for the president to treat it as a joke.

Let me quote my column under reference. I wrote: “I find the president’s statement rather disappointingly dismissive of what is happening in the South-East geo-political zone. MASSOB is agitating for the dismemberment of our country. Its agitation is a direct challenge to state authority. It is not wise to dismiss such agitation as a joke. History has enough evidence to show that challenges to state authorities often begin as seemingly innocuous social or political protests.”

In the same week that my column was published, Mrs Josephine Anenih, former minister of women affairs, published an opinion piece on the MASSOB agitation. She wrote: “I see a looming war in Nigeria. A war that will consume the whole country if allowed to conflagrate. What Nigeria is battling with in the North-East will fizzle into child’s play if the insidious danger that is brewing in the South-East is not nipped in the bud.” 

She went on to make this important assertion: “I have listened keenly to hear the voice of Igbo leadership but was deafened by the silence that hit me.”

I wrote: “I, too, am deafened by the sound of silence. I do not accuse the Igbo leadership of complicity in the MASSOB agitation. I know many decent and patriotic Igbo men and women who are, I am willing to bet, pained by the self-destructive activities of these agitators impugning the patriotic credentials of such people.”

There is no denying this: we have all been wrong in treating the MASSOB agitation like a labour protest. We refused to act when we should. We allowed the agitation to grow into the present problem and a possible crisis. I believe that if the Igbo leaders had asserted themselves and turned their youths away from their chosen path, we would not have this heat and this monumental fear about what is to become of our country. I believe that if the Nigerian state had risen up to the challenge and asserted itself right from the beginning, those in the South-East who do not support MASSOB would have found the voice to condemn the misguided zeal of the youths. 

Incendiary language and chest beating are making sober reflections difficult. The first step out of this quagmire is to admit that we were wrong and take immediate steps to do the needful because, as Mrs Anenih pointed out, when fire conflagrates its destructive capacity easily gets out of hand. I urge the northern and south-eastern leaders to fully appreciate their own role and join the acting president in preserving peace in a country whose tortuous journey into a united nation is not the envy of many nations.