The Igbo will be better off with Buhari

The problem with Nigeria, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu once said, is that the mediocre people are ruling the intelligent people. The Igbo emerged from the 1967/1970 civil war to meet a federal government strategy to marginalize and emasculate their leadership.  .The Igbo have a justifiable dread of Nigerian military officers who were natives of Northern Nigeria and […]

The problem with Nigeria, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu once said, is that the mediocre people are ruling the intelligent people. The Igbo emerged from the 1967/1970 civil war to meet a federal government strategy to marginalize and emasculate their leadership.  .
The Igbo have a justifiable dread of Nigerian military officers who were natives of Northern Nigeria and who participated in the civil war. These officers and their rank-and-file soldiers had carried out mass rapes and sexual enslavement across Igboland during the civil war and at the war’s end; many of these soldiers had looted vehicles and other property as they overran Biafra. Then, finally, the Igbo, the Igbo business and political leaders, lost all their cash holdings as the Finance Ministry of Chief Obafemi Awolowo awarded them the grand sum of 20 Nigerian pounds per man for any amount of money owned in Nigerian banks prior to the war. It was akin to what Swiss banks did to Jewish survivors of the World War 2 Holocaust. Talk about Gowon’s Reconciliation, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation!
When the military government, led by Muhammadu Buhari took office, he visited all the states in Nigeria so to say, introducing himself to his subjects. He went to the 17 states, including Rivers and Cross River,  that shared borders with the two Igbo states, Imo and Anambra. The message could not be louder, he had a thing against the Igbo. Imo (today’s Imo and Abia) chiefs then decided they would not come to welcome him, but were pressed to change their minds by the military governor, then Col. Ike Nwachukwu. One of Buhari’s first policy decisions as approved by the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC), which had only one Igbo representative, in those days usually a mid-level naval officer, was to summarily move the site of the proposed petrochemical plant to Onne, where it now sits, and which was the originally proposed location, and which made more sense economically and logistically. I said the Igbo were lucky not to have that great environmental pollutant of an industry at their backyard.
When the Buhari government in 1984 issued a decree banning Africa’s first private university, Imo Technical University, the measure outraged a lot of people in Igboland. Many people in the East believed Buhari wanted to crush the attempt by Igbo to escape the trap of quotas placed on qualified Igbo seeking admissions to federal government-run Nigerian universities. Despite information that most members of the AFRC favoured the continuation of the university which had just a few months earlier received the backing of the Supreme Court, Buhari signed a decree literally behind the backs of the other members of the ruling Council. Buhari cited copycat universities as the reason for his action. Imo chiefs sent a plea through Military Governor Ike Nwachukwu for Buhari to ban the others and leave Imo Tech alone. This was a university backed by a consortium of American universities, including Rice University, Houston; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta; Tuskegee Institute, Alabama; Worcester Polytechnic; and Illinois Institute of Technology. The national newspapers in their editorials condemned the move to ban the university. Insinuating that the university was being sponsored by the CIA, Buhari’s decree stated that no foreign institution or persons can sponsor or contribute to any university in Nigeria. Tell that to Vice President Atiku Abubakar and his American University of Nigeria, Yola.
The Igbo have very powerful reasons to dislike and mistrust Buhari. But I say it here that although Buhari may have had some deep-seated animus for Igbo, he is not the same man he was as a hot-headed, inflexible 40-year-old in 1984. During his short political career, he has had to endure the backstabbing, the double-cross, the insults, betrayal from his fellow Northern politicians. He has learnt to be cautious in his dealings with his fellow Northern leaders. He knows many of them don’t like him.  
I remind the Igbo that the politicians of Northern Nigeria have always aligned with the Igbo. The Northern People’s Congress and the National Council of Nigerian Citizens aligned to form the two civilian governments of 1960 to1966. The Northerners did not break the alliance. The civilian government came to a bloody end because of the action of five junior army officers, four of them Igbo and one of them Yoruba. But no Igbo politician had any inkling of the coup that these misguided young men carried out that was not only a disaster for the Igbo who were basically already in control of the country, but led to perhaps a million dead Igbo by the time the ensuing civil war was over.
The young generation of mediocre leaders, the kind of people with little intellectual ability, empowered financially since the civil war by Nigerian military dictators, insisted on supporting Dr. Jonathan, and chose not to see that if Igbo gave their full support to the Hausa-Fulani to complete the remaining four years of what would have been Yar’Adua’s and the North’s eight years, in the next presidential election (2015), the Hausa-Fulani would support an Igbo presidential candidate. And the Hausa-Fulani have never broken their words to the Igbo.
The Igbo must come to terms with the situation. Not only would voting massively for Buhari help build an alliance with the Hausa-Fulani for the future, Buhari’s victory would also help the Igbo economically, and a good economy is their lifeblood. Here is why. Industry has practically vanished in Nigeria and millions of educated Igbo are languishing, unable to find gainful employment. The incompetence and greed of the people in Jonathan’s government have meant that the disposable incomes of many Nigerians have fallen, and the effect is now worsened by the decline in the value of the naira in the foreign exchange market.  .
The Igbo have to do a trade-off here. They can continue living under the maladministration of Goodluck Jonathan or they can return to the table to re-negotiate with their previous allies of the Hausa-Fulani and elect a man who can and has shown that he can root out corruption and heal the giant of Africa under a civilian system with its checks and balances. In the same vein, I urge Muhammadu Buhari, in the company of some of his fellow Northern political leaders, to sit down in a conversation with authentic Igbo leaders, sooth the hurts inflicted on the Igbo over the years, and begin a new chapter of what previously was a fruitful relationship between two of the biggest tribes in Nigeria.

Ukegbu wrote from the United States<[email protected]>;