Yesterday, I realized that the southeast has entered a long night in a long and tragic race with an unforeseen destination. Let me begin with an eyewitness account.
Villagers of Isingwu, Mgbowo in Enugu State, are not likely to forget Monday, 1 November 2021 in a hurry. Before I continue this story, and for full disclosure, Mgbowo Community is four villages away from my hometown. It takes less than 30 minutes to arrive from the City of Enugu. I made the trip, just to be able to understand and faithfully report what went down in my hood.
Local folks of Isingwu Village were woken up at dawn on Monday with staccato bursts of gunfire. The earth shook as military booths stumped towards the hamlet, from fierce looking young military chaps looking for Eastern Security Network (ESN) fighters. This time around, however, the guns did not belong to the regular underground forces operating in the Southeast – the unknown gunmen and Biafra National Guard (BNG) militia. Instead, they were state actors, led by troops of the Nigerian Army from the Division in Enugu. Enugu is coordinating Operation Golden Dawn, a routine military exercise that has now transformed into full scale operation to take out IPOB/ESN and BNG elements from the region.
What the local folks told me was that the soldiers claimed to have information that IPOB/ESN elements were camped in their village. On Tuesday, the Army Division confirmed in a statement that the raid was to flush out ESN fighters allegedly hiding in the village. However, the joint security team that went to Mgbowo managed to arrest one youth.
From what I could see, it did appear that the information they received was precise; the troops targeted and burnt down only a house. They also shot and broke the legs of a local youth who is a member of the village vigilante. Villagers who dashed into the nearby bushes to take cover (reminiscent of how it was during the Nigeria Civil War) tiptoed out only when the guns cleared. Because it was Monday – a day that has now been “regularized” as work-free in the Southeast – there was no immediate assistance to take Chigozie – the young man who was shot – to a hospital.
Mgbowo gave me a deeper insight into what the Southeast is undergoing at the moment. Everything has now taken on a more frightening dimension. Last week, the Army promoted its heroic efforts to enforce an environment of peace for this Saturday’s governorship elections in Anambra State. That effort is taking a heavy toll per civilian and security casualties.
There is no doubt that we now have the makings of an undeclared war. It is an unconventional war.
Certainly, it is not a war between the Igbo and an Army of occupation. Rather, this is a jungle war in which Ndigbo living in the Southeast have been caught in a crossfire and cannot immediately find escape routes. And the combatants are three groups of state and non-state actors each.
The non-state actors are not coordinated, and their missions appear separate because they are largely undefined. There is the Eastern Security Network (ESN) which, at inception, declared a mission to protect local farmers from Fulani herdsmen and local residents from Fulani militia. Today, its mission has turned 360-degrees to the release of its detained leader. It seeks to achieve this by grounding socio-economic life of their people. To people who are trying to make sense of this tactic, it turns out that the end is to get all Southeasterners involved in negotiating the release of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, rather than continue staying aloof. At the same time, it also wants residents to swallow whatever wicked designs it has for them “as a sacrifice for freedom.” The other two groups – roughly identified as “unknown gunmen” and the Biafra National Guard, have no discernible mission beyond killing security personnel and burning public property.
The state actors hitherto functioned as independent security maneuvers but appear to have now been fused into the regular military action code-named Operation Golden Dawn. Their lead actors include the Army, Nigeria Police and Department of State Security. Because the troops are the primary targets of the non-state actors, these operatives are literally fighting for their lives as they fight for the people of the region. Which leaves them in a vulnerable position, from which they appear to have no option other than to emphasize the current tactic of shoot on sight rather than arrest and prosecution.
No one can say the Southeast is under siege. It has been for a long time. What has happened now is that the knot has been tightened further. The region has become a wild plane where state and non-state actors play their deadly games while poor residents cower in fear. Ndigbo of the Southeast are caught in between a crossfire of legal and illegal weapons carriers.
As a child in middle school during the war, one phrase that kept recurring as people wondered what the point of the war was and how it will end is this: agbacha oso, agu o mile. In its literal translation, it says one cannot measure the miles covered until one arrives a destination. Counting the distance means, in this context, counting the costs. The local saw signposted a warning that the costs are huge and subsisting.
Yes indeed. The southeast has entered a long night of an undefined and tragic pseudo war. Agbacha oso, agu o mile.