By Fred Chukwuelobe
While the organisers of the protests were making their plans, agents of government didn’t have any plans to assuage their anger or address their demands to forestall a breakdown of law and order.
What they thought best was to pin the protest on Mr. Peter Obi, Labour Party’s presidential candidate in the last election and on Igbo people. They thought that the best way to stop the protests was to get the Igbo people not to participate. In their infantile mind, the Igbo must be scapegoats in everything that is wrong with this country. They had to point their fingers at their supposedly biggest rivals.
The late Chinua Achebe, writing in his book, “The Trouble with Nigeria,” said: “Nigerians will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo”.
That has always been the case. The Igbos are seen as cannon fodder by the rest of Nigeria when political decisions are being made. In hating them and singling them out for their enterprise and itinerancy, which has developed many parts of the country, Nigeria has remained the biggest loser, even if those propagating the hate do not want to admit it.
They forgot that despite their new found alliance with their hitherto political foes, years of political miscalculation and the births of many out-of-school and hungry youths in the North meant that the protests would fester in new grounds, especially now that it is their “awaloken”.
So, they met, determined that the best way to stop the protests from assuming the #EndSARS dimension was to draw Igbo people out, to pin it on Peter Obi, who is Igbo.
Enter the agent provocateurs, led by Bayo Onanuga and some faceless, mushroom groups threatening Igbo people with eviction from the South West where they call home.
They went to town, couched very cheap statements warning the Igbo people not to dare organise any protests in their area. Unbeknown to them, Igbo people are smarter. They allowed them to engage in blabber-mouthing while the people from the land of the rising sun pulled one of the smartest moves yet, ignore their tantrums.
While the focus was on the Igbo people, even as petulantly as hanging the destruction wrecked by criminals who hijacked the #EndSARS protest on them, the bigger problem laid somewhere else: the North.
Once the protests began, the Igbo remained quiet wherever they were found. Nowhere else was the quietude even more defeaning than in the South East geopolitical zone inhabited by Nd’Igbo. They guarded their markets and their tongues and watched from the sidelines as those who were told that they were the problems unleashed mayhem.
From parts of the South West to the North, the protesters made their voices heard and made their points even as lame as they could in some instances.
The northern elite, who had been at the forefront of emasculating the Igbo and gerrymandering the polity to an advantage, leaving the Igbo out, suddenly woke up from their miscalculated slumber to now remember that they had failed their people. Television screens showed northern leaders bemoaning their fate and miscalculation.
The once revered traditional emirs couldn’t help tame the rampaging mob. They are even fighting to ward off the rampaging political class that is baying for blood for their revered stool. At the last count, two Emirs are struggling for the control of Kano Emirate. The once very powerful Sultan of Sokoto has been cut to size by politicians who stripped him of powers to appoint local Chiefs.
Millions of youths are uneducated, hungry and angry, and anger they displayed even if crudely.
They went after signboards, roofing sheets, drainage covers, police armoured cars, bags of essential commodities, and so on. To them, these were symbols of oppression, which they’re protesting against. They ignored their leaders who have spent the greater part of their political lives teaching them to hate the Igbo. They now see them as the oppressors.
I have been watching from my small corner to see what the Onanugas of this world and the motley of tribal irredentists will say of the protests. Nothing! They have lost their voices. Their plans of roping in Nd’Igbo and Peter Obi into the protests fell flat.
Now, will they learn? I don’t think so, because they’re bereft of any solutions to the myriad of problems bedevilling this country. They think the Igbo are the cause. No! The Igbo are rather part of the solution because wherever they are, they call home and develop. They have paid a heavy price to keep this country united. They fought a war of survival and lost it, but they survived the war faster than many could have imagined. They will always survive the shenanigans of tribal bigots.
Those hoping to lure the Igbo into the impending political fight have lost it. They should look at the real problems. If they do, they’d realise the Igbo are not their problems, but that they are the problem of the Igbo. Ka Chineke mezie okwu ’m.
(c) Fred Chukwuelobe.