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Kigali is the capital and largest city of Rwanda. Those that have visited the city in recent times say it is a beauty to behold, perhaps, a reason for other Africans, including Nigerian leaders, trooping to it for retreats and conferences. That, however, is not the sense in which the capital city is being referenced here. It is rather a metaphor for intolerance and ethnic bigotry, which resulted in the genocide that swept through Rwanda in 1994.
The killing spree, which lasted 100 days before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel militia intervened in July 1994, claimed the lives of 800,000 people, largely Tutsis, but also moderate Hutus. It was a vicious exercise in which neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their wives of different ethnic groups.
Last April, Rwanda marked 30 years of the gory incident and paid solemn tribute to the genocide victims. But as the East African country has been doing quite much to erase that ugly chapter from its history, signs of such madness happening in Nigeria are increasingly becoming obvious, if not checked now. While Rwanda boiled, sane minds across the world raised the alarm. Years after, visitors to the country could not come to terms with the level of bestiality that accompanied the genocide.
Bayo Onanuga, special adviser to President Bola Tinubu, was among the flustered visitors to Rwanda after the mayhem. On September 2, 2018, he penned a grisly piece of his shock at the magnitude of destructions in the country. Onanuga wrote, “I visited the Genocide Memoriam in Kigali, Rwanda, and left deeply sober after 90 minutes of tour. I recommend it as a must-go place for ethnic champions, Pastors and Imams harbouring hatred about their fellow human beings and non-adherents of their faith. I hope they will take away as I did, that human beings do not in most cases have a choice about who they are in this world. Our ethnic identity is determined for us by our maker. So, why do we hate a person because he is not a member of our ethnic group? Why should a Christian hate a Muslim, vice versa? Let all humanity live in love”.
Onanuga, a senior journalist, made the profound remarks in 2018. But by 2023, just within a short space of five years, his entire world view has changed. He has fully unfurled as an ethnic jingoist driving the nation at a frightening speed to genocide in line with Rwanda of 1994. For him, one is either of his Yoruba South-West extraction or a cockroach deserving of death, as Hutu extremists regarded their Tutsi victims in Kigali.
Onanuga’s soft targets are the Igbo, especially those living in the South-West and Lagos in particular, who he detests for their enterprise and never-say-die spirit. In his thinking, a good Igbo man, is a dead one. Such a bizarre mindset can only approximate to the hate by Adolf Hitler, the German maximum ruler, against the Jews while embarking on his “final solution to the Jewish question,” at the end of which an estimated six million Jews were massacred all over Europe during the Second World War.
When, therefore, Onanuga took on Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the last general election the other day, accusing him and his supporters of being behind the touted protests by Nigerian youths over hunger and the rising cost of living in the land, he was not merely playing politics but simply advancing his petty project from another angle. In his words, “The malcontents planning to stage nationwide protests are supporters of Peter Obi, the failed presidential candidate of the Labour Party. He should be held responsible for whatever crisis emanates from the action”. To rub it in, he stressed, “The protest planners are also the same people who were instigated by IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu to launch the destructive ENDSARS protest in Nigeria in October 2020”.
To be sure, Obi has from the outset stated that his political engagements are on the basis of his competence and capacity, not as an Igbo or Christian. He has also demonstrated clear aversion to violence in whatever form. Obi’s lawyers are taking care of the unfounded allegation anyway.
But Onanuga’s proteges are frantically expanding the frontiers of his unguarded remarks. The other day, a mischievous statement by a certain Barrister Oladosu Oladipo indicated that “the South-West leadership are reflecting on EndSARS Protest in Lagos whereby multibillions naira manufacturing industries, factories and businesses were put on fire and destroyed by hired idiots but the ‘Computer Village’ was spared, not ‘touched’”. Computer Village is an information and communications technology (ICT) setting in Ikeja, mostly operated by Igbo businessmen and women. The release added that “while BRT buses at Ojota and Ebutte Metta were burnt, none of the ‘luxurious buses’ at Yaba and Jibowu, traveling to the Eastern region, was ‘destroyed’”. The buses in question were largely owned by Igbo transport operators. The emphasis on the business premises is worrisome.
Such chilling references are dangerous in a nation that is yet to fully recover from a bitter civil war of 1967-1970 that saw many lives wasted, 54 years after. They also bring back the sad memories of the 2023 general election when Onanuga and his ilk in the All Progressives Congress (APC) unleashed attack dogs on the Igbo and their businesses in Lagos for the singular offence of the people daring to take part in the electoral process.
Onanuga, then, APC presidential campaign council media director, said, “Let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics. Let there be no repeat in 2027. Lagos is like Anambra, Imo, any Nigerian state. It is not No Man’s Land, not Federal Capital Territory. It is Yoruba land. Mind your business”.
Calls on him to pull the brakes on the dangerous path he was toeing did not deter Onanuga. He rather boasted, “Let me make myself abundantly clear: the views I express on Twitter are my personal views. I don’t owe anyone any apology for addressing the existential threats of our people. I am after all, first of all a Yoruba, before being a Nigerian.”
Onanuga is from Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, but has appropriated the rights to live in Lagos and have a say in what happens in the state to the exclusion of others. He is playing a similar card at the national level, hence the need for right-thinking Nigerians to halt the frightening gambit that may have telling effects on the nation.
