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By Nwachukwu Obidiwe
For Levi Obijiofor, a journalist and journalism scholar, as his published profile introduces, he who holds the torch for the people to find their way does not hide it under the bushel. If he does, he is invoking darkness. Again, he who commits himself to deep thinking, the outcome of which he advocates to the public as a duty, should not invert the truth for doing so will worsen the thoughtlessness of the people. Such is an injury to conscience and a reproach to service. Your piece in The Sun newspaper, titled, “Ngige: Truth-telling or Spreading Propaganda?” is a disservice to Ndi-Igbo. It is bad education on our circumstances today, which those in the vicious grip of self-destructive propaganda as championed by your piece won’t understand. Your false deductions as takeaway from the foresighted address, which Senator Chris Ngige gave at a recent meeting of Ndi-Eze Ndigbo and Igbo Delegate Assembly in the 19 northern states, follows the pattern of the pernicious propaganda, which has incited Igbo youths to violent agitations. Ngige is a statesman and what an elder sees sitting down, the top of the tallest iroko cannot avail same to a child. Your piece, without the false flesh you adorned it with, should have taken the title, “Ngige’s Inconvenient Truth.”
My initial impulse was to ignore your snide but I consider this is about your third voyage in that province of mischief. Need, therefore, to first take you back to the Enugu Coal Camp of those days, so that your uncle, Aaron Obijiofor, will give you a handful of notes on the Ngiges and their patriarch, the late Pius Okonkwo Ngige, who, as foreman, at the Public Works Department of the colonial service, resigned his job after leading a protest over the ill treatment of Nigerian workers. The colonial officers had asked him to choose between renouncing the workers and resignation. He chose the latter. The minister is only a chip of the old block. But, of course, this pedigree is not alien to you, recalling that, in 2006, after he left office as Anambra State governor, you wrote about his courage and passion for the people that nearly cost his life. This same courage keeps him in the news for the right reasons. The only difference is that your hatred for President Muhammadu Buhari has blurred your vision that it is still the same courageous Ngige who speaks truth to power and fights for the voiceless.
We ought to commend him for standing tall at a time when the man in other leaders failed. Ngige is not against self-determination but needless destruction and war in Igboland. His bold caution against armed struggle is not different from the muted voices of Francis Cardinal Arinze, Prof. Ben Nwabueze and Chief Mbazulike Amaechi, topmost Igbo elders. The huge difference is that Ngige chose the roof top, not because of his height but because of wisdom and courage, so that he can be heard from every distance. Ngige was a soldier in Biafra. He saw children die of kwashiorkor. He saw the shelling, devastation and death. He has to take that risk at a time many are afraid to speak up so that Ndigbo will not become a collective persona-victim in Kofi Awoonor’s Songs of Sorrow, who blamed elders for not forewarning him as he was led “among the sharps of the forest, where retuning is not possible and going forward is a great difficulty.”
Ngige did not choose to be gentle in telling the inconvenient truth that the South-East hitherto enjoyed all the top federal executive and legislative positions between 1999 and 2015 yet Enugu-Awka-Onitsha, Enugu-Okigwe-Umuahia-Port Harcourt and Port Harcourt-Owerri express roads turned into farmlands while Nnewi-Okigwe and Abakiliki-Cameroon became forlorn wishes. Ngige is not wrong that the Second Niger Bridge was only a promise on a paper, circulated at every national election for 16 years, notwithstanding the so-called lucrative appointments. The bridge only became a reality, currently at 60 per cent completion, in three years of the Buhari administration. It is an inconvenient truth to remind us that the Akanu Ibiam International Airport, Enugu, took the trophy as the worst in Africa, even as persons of Igbo extraction successively served as aviation ministers. An inconvenient truth to give the credit for reversing and bringing it to real international standard to President Buhari, who didn’t make any noise before giving N10 billion for it. What of Ngige’s role as a strong and visible member of the Federal Executive Council?
Ngige’s only sin is that he did not choose to “tell gently, gently, all that we shall one day have to tell, so that those who hear it later, will not laugh and term us the loud mouth of big children,” which Birago Diop captured in Vanity. Ngige chose not to sit on the fence, in aloofness at a time “the truth and untruth struggle in endless and bloody combat…where all the opposites arrive to plague the inner senses,” as Lanrie Peters, created in The Fence. No sane elder idles away while his goat delivers in a tether. Ngige’s warning is that Ndi-Igbo should not once more become “the shattered prisoners in a fortress of falling walls.” Ngige does not want to be an “emissary of rift, so smug in smoke-rooms, away from the funeral piles at home, eating up the forests,” a rueful, mournful picture that J.P. Clark painted in The Casualties, to remind us of that war, past.
Come on! Ngige didn’t say President Buhari has done it all for Ndigbo. He is only calling for objectivity in the overall assessment. He is only urging we play down the presidential elocution for the reality on the ground. His argument is that no leader hates a people with such an advertised passion and still yields to unprecedented development of critical infrastructures in their zone to stimulate economic activities. While not denying the Igbo absence in certain sensitive national positions, his counter is that apposite compensation with critical infrastructures cannot be denied and that what we lack can be achieved through good thinking. He revealed his visit to the President over appointments in the army and police and the encounter with the Inspector-General of Police, details of which are still available on the clips of his Channels television interview for persons like Levi to review.
It is here that his reference to elite propaganda as an agent for the miseducation of the youths revolves. There is no denying that the time we live in demands better engagement strategy that sets politics aside. It is time for a deeper reflection and truthful commitment.
No sane person cuts his nose to spite his face and no right-thinking person sets his house on fire . Therefore, destroying infrastructures and killing security agents, 70% of whom record show are Igbos is stupid and preposterous. The Nnobi Police Station in Idemili South, one of the numerous burnt, was built from contributions from different town unions when Ngige was the President General of Alor Peoples Convention. I don’t know if Levi has ever served the Nnaka Town Union much less lead it to be supporting this war is on our hearth. Ngige can’t afford aloofness over such senseless self-immolation for it is not different from the position of others whose utterances fuel the violence .
This again bears out in crystal form, the brainwashing of a section of Igbo youths as argued by Ngige. A situation where our youths are convinced that all their problems, will vanish overnight, in a Biafra achieved through an ill-prepared, pointless armed struggle, shatters and benumbs thinking faculty . Nothing except brainwashing will convince a youth to discard an olympic size football pitch, where his competitive spirit has earned endless local and international trophies, for a backyard playground. Only brainwashing can make a youth conclude that fishing in Agulu Lake is now more rewarding of a bumper catch, than in the Atlantic ocean. That youths whose fathers clamoured for the Second Niger Bridge for decades, see it springing up with speed, suddenly diminish the enormous effort because a President Buhari who they have been told is Jubril from Sudan is building it, defies reasoning.
But nothing can be more preposterous than Levi alleging that Ngige undermines the Dignity of Man, the motto of the University of Nigeria, his alma mater. This is quite bizzare because while Levi uses his pen to incite and put Igbos in harm’s way, Ngige uses his position to protect them. He uses it to forestall killings and destructions. Ndi-Eze Ndigbo in 19 Northern States had run to him over distressing developments. Ngige intervened on their behalf, reaching out to the authorities in their states of abode for protection. His intervention not only calmed frayed nerves, it also restored sleep to millions of Igbos living in the North. Is there a better way to live the motto of the University of Nigeria than this ? By the way, who was Levi at the UNN to talk about Ngige who was a student union leader even as a medical student? How dare compare with Ngige who was denied distinction in pathology for involvement in students activism according to Prof. Wilson Onuigbo while addressing the medical doctors of 1979 set at the homecoming ceremony in 2004 ?
But what can be more stupid than to allege Ngige is concerned with personal gains? For a start, this is a man who never lobbied to be Minister in 2015 and even in 2019 when desperation led many into spending millions for the position but was re-appointed while in the US. For your information, this man is an accomplished medical doctor who left the Federal Ministry of health at a directorate level, and thereafter invested heavily in many reputable private clinics, real estate and flourishing motor business- majority shareholder in Ess Dee Motors before joining politics. Is Levi also aware Ngige is one of the principal founders and the longest serving President of Ika-Ikenga, member of Ohaneze Strategic Committee, co-convener of Mkpoko-Igbo and former Assistant National Secretary of the PDP(1999-2002) former Governor and Senator, Officer of the Order of the Niger(OON) awarded on the double recommendations of the Federal Ministry of Health for outstanding role as a public servant and Anambra State Government for meritorious contributions to his community? Can anyone in good conscience claim a man of such enormous pedigree is longing for lucre of office, position or money? Ngige is only paying the price of a sensitive conscience. But when the time is ripe and judgement beckons, I have no doubt that history will reward him bountifully with kind words even as he journeys with his high chieftaincy titles of Onwanetilora- Okaomee of Alor, Ituku, Okpanam, Abatete and Okoh as well as Ogbuheruzo of isseke
• Nwachukwu Obidiwe, a journalist lives in Abuja
