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Nigeria loves to call itself a nation the way a child calls a cardboard box a spaceship, loudly, confidently, and with absolutely no supporting evidence. One wonders whether the word is meant for conviction or hypnosis. If a bucket, a kettle, and a dying generator are stacked together, do they become a coordinated symphony? Only in Nigeria, where unity means: “You are here. Don’t ask why.”
Among all who were forcefully drafted into this grand experiment of confused citizenship, the Igbo of the South-East (some call it Sad East) have paid the highest tuition fees for the privilege of belonging. They are expected to be hardworking but invisible, successful but never too successful, patriotic but never proud. Nigeria demands loyalty the way a kidnapper demands affection; stay, smile, and don’t mention the ropes.
The so-called “nation” began not as a union of peoples but as a clerical shortcut. Some British administrator, bored and possibly late for lunch, joined distant, distinct civilisations under one office stamp and called it governance. Not a single town hall meeting was held. Not even a polite group text. The Igbo, who traditionally debated leadership like their lives depended on it, immediately became the wrong kind of citizens in a state where obedience was expected and questions were crimes.
Independence in 1960 was marketed as freedom but delivered as inherited paranoia. The new political elite picked up colonial suspicion like a used school uniform, ill-fitting, uncomfortable, but stubbornly worn. The first coup of 1966, idealistic, naive, and disastrously interpreted, lit the fuse. The “revenge” massacres that followed were not spontaneous anger; they were organised horror. Igbo civilians were hunted like proof of a point. The survivors ran, not to secede, but to remain alive in a country that had turned their citizenship into a liability.
And so, Biafra emerged, not as a declaration of arrogance, but of oxygen. When you are being killed in your living room, stepping outside is not rebellion; it is breathing.
Nigeria responded with war, starvation, and a press release. Children starved while national leaders congratulated themselves on “unity.” At the end, the government announced “No victor, no vanquished”, the verbal equivalent of wiping your bloody hands on a white shirt and calling it detergent.
Ironically, the chief architect of this bloodbath, now hoary in years, is busy praying for a Nigeria that never was. No remorse. No feeling. Yet holding a darkened heart and scarred hands up to a sacred God whose retribution, though slow, surely comes with heavy weight, as on the complicit Middle Belt today, paying for the weeping blood of the innocent they helped destroy, at the hands of its collaborators-turned nemesis.
Then came the punishment phase. Igbo bank accounts were wiped clean to twenty pounds, regardless of what existed before the war. Billionaire? Trader? Farmer? Teacher? Your new worth was the cost of two chickens. Yet the Igbo rebuilt, not by national grace, but by covenant and muscle memory. Markets resurrected. Schools reopened. Towns regrew from ash like something God forgot to make fragile.
But Nigeria did not stop at injury; it drew architectural diagrams for permanent disadvantage. The South-east was given fewer states than everyone else, fewer senators, fewer local governments, fewer resources, fewer voices. This wasn’t governance; it was mathematics as warfare. Railways somehow end before the region. Federal roads look like excavation sites from failed archaeological expeditions. Seaports that should power the economy are locked in administrative purgatory so that imports must land in distant ports and crawl back home through potholes large enough to bury hope.
This is not incompetence; it is strategy wearing the perfume of bureaucracy.
Industries in Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi are starved of electricity, so that geniuses must either migrate or die of generator fumes. Meanwhile, regions that produce little and invest even less are rewarded with federal generosity. One must admire the consistency, if not the logic.
Then comes the cultural insult. Igbo presence across Nigeria is treated like a scandal. “You people are everywhere,” Nigerians say, with the tone reserved for termites. If opportunities are blocked in the East, where exactly are people supposed to stand? On the moon?
And hovering over all of this is the confirmed existence of the mythical “Igbo cup”, a policy of permanent suspicion, national punishment packaged as “balance.” Regardless of the historical facts, that the 1966 coup, as confirmed by General Ibrahim Babangida, was ideologically mixed, not ethnically engineered, the narrative was crafted to make the Igbo collective defendants in a crime without trial.
Thus, every decade brings familiar scenes: riots somewhere, even in far-flung lands, Igbo shops are mysteriously the first to burn. Political tension arises; Igbo safety becomes optional. The country wants their business, their innovation, their diaspora wealth, but not their security, not their equality, not their dignity.
And yet, they build.
Nigeria thrives on Igbo industriousness, the way a failing student thrives on the class genius, copying answers while insulting the handwriting. Perhaps that is why they don’t want them to leave for their Biafra or ‘Biafraud’. The contradiction is almost artistic.
The targeting has never really stopped. Periodic flare-ups of national tension have shown a pattern in various states: Igbo businesses and properties are attacked or demolished, and Igbo travelers are singled out. Their presence is tolerated but never protected. Their success is admired privately but resented publicly. The message is always the same: you may survive, you may prosper, but you must never feel secure.
Yet the Igbo continue to build. They trade, they travel, they innovate, they teach, they repair what the state abandons. They are the heartbeat of commerce in a country that has consistently tried to slow their rhythm. Nigeria depends heavily on the Igbo for entrepreneurial energy, for manufacturing ingenuity, for diaspora remittances, while continuing to treat them as guests in a home they helped construct.
This contradiction cannot sustain itself forever. History is patient, but it is not static. A country cannot survive indefinitely on denial and forced silence. Nigeria must choose whether it will evolve into a federation of equals or it will continue performing the longest-running political theatre on the continent.
History does not forget, and patience is not eternity. A country cannot continue calling itself united while practicing exclusion as national policy. Unity is not enforced silence. It is justice.
Justice has been missing from the South-east for over fifty years. The Igbo have endured violence, starvation, systemic exclusion, cultural hostility, and economic sabotage, and they still stand unbroken, inconveniently refusing to disappear.
So, the real question is not whether the Igbo will remain.
The real question is whether Nigeria is worthy of the people it insists on holding hostage to its weird idea of unity.
Unity is not the absence of secession. Unity is the presence of justice. And justice has been on sabbatical in the South-east for more than half a century.
The Igbo have survived colonisation, massacres, civil war, deliberate economic strangulation, and political exclusion. They have survived being told they are too ambitious, too outspoken, too visible. They have survived every attempt to shrink them.
And they will continue to survive.
The real question is not whether the Igbo will remain in Nigeria, as most of them truly wish.
The question is whether Nigeria deserves them.
Those little minds of Lagos
Lagos, the grand theatre of “One Nigeria,” suddenly forgets its lines when Bokku Supermart describes Ndigbo as “cheats,” as if success must be suspicion and hard work must be a crime. Yet Ndigbo build houses here, pay rent, employ people, raise children, and contribute daily to the city’s pulse.
Lagos traffic does not discriminate by tribe before it blocks you; the city’s hustle belongs to everyone. Still, some nitwits have made stereotyping their civic hobby, mistaking loud diffidence for cultural pride.
But no worries. Lagos has always grown because people from everywhere come to build, and builders will always outrank those who merely sneer from the sidelines. The city belongs to those who create, craft, trade, and contribute.
So, let no Igbo be shaken. History is certain: wherever they go, they thrive and rise. Let the little minds chatter and be consumed by their bile. Why must you plunge into the mud-wrestling Olympics with those who treat ignorance as a competitive sport? The victory remains in staying unbothered, unshaken and ever rising.
