Nothing in the recent history of Southern Nigeria assures of better nations, if they separate from Nigeria. Our collective history is not equivocal about who the enemies of Nigeria are, but sadly the same personalities are leading a rabble of secessionists in the South into a bubble paradise under our watch. Here is the triumvirate of evil that is besetting Nigeria’s progress: the generation that saw and fought the civil war but turned around to take Nigeria hostage; the generation that read about the war yet now co-supervising the plunder of the ruins that Nigeria is today; and the generation that neither witnessed nor read about the war but is now up ‘in arms’ to commit the remains of Nigeria to history. Amidst our social media noise, the theatre of war is gradually shifting base from North to South. Neglect of history, corruption of history, and ignorance of history all work together to consign great kingdoms to history. As long as Southern Nigeria continues to feed this disconnect from history, the region’s descent into complete anarchy will continue to be sure, steady, and irreversible.
Personalities who are currently leading separatist agitations in the South have their deeds recorded in our history. They are mostly mercenaries doing the bidding of their paymasters, local and foreign, and sincerely misguided or unguided ethnic patriots. Nnamdi Kanu was entirely a nobody until he started IPOB and its Radio Biafra. Sunday Adeyemo aka Igboho grew from being the leader of Rasheed Ladoja’s political thugs to becoming a chattered hand that could unleash political terror in any part of South West. Given their antecedents, can the likes of Kanu and Igboho lead the South into a great future? We have seen in Lagos State what it means to live where leadership by elected persons and rulership by miscreants and mobs coexist. Add our current clan of greedy politicians to the equation and you have a complete recipe for disaster. These ones have demonstrated many times that they would do anything to remain in or around power.
If I may ask, where do we intend to raise an army of fighters, should the agitations lead to a war? Our young people are busy creating in our names pseudo nations whose territories stretch from Twitter to Facebook and to badly written blogs. Off social media, a visible proportion of these emergency ethnic champions are sold to various forms of internet fraud, gambling, money doubling schemes, and human rituals for money. Some of their females have built a thriving kayanmata industry. The many of them who have defied the challenges of the day to build viable small businesses, labouring day and night to see the same grow, would obviously not want to watch their efforts go up in flames. From all indications, these young people are either too distracted or too busy for the war that a section of them daily invokes on social media platforms. Human history is yet to have a record of a people who win a war by trending hashtags on social media.
In our recent history, we have had states declared in the Niger Delta. The militants ended up being the richer for it. Sadly, the people are left to nurse ruined environment and live with its fragility. Does not this tell us that the closer we drag Nigeria’s already mangled body to its grave, the nearer we get to anarchy, which we are confusing with nationhood? We do not want to take it to heart that the El Dorado in our separatist dreams may not glow brighter than South Sudan now does – a state that failed in its promising infancy. History does not teach us that the new is always the better, especially if the new is midwifed by charlatans.
Why have we refused to learn wisdom from the fact that our ability to raise, maintain, and sustain concurrently super-rich politicians and wretched citizens foreshadows only the birth of another unjust union? It never disturbed us that our super-rich politicians enlist the children of poor citizens into gangs that do the politicians’ evil bidding. We never questioned their magical rise to wealth, those who left our mutual difficult fate for politics and in few years littered our territories with mansions. We do not stop at that, but go ahead to give them our respect, highest tables at important events, chieftaincy titles, and a podium at religious gatherings. We just want a paradise, even when everything about us points in the direction of hell. The dream of egalitarian unions that has created millions of silent supporters of separatist movements in the South can only be a nightmare in disguise, if it is viewed through the lens of our history.
What we are seeing in Imo is child’s play compared to the fate that will befall us all in the South, if we refuse to toe the line of reason our history offers. If Muhammadu Buhari has cared so much in the past six years about the raids of his Daura ancestral hometown by bandits, and the destruction of the North by Boko Haram and ISWAP, he would care just so much if the same fate befalls your hometown, mine, and entire region. North East and North West have a high latitude of tolerance for religious fanatism and they are nursing the monsters that it bred in terrorists and bandits. Ethnicism will do no less to us in the South, should the current trend continue. IPOB with its ESN has been branded a terrorist organization. Soon, Oduduwa Republic and all other similar groups will be so classified. Officially, the theatre of war will move to the South, and the destruction that will result will be sure, steady, and, sadly, irreversible.
Oladapo sent the article from the University of Ibadan.
