BAYO ONANUGA IS ANYTHING BUT AN ETHNIC BIGOT, By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

Contrary to the preferred narrative of a mixture of ethnic champions and rather quite clueless commentators, out there, Bayo Onanuga’s tweet exhorting Ibos to refrain from meddling in Lagos politics, going forward, even at face value, is anything but bigoted or, howsoever, ill willed.

When Mr. Onanuga’s professional background and manifest personal orientation are brought into the equation, the seemingly coordinated attempts to tag him an ethnic bigot fall flat on their face.

Indeed, whatever his detractors are aiming to achieve they will fail in dressing Onanuga in what is only actually their own robes.

Bayo Onanuga is a world class journalist, hero of the struggle for democracy and a fine gentleman by any measure.

His tweet might indeed have come across as somewhat stark but having worked with him for a while now, what I would probably ascribe to the obsessively forensic lawyer in me, has often noticed a degree of demarcation between what he types on a phone, such as a tweet or WhatsApp message, and what he types on a computer, such as a news report, press statement, or newspaper article.

I’m not too sure but I figure I come across just the same typing on a computer or phone though I actually find typing on a phone far easier.

In any case, there is really only so much you can say vide a tweet and personally, I rather prefer to make myself abundantly clear through full-length articles capable of showcasing a concise adumbration of my standpoint.

That said, Onanuga actually meant well vide his message to the Ibos, and, the Onanuga I know would have put up the exact same tweet with the appropriate substitutions if it had been a bunch of Yorubas who had marched off to Anambra, Abia or elsewhere in Ibo land, denigrating those places as “no-man’s-lands” and purposing to “capture” them from the aboriginal Ibos for the settler and immigrant Yoruba.

If truth be told, certain people are in the totally offensive and most obnoxious habit of referencing Lagos, and quite frankly other places, for that matter, as “no-man’s-land”, and while this is by no means something all Ibos do, the bitter truth is that the overwhelming majority of those who do so happen to be Ibos.

That is apart from the fact that those overwhelmingly more likely to stand for elections in places that are not their ancestral homelands, also just happen to be Ibos, as well.

Needless to say, the indigene/settler tensions in our country must be holistically and imaginatively addressed but we must countenance no illusions about the reality of our situation.

The notion that any person, regardless of ethnic, indigeneship, settler and similar considerations should be able to run for office anywhere in Nigeria is quite high-minded, lofty and most romantic, but it is also miserably pedestrian, quite kindergarten, utterly idiotic, obviously nonsensical and altogether unworkable within the praxis of our extant Nigerian reality.

Short of being dragged, kicking and screaming, by the indigenous Aworis, Eguns, Saros and Ijebus of Lagos to occupy the office, I would never dream of standing for election in Lagos, even as local government counselor, just as my tribespeople back home in Delta could not tolerate some Lagosian coming to preside over our political affairs.

My old friend, Donu Kogbara, was on Arise Tv, sanctimoniously upbrading Onanuga for his tweet, as if her village people back in Ogoniland would tolerate an Ibo trader becoming their local government chairman, when they most certainly wouldn’t even stomach me, their fellow Niger Deltan, coming all the way from Delta to take up such a role in their native Rivers!

This wokism that ends up only really papering over cracks and intimidating everyone into a Gobbelian conspiracy of silence is the worst fascism and a veritable recipe for utter disaster.

All it ever achieves is a contrived and utterly useless peace that is sooner than later quite dreadfully upended when the suppressed and unaddressed tensions that were all the while simmering just beneath eventually explode unto the surface.

It is most hypocritical and totally unhelpful to the effort at healing and reconciliation for truth to be supplanted by falsehood as is very much the case with emergent and widespread approaches to a very serious problem.

There was a clear and unmistakable ethnicist agenda championed by a major and rather quite loud and uncouth section of Peter Obi’s supporters this election cycle with the active encouragement of Mr Obi, himself.

That despicable agenda failed spectacularly and now the perpetrators are accusing the reactors of being the perpetrators and yet, at the same time, calling for healing and reconciliation!

Yes, let there be healing and reconciliation but both will be impossible vide despicable attempts at rewriting history.

If truth be told, our beloved Igbo compatriots badly require much soul-searching, even a wholesale reevaluation of their worldview and attitude to other Nigerians, especially with respect to how they bring up their children to view other tribes and ethnicities with whom they share one country.

The expectation that people should stomach insult and denigration from others of a different ethnicity and not react in ways that are invariably problematic is as idiotic as it is unrealistic.

If you are an immigrant/settler in a place and are so empty-headed as to say to your indigene/host “without me your town wouldn’t be developed”, it would be entirely fair, just and equitable in the circumstances – quite apart from being compellingly natural – that he should retort: “I never invited you to come develop my town for me – go back from whence you came and develop your wasteland of a homeland”.

The problem at hand did not begin with others baiting or profiling the Ibos – that is all reaction; the problem at hand began with a section of the Igbo most unconscionably baiting and profiling others across this country but especially so in Lagos!

That truth is critical to resolving the problem.

*Onokpasa, a lawyer and member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Abuja.