WHO EVER HELD BACK THE “BIAFRANS” FROM LEAVING?

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

There is a trending video that was just brought to my attention, featuring Niger Deltan activist, Asari Dokubo, pleading with the Nigerian state to, as he put it, “let the Ibos go”.

I vehemently disagree with many of the sentiments expressed by my brother, Asari Dokubo, in his completely unnecessary outburst and totally condemn the more brazenly ethnicist dimensions to his quite tactless submissions.

Yet, and without condoning Dokubo’s tirade, in any way, that is arguably the response to expect if you are foolish enough to make someone like him your target!

The rabble of ethnic jingoists who suddenly transmuted from secessionists to “Obidients” in the wake of Peter Obi’s fraudulent presidential run, roundly showcase a tendency to seek to intimidate others, with views contrary to theirs, into silence.

They claim to be warming up to make Nigeria great but they hack your phone, download your contacts, and relentlessly subject you to horrendous cyber bullying, calling you anything from ritualist to fraudster with the pathologically amoral Obi ever smiling his nauseatingly fake smile and pretending not to be seeing or hearing any evil (ironically, in the ranks of the “Obidients”, are to be found some of the most perfidious fraudsters and fetish people in this country)!

I might react differently to cyber bullying but if you decide to target an Asari, I guess you should know what to expect.

I would nevertheless admonish Dokubo to develop a much thicker skin to criticism and be more circumspect about what he responds to, especially from ignoramuses on social media who have unfortunately been brought up by their quite misguided parents into thinking they are better than kids from other tribes and ethnic groups.

It is very wrong, as Mr Dokubo has done, to equate “Biafrans” and secessionists with the Igbo ethnic group and totally baseless to suppose that the “Ibos want to go” and that anyone is really preventing them from doing so.

While there is more than enough evidence that a bunch of secessionists, calling themselves “Biafrans” ( “Biafra” is a word I suspect European explorers coined from the Ijaw language, but which ethnic jingoists in the ranks of the secessionists now pretend is an Ibo derived word), no longer want to be Nigerians but there is no basis for the extrapolation that this then amounts to “the Ibos” wanting to go, as Mr Dokubo has framed it.

For God’s sake, not all Ibos are secessionists, there is no evidence that even a substantial number of them, much less a majority, identify as “Biafrans”, and, the overwhelming majority of Ibos I know are proud and quite patriotic Nigerians.

I do not believe keeping a country one, at all costs, including through bloodshed and fratricide, is a task that must be done; I instead believe that making a country work, as President Bola Tinubu is presently striving to do, is the one and only sustainable path to keeping a country strong, united and one.

I mean, if the country altogether works, who would ever really want to leave, anyway?

That said, the truth is that if it so happens that a majority of Ibos actually want a separate country of their own, then they should be allowed to have that, except that it must be restricted to their actual ancestral lands within the present five states comprising the South-east geopolitical zone, and, even at that, only to the extent that individual communities therein subscribe to the Biafran republic of the secessionists amongst them.

There, of course, lies the problem because much of this narrative that “the Ibos want to go” but that it is the Nigerian state that is preventing this from happening is as fictional as fiction, itself!

Those from the South-east who “want to go” are actually just a bunch of the most infernal thieves who greedily envisage the territory of their phantom “Biafran” republic as including lands, states and regions that historically have absolutely no part, whatsoever, with Iboland and whose indigenous people want absolutely nothing to do with the idea of sharing a “Biafran” or any other republic, for that matter, likely to be dominated by Ibos.

I don’t think up to 5 percent of the indigenes of Asaba, just across the river from Onitsha, could ever tolerate being stuck in a country dominated by Ibos from the South-east!

As for places like Sapele and Warri, God help any “Biafrans” foolhardy enough to come to plant the decidedly jingoist flag of their intrinsically imperialist agenda, there!

I’m really quite sorry to have to say this but it is the bitter truth of the matter.

Indeed, I do not think up to even as little as 1 percent of the indigenous peoples of Delta, Edo, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Benue or Kogi could possibly stomach the thought of being part of Nnamdi Kanu’s or similar twisted concepts of “Biafra”!

Unfortunately, for the secessionists, former President Muhammadu Buhari was actually right when he described them as “a dot in a circle”, for that is the best they can hope for as a sovereign independent country.

I love my country and love all its constituent parts but this blackmail of pretense that certain people want to exit the union and are being prevented from doing so is total crap and it’s probably high time we call the bluff, allow the secessionists to go, as they actually are and not as they would rather greedily be, and let’s see if they dare!

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