By Taiwo Adisa
In October 2001, the management of The Punch sent me to the South-East, ostensibly to coordinate political reporting for the newspaper in the zone ahead of the 2003 elections. I then made Abia my base, from where I roved around the five states. Abia was a natural base because the newspaper had two offices in the state. Again, the state correspondent was on leave at the time, so I had the chance to report the state and the geopolitical zone at the same time.
One first rude shock I received was from an aide of the then Governor Orji Kalu, who had related to me as a publicist while I was on the Politics Desk of the newspaper at the Onipetesi, Ikeja office. He said; ‘Mr. Adisa, now that you are in the South- East, know this is a different terrain o. There are some people you must not touch with a long pole. I was interested in getting the list of the “bad” people and he wasted no time drawing the list. First was the then deputy governor, Enyinnaya Abaribe, then the Abia State chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Tony Ukasanya, the Chairman of Niger Delta Development Commission(NDDC), Chief Onyeama Ugochukwu, National Secretary of the PDP, Prince Vincent Ogbulafor and Senator Adolphus Wabara, who was the senator representing Abia South at the time, and some other bigwigs of the PDP. The governor’s aide told me “These people are very dangerous that they would make my stay in the East difficult.”
But having grown up in an Ondo community where discrimination was alien, especially with a father, who was practically the Asiwaju of non-natives, Nigerians, or non-Nigerians, I couldn’t fathom such segregation. So I decided to know more about the “bad people” of Abia. I got their contacts one after the other. Of course, I had the contacts of Chief Ugochukwu, one of the journalism greats we have known.
My first contact with the then-deputy governor, Abaribe was pleasant. He never showed signs of a man overtaken by the ‘hugeness’ of his office and saw me to the door. Such a humble, soft-spoken politician. And I went around all the “bad people” discovering their meekness and deep concern for Nigeria, rather than the giddy, power-grabbing culture of the ordinary politician that was painted. My friend was infuriated seeing I had interviewed most of those on the list of ‘no-go areas’ he had presented to me and I had to tell him off.
Yes, it’s impossible to finish narrating the entire bit of my South East Odyssey in this piece but enough to say that we will always need to try out the stereotypes we build or got built for us about individuals, people, or events. What I saw in the South- East were human beings, living their lives the same way those on the streets of Oshodi or even the main market in Kano would. Politicians play politics the same way it is played in any of the other geopolitical zones. I saw nothing to denounce my early life experience in the home of ‘Baba Eji’ as the Ondos would call Baba Ibeji (father of twins), where all tribes and tongues converged for evening rendezvous after the day’s hard work.
My humanity-first experience and conviviality among tribes and tongues were further reinforced by some of the heroic stories we saw emanating from the Nigerian Civil War or in the immediate prelude to that devastating battle. If we recall some of those stories, we will easily conclude that perhaps our oldies need to tell more of such to today’s Gen Z generations and the fast fingers, who easily rain curses and abuse on others on account of tribe and tongue. Some of those who readily ‘spill blood’ online, promote hate and cruelty in the name of ethnic jingoism.
Two of such instances will come in handy here. We’ve read of the story of the then military governor of Western Region, Lt. Col Adekunle Fajuyi, who opted to die alongside his Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Aguiyi Ironsi, while the latter was a victim of a counter-coup on a visit to Ibadan. The Ekiti-born Fajuyi, a Yoruba of the South West, laid his life for Ironsi, an Igbo, from the South-East.
Then we heard of the ‘abandoned property’ saga in the Port Harcourt axis. None of such happened in Lagos, as many Igbos who had fled to Biafra land in the heat of the war, met their properties intact and even received the balance of the accumulated rent for the years they were away.
Recall that these are no fictions. They were incidents that bed-rocked today’s Nigeria and they cannot be wished away. If today’s generation is trivialising those incidences, you would understand the revered writer, Prof Chinua Achebe’s apparent frustration when he wrote There Was a Country.
Today, the old sane Lagos is being defined by ethnic jingoists and tribal champions who want us to chase the Igbos away. To where I am tempted to ask. Have they done a census of the series of intermarriages that have taken place between and among people of different ethnic colorations, especially after the end of the war in 1970? The mother of the governor of Osun State, Ademola Adeleke hailed from Ukwa, in Abia State and I know Chioma, who got married to Adeleke’s nephew, the popular musician, David Adeleke (Davido) is also Ibo. That’s just to mention one family. So, how do they divide the children in the face of an ‘Igbo Must Go’ agenda? The same sane Lagos, that we saw in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, is today being rechristened an entity of monstrous ethnic bigots, who are moving to launch what they called the ‘Igbo Must Go’ campaign. I must confess that the current crusade is an offshoot of a similar wrong-headed campaign around the 2023 general election, where ethnic bigotry abnormally took the centre of affairs in Lagos. I believe it was, and still is, a result of a miscalculated assumption that ascribes to the Igbos, every “anti-system” occurrence in Lagos. If some acclaimed lords of Lagos politics lose an election in Lagos, that should be an avenue to pause and check what is amiss. Rather than pick cudgels and cutlasses to chase away those who don’t speak your language. The Yoruba has a saying that we all cannot sleep and head in the same direction. It means that individuals, whether they are your siblings or your biological children, have the power to think differently. If the Americans, the British, and all resort to such, how many of our kit and kins out there would remain abroad?
Last week, the South East caucus in the National Assembly highlighted what I see as the emptiness of the Igbophobic campaigns in Lagos in recent years. The caucus, in a petition to the Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, demanded the arrest and prosecution of the promoters of the vicious ethnic jingoism called the ‘Igbo Must Go’ campaign. In the petition signed by Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, leader of the South-East Senate caucus, and the leader of the caucus in the House of Representatives, Hon Igariwey Iduma Enwo, the lawmakers drew IG’s attention to “a bigoted anti-Igbo tweet made on the 27th of July released on X account of @Lagospedia, wherein Lagosians and every South-West stakeholder were asked to prepare for massive protest of ‘IgboMustGo’ on the 20th to 30th of August.”
Rather than descend into the gutter like pigs anytime things don’t go their way, politicians and political merchants should spare us a thought and stick to the ideas that edify humanity as we saw in the Ironsi/Fajuyi incident and the great people of Lagos who were their brothers’ keepers.