By Paul Onomuakpokpo
In a seeming bid to ward off the
increasing threats to the stability of the country, the government is
floundering from one absurd measure to another. From deploying its security
apparatuses to monitor the social media, it has moved on to rein in hate speech
by proposing a bill in this regard. No much alarm should be triggered if the
government luxuriates in the obliviousness of the inability of these frenzied
measures to stave off the dissolution of the people’s union if it fails to
reckon with more enduring and acceptable solutions that the citizens have
generously proposed.
*Nnamdi Kanu |
But we must not ignore the augury
of a looming tragedy we are now confronted with in the government’s latest move
to sustain the nation’s unity. This is the bid by the government to re-arrest
the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu. Kanu might
have impudently breached some of the conditions for his freedom from
incarceration. He might have been found rhapsodising before his hundreds of
supporters and putative security personnel about his republic of unrivalled
equality and thereby violating the condition that he must not be in a crowd of
more than 10 people. He might be considered to have continued on the path of
heating up the polity by insisting on his prising a Biafra
Republic from Nigeria and
securing the support of some Igbo youths who evidently swoon over the prospect
of freedom from the stranglehold of their implacable tormentors. He might have
been a threat to the state by declaring that no election would take place in
Anambra as long as the Biafra question remains
unresolved. But these apparent offences do not validate the government’s quest
to re-arrest him in view of the rash of grim consequences that such a move
would precipitate.
While Kanu could easily be derided in some parts of the country such as the
north as an irritant that must be silenced, he is revered in the south-east by
his fellow Igbo youths as the exemplar of a quest for freedom that was
tragically mainstreamed by the late Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. But the challenge
that the government would not easily wade through is that of re-arresting Kanu
without imbuing in the Igbo a heightened consciousness of his heroic status. Of
course, Kanu has his uses. His emergence has focalised the much-neglected need
for justice for the majority of the citizens who are at the mercy of an
insignificant proportion of the population.
This is where his relevance ends.
For, his anti-heroic status outweighs his heroic attributes. While Kanu thinks
that he embodies the aspirations of his people, the fact remains that anybody
can latch on to the perceived or real injustice to their people to express
their own perverted ambition as Adolf Hitler did in Germany . Kanu’s anti-heroic
delusions are expressed in his warped sense of grandeur and territorial
ambition that goads him into contemplating corralling unwilling peoples as part
of his envisaged Biafra
Republic and thereby
replicating the injustice he is fighting against.
It may still be possible for the
government and others to argue that the alleged marginalisation of the Igbo is
just an accident of an unjust social system and not a deliberate policy to
permanently consign them to the margins. After all, other people from other
parts of the country are equally marginalised as long as their lives are by no
means improved by the fact that their own people – from the same community,
state or region – are in government. But such an argument stands the risk of
irrevocable repudiation if the government re-arrests Kanu. Such a re-arrest
would rather re-affirm the alleged marginalisation of the Igbo since the
argument would now be that the government has refused to arrest the northern
youths who threatened to forcibly evict the Igbo and take over their property
by October 1 if they do not leave their region. Yet, they are known to the
government as evidenced by the presence of some governors when these agent
provocateurs suspended their eviction notice. We are further alerted to the
seeming official protection these northerners enjoy by the fact of their
audacity to only suspend and not withdraw the ultimatum. The refusal of the
authorities to arrest these northern youths is thus seen as an official
endorsement of the assumed supremacy of the northern human species and the
inferiorization of their counterparts in the south.
Kanu’s misguided territorial
ambition has already alienated the people of the Niger Delta and the wilder
south-south region who feel they are not part of his Biafra Republic .
This was why they expressed their desire to have their own country to be known
as the Republic of Niger Delta if the Biafra Republic
through governmental churlishness escapes from the provenance of the fecund
imagination of the Igbo to that of reality. However, the danger is that this
alienation is now evaporating in the face of the threat by the government to
re-arrest Kanu. The Niger Delta militants who have warned against the re-arrest
of Kanu have threatened to resume hostilities and the disruption of crude oil
production which is at the heart of the nation’s economy.
Clearly, there is the lingering doubt in the south that the northern youths are
really sincere in their suspension of the ultimatum. It is this doubt that has
made IPOB to keep asking Igbo in the north to leave before October 1. They fear
that the northern youths would by October 1 go ahead to unleash violence on
southerners. Despite this suspicion, the tension between the north and the
south, especially the south-east has reduced since the suspension of the quit
notice. It becomes obvious that the re-arrest of Kanu would not only stoke this
tension, it may trigger violence with the attendant loss of lives and property.
If Kanu is a problem to the polity
today, the government must rue the fact that it is his creator through its
initial feckless response to him. Instead of finding a better way of handling
Kanu, the government hurriedly clamped him into detention and thereby made him
popular. Now, the government is on the path of making him more popular by
re-arresting him. Clearly, the broader issue of justice for all Nigerians that
Kanu’s clamour for Biafra
Republic has triggered
resonates with all who desire the continued survival and unity of the country.
But while the government is still contemplating how to respond to this matter,
it should not energise the Kanu phenomenon by re-arresting him.
The government should work through
the leaders of the south-east to whittle down his influence. Already, while the
leaders have supported the restructuring of the polity, they have disowned his
quest for a Biafra
Republic . But the
government has alienated these leaders through its attempt to re-arrest Kanu.
They have openly warned the government against the folly of re-arresting him.
The fact that it is a court that may order the re-arrest of Kanu would not make
it not to be linked to the government as the source of his ordeal. This is the
same government that has no reputation for obeying court orders. It took a long
time before the government heeded court orders for Kanu to be released from
detention. And the same government has refused to comply with court rulings for
the release of a former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, and the leader
of the Nigeria ’s
Islamic Movement Ibrahim, El-Zakzaky. The government should quietly withdraw
its suit for the re-arrest of Kanu and think of better ways of curtailing his
influence.
But ultimately, if the government is genuinely concerned about ensuring peace
in the country, it must take cognisance of the fact that what would stop or
vitiate agitations like those of Kanu is for it to accept the inevitability of
the input of all the citizens in a template for how they want to be governed.
It should find that input in their quest for restructuring that would engender
true federalism instead of hunting those who desire to free themselves of the
tyranny of the iniquitous state and its remorseless traffickers in inequality
and supremacy.
*Dr. Onomuakpokpo is
on the Editorial Board of The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment