Chuks Iloegbunam tells Sam Omatseye to cleanse his journalism
*Peter Obi
Some
have called you foolish, dear Sam Omatseye. Others insist that you are plain
stupid. There are those who hold you to be beneath contempt. Their howls of
execration upon you are in reaction to your August 1, 2022 article entitled Obi-tuary. For me,
however, you are a dear friend. Our friendship started in the 1980s at Newswatch magazine where both
of us practiced journalism before you travelled to the United States for
further studies.
It continued upon your return and strengthened
to the point that, sometimes, you get the producers of your TV
Continental programme to connect me to field questions live. Besides,
living in different states, we often chat by telephone. I demonstrated our
amity again last May when I was in Nigeria’s commercial capital for the Lagos
International Book Fair. I phoned you and, within the hour, you were at my
stand where we spent quality time reminiscing about the good old days and
prognosticating on the future of our dear fatherland.
Armed with this handle of friendship, I have just the one advice for you: Be careful. It is in elaboration of this counsel that I write all that you read hereon. Please look back to the time of the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967 to 1970. You will find that, military or civilian, none of the political actors of that era is still in a position to fight elections today. The final curtain long fell for most of them. Of the lot that remains, some have become vegetables, or are propped up with a suffusion of drugs or would not find their way to the loo unless hired attendants or swearing relatives point it out. Together with the handful that is still blessed with something close to robust health, they have one thing in common. They are seated, restless or restive, in various existential departure halls, clutching fitfully at their boarding passes and waiting for that inevitable voice that cannot be disobeyed, to announce their flights into past tense.
In a broad sense, the departed leave their legacies, good, bad or ugly, for those standing in line and waiting their turns to also check out. What legacies, dear Sam, are you and I feverishly working day and night to leave for those coming in our wake? When you write an article that denigrates the Igbo nation of over 50 million people, and make nonsense of some of those things that mean the most to them, do you really believe that your disposition is justified by the pay and perquisites that accrue to you at Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s The Nation newspapers?
This
is you: “The Biafran babblers are alive
and well. They just swapped icons, rechristened the shrines and rewrote the
rites. They left the prophet for a secular priest. They have had a switch of
battle gear.”
This clearly is a perfidious way of sentencing
Ndigbo to the status of the bat that is neither bird nor mammal. Their fight
for Biafra five decades ago was stopped. Their fight now for democratic
integration impels you to call them babblers, i.e., people who are no more than
endless talkers of nonsense. One would think that the bat sobriquet aptly
becomes your Bola Ahmed Tinubu whose initials provide the BAT acrostic that he
wears like a badge. I will sooner return to the BAT.
This,
again, is your characterisation of the Igbo: “They can say they have a
legitimate tribe and rhetoric. They may pretend to love Nigeria. They may claim
to embrace INEC, cling to a political party no one in the police or DSS will
harangue.”
Isn’t this the height of Igbophobia? We may go back in history. Before Tinubu, there were other Yoruba presidential candidates, including Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief M. K. O. Abiola, General Olusegun Obasanjo, Chief Gani Fawehinmi and Chief Olu Falae. None of these personages indexed their presidential ambition on stoking inter-tribal animosity between the Yoruba and the Igbo. As a matter of fact, Chief Philip Ezebuilo Umeadi, Igbo and one of the oldest Senior Advocates of Nigeria, was Papa Awolowo’s running mate in the 1979 presidential election.
*Chuks Iloegbunam
Why
does it make sense to you and to your principal that the only route to his
vaulting presidential ambition must be one that sunders two ethnic groups that
have since before the amalgamation been living together in amity, harmony and
peace, two peoples that have always, in peace or in peril, lent each other a
helping hand?
At
the height of the Western Nigeria political crisis of the mid 1960s that pitted
Chief Awolowo against Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the former’s Action Group
(AG) and Dr. M. I. Okpara’s National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC)
entered into a coalition that birthed the United Progressives Grand Alliance
(UPGA). We have it on Wole Soyinka’s authority – see page 73 of his
autobiographical You Must Set Forth At Dawn(Bookcraft,
Ibadan 2006) that Dr. Okpara lent the then incarcerated Awo a voice by
dispatching Mazi Anyogu Elekwachi Ukonu and a complement of seasoned
broadcasters that installed a transmitter right inside Awolowo’s Ibadan home.
Ndigbo
were not a part of Awolowo’s treason trial and his imprisonment for ten years.
Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe even said that he was the one that insisted on Awolowo being
imprisoned in Calabar, rather than in Northern Nigeria where the chief feared
that poisoning could end his life.
It
was not the Igbo that nullified Chief Abiola’s victory in the 1993 presidential
election. Rather, Ndigbo were in the forefront of the NADECO (National
Democratic Coalition) struggle against the gross injustice. At least a third of
those that formed the NADECO were Igbo, according to a list in Battlelines: Adventures in Journalism and
Politics, Chief Segun Osoba’s autobiography published in 2020 by
Diamond Publications Limited, Lagos. They included Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, the
late Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu, Okwadike (Dr.) Chukwuemeka Ezeife, Prof Anya O.
Anya, Chief Ralph Obioha, Chief Empire Kanu, Chief Michael Anyiam, Chief E.
Duru, Chief Vincent Nwizugbo and Dr. Uma Eleazu,
NADECO had an international arm. In the United Kingdom, its meetings were held in the late Raph Uwechue’s Africa Books Limited offices in Hammersmith London. Chief Uwechue was Igbo. Dear Sam, I do not know exactly where you were at the time, and I concede that, among Nigerian politicians, there is something known as selective amnesia. If, therefore, your Tinubu, who lived in London for a portion of his exile, does not remember Uwechue’s role in NADECO, I am sure that none of General Alani Akinrinade, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi and Professor Sylvester Monye will forget.
All the Igbo fighters for June 12 were not
dissuaded by the fact that their struggle was to actualise the electoral
mandate of Chief Abiola, a Yoruba politician. Apart from incarceration,
harassment by security operatives and the alienation of exile, some of these
men paid heavily in other ways for their commitment to cause of justice. Chief
Bobo Nwosisi died in exile in London. Chief Obioha lost his bank, the First
African Trust Bank Limited.
In
the light of the above, readers would have to judge for themselves whether or
not it is right for you, Sam, to say the following of Ndigbo: “They have
transferred the temperament of their former master into the new. And they have
not spared any incoherence, any lack of finesse, and threats and tantrums, any
show of rabid, primitive cants, or any ululations. They have abused, cursed,
thrown imprecations. They have hugged lies about their candidate. They have
pelted lies about others. They have distorted material. Obi has turned out to
be an excuse for even closet Biafrans to betray open emotions about Biafra
without being accused of it.”
To
be sure, your writing is not an aberrant occurrence. On July 17, 2022, an
Adedamola Adetayo posted on the Internet an anti-Igbo diatribe in which he
said, among other things that “They have a POLITICAL ZIONISM already in play.
It is in the thing they deceptively call Obidients. That Movement is going to
RALLY the Igbos of Lagos in a way that they haven’t ever been rallied. THEY ARE
SET TO DETERMINE THE LEADERSHIP OF LAGOS. The priority is to remove Tinubu first.
In future they will call the shot. This is what Peter Obi is all about. He has
no plans for any Presidency. I can imagine that the ZIONISTS already have their
IPOB/UGM all over the places in Lagos, in the Garrisons called Markets, under
cover, masquerading as Igbo traders.”
Years
before this ranting Adedamola Adetayo, John Femi Kusa, who had been a script
editor at The Guardian in Lagos, also
showed his claws. In March 2019, he published an article on the Internet with
this sentence of a title: Okota:
The Igbo Question, Jimi Agbaje, Afenifere And The Rest Of Us. In it, he
claimed that, “The major problem, in my opinion, is the Igbo penchant to wish
to take over another person’s land…Lagos was either a colony or a part of
Western Nigeria. But because of the generosity of Yorubas and the foresight of
their forefathers which made this region the star region in West Africa, the
Igbos would like the Yorubaman to believe that LAGOS IS NO MAN’S LAND. Can
anyone say that of Benin without eating his pounded yam as raw yam?”
Dear
Sam, your Obi-tuary piece is as
incendiary as the hateful views of Kusa and Adetayo. Kusa, now well into his
70s will not physically go feeding the Igbo raw yam. But all the vitriol you
guys have been pushing against the Igbo is the stuff that leads the M. C.
Oluomos into mindless violence and murder and arson and brigandage. You pen
pushers of evil are the ones that egg on the rabble into wielding guns and
cudgels and massacring innocent people for transient political offices. Is it
right to promote this permittivity simply so that Tinubu will attain his wild
goose chase of the presidential crown?
Kusa
schooled at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, earning a degree in Mass
Communication. All through his years in the Igbo country, not once was he
molested or denied his citizenship on account of his origin. Did his welcome at
Nsukka lead him into believing that the town was a part of the Yoruba country?
According to Facebook, the acerbic Adetayo guy schooled at the Nnamdi Azikiwe
University, Awka, and earned a degree there without abuse, let or hindrance.
Maybe it got fixed inside his brain that Awka is an extension of Lagos, or that
Azikiwe after whom the institution was named was his progenitor.
If
there are Ndigbo who say that Lagos is a no man’s land, can one Igbo person be
put up who simply seized a piece of land in the metropolis and converted it to
his use? If Nigerians, including Tinubu’s daughters, who have being buying up
choice properties in New England, United States, can own houses in Europe,
North America, the Middle East and elsewhere, why must it rankle that Ndigbo own
property in Lagos? Why must ownership of landed property in one’s own country
lead to calumniation and physical harm? Is it not too steep a price to pay in
order that Tinubu should become Nigeria’s president?
The
Igbo were not responsible for the recent bloody massacre of congregants inside
the St Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State. The Igbo are not among those
sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of Afenifere leader Chief Reuben
Fasanranti’s daughter. The herdsmen marauding, pillaging and plundering Yoruba
land, looting, raping women, destroying farmlands and spreading death and
destruction are not Igbo. The Igbo man did not kill a soul. He did not contest
the governorship of Lagos. He hasn’t ever claimed ownership of Iga Idungaran. The
Igbo always lived in peace with the Yoruba – until Tinubu surfaced with his
divisive politics. Are the vociferous Igbo supporters of Tinubu no longer of
the ethnic group because of their partisan predilection?
Sam,
informed readers of your articles are aware that your allusions to classical
Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Roman mythologies and literary divergences are no more
than an egregious attempt at appropriating the intellectual centre circle.
Otherwise, you would appreciate the importance of adding depth to your
fulminations. Any owner of a book of quotable quotes or a glossary of literary
terms can fill their verbiage with citations. But that is no scholarship, my
friend.
Look at you: “Obi is like Zik, Kanu like
Ojukwu. One is a flair, the other a flare.” Yet, it doesn’t strike you as
reasonable to accord some of Zik’s aptitude to Peter Obi, a man who earned an
honours degree in Philosophy from Nigeria’s premier indigenous university that
was built by the great Zik of Africa. And Ojukwu is no more than a flare. By
impugning him with combustibility, you forget that in January 1967, Ojukwu went
to Aburi, Ghana, not with an incendiary device, but with the sole purpose of
putting out the smoldering fire that was threatening to become a national
conflagration. You forget that it was not Ojukwu but those that reneged on the
Aburi Accord that tossed a lit match in an ocean of gasoline.
I
agree with those that have invested you with the coronet of a seasoned
journalist. Except that your coronation disdains the fact that your brand of
perceptive journalism is only seasonal. That explains why it bothers you that
“Obi hops from church to church,” but means absolutely nothing to you that as
Dele Sobowale reported in the Sunday Vanguard of July
10, 2022 “…Bola Tinubu has charged the Supreme Council for Sharia in the
country to create a department of political affairs to create political
awareness among the faithful towards producing a Muslim President in 2023.”
Neither do you care a hoot that, as Dr. Sobowale added in the same article
“Tinubu has followed up that injunction to the Supreme Council for Sharia, by
making secret pledges to expand the reach of Sharia to more Southern States if
elected.”
Rather,
you call Peter Obi a hypocrite. But Mr. Obi gave his date of birth, the name of
his parents, the town he hails from, the schools he attended and the businesses
he is into. All were found to be correct. Not being at all interested in the
truth, you threw Mr. Obi’s data out of the window because you must be seen to
be frantically propagating a character of disputed age, of unknown pedigree,
unascertained genealogy, unsubstantiated name, uncorroborated curriculum vitae,
and unverified academic diplomas.
You
shout from the rooftops that Peter Obi is not fit to govern. But you posit as
fit for the presidential palace a specimen of incontinence, tremulous lower
extremities, slurred speech, unsteady gait and memory lapses. You cannot be
serious, my friend.
Of
course, it is your entitlement to advertise even ordure if that captures your
fancy, but you may not carry on as though your readers are imbecilic. By
raising the Biafran bogey, your intention was clearly to create doubt and
apprehension. But your gambit only registered a calamitous failure. Jonathan
was President of this country. It didn’t obliterate Niger Delta agitation.
Buhari is president of this country; those of his people campaigning for the
Islamic State haven’t thrust their swords in their scabbards. You have a
fondness for excoriating Nnamdi Kanu. Excellent!
Except that your seasonal flair for journalism
has never prompted you into examining the Sunday Igboho phenomenon. You make
yourself a laughing stock by encapsulating in ethnic strictures the
pan-Nigerian Peter Obi Movement that is youth led. You reckon not one bit that
the youths that are sick and tired of the sanguinary dreariness and aridity of
your principal’s vanishing epoch.
Nonetheless, you cannot contest the truism that, in the last analysis, everything goes and turns round. All metals are bound for the anvil. We are here today – those, like Peter Obi and his equally competent and credible running mate, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, that wish to place a new heart in the Nigerian nation; and others like your principal and his paid battalions of blinkered acolytes that, as Pa Ayo Adebanjo finely put it, are only interested in continuing and escalating the rot they inflicted on hapless Nigerians in 2015. Whatever tomorrow brings, you must continue to ruminate over the legacy you will leave for coming generations. Every one of us will have their entrance and their exit, it being a settled fact that obituary’s certitude rings true for all comers, not just for Peter Obi as you wantonly asserted.
*Chuks
Iloegbunam is the
author of the upcoming book on Mr. Peter Obi entitled The Promise of a
New Era.
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