By Aloy Ejimakor
It’s often said that a lie told so many times, if unchallenged, may – in the course of time and generations – begin to pass for the truth. One of such is the terrible lie and brazen propaganda, institutionally purveyed (against the Igbo) since the end of the Civil War, to the effect that Igboland is landlocked or has no access to the Atlantic Ocean.
The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to rebut this fat lie with some simple historical, geographical and topographical evidence that are in plain view, if you care to dig into the archives or conduct some basic physical explorations of your own. In the same vein, those that mock the Igbo on this account might as well imbibe the truth and pedal back to reason and reality.
Suffice
it to say that it is a profound tragedy that entire generations of the
immediate post-Civil War Igbos never bordered to check but seemingly swallowed
this brazen institutional falsehood, line, hook and sinker. They never reckoned
that it is aimed at frustrating the merchant spirit of the Igbo. A few older
Igbos that knew it to be false just didn’t care anymore, having been weighed
down by the debacle of the Civil War fought by their generation.
What also unwittingly enabled this lie to persist to this day is
that most people don’t take physical Geography (or even adventure) that serious
anymore, otherwise they would have easily discovered that Abia, Imo and Anambra
States have varying short-distance paths to the Atlantic through Imo, Azumiri,
Niger and Urashi Rivers. Igbani Island, a diaspora Igbo enclave, corrupted to
Bonny by the British.
It’s not really rocket science, as you can easily confirm this if
you know how to read Google Earth or you conquer your fear of swamp snakes and
walk through these areas on foot. If you try, you will discover that there are
many hardly explored waterways and slithering tributaries, including the remote
reaches of Oguta Lake and Urashi rivers (at Oseakwa, Anambra State) that
meandered through Igbo-delta wetlands to the Southeastern beginnings of the Atlantic
waterfront or beachhead.
These rivers have varying lengths of short navigational paths to
the Atlantic and in some cases, are far shorter, nautically (and even on
footpath) than the Portharcourt, Calabar and Ibaka seaports are to their sides
of the Atlantic. Many of these pathways, including particularly the ones from
the outer reaches of Imo and Azumiri Rivers terminate at the Atlantic at no
more than 15 to 30 Nautical miles to the beachhead. To put it in lay language,
one nautical mile equals 1.8 kilometers. So, all you need is some old-fashioned
dredging that the colonialists did without a whimper generations ago. You don’t
need to reinvent the wheel.
Thus, the contiguity of Southeast (not even the greater Igboland)
to the Atlantic is nautically less in distance than the Atlantic is to the
dredged seaports in Calabar, Onne, Ibaka, Lagos and Portharcourt. If you
discount the territories unfairly excised from Igboland during State creations
and the damnable boundary adjustments that followed, it will be far less.
During his tenure as Governor of Imo State, Dr Ikedi Ohakim singularly did so
much to spotlight this matter in a bid to galvanize the Federal authorities to
build a seaport that abuts core Igboland. For avoidance of doubt, seaports are
in the Exclusive Legislative List of the Constitution and therefore outside the
legislative reach of the States.
To
be sure, Ikwerre land or Igweocha which bears the greater portions of the
Portharcourt seaport was dredged up to 50 miles to the Atlantic front through
the Bonny River. Onne seaport was dredged up to 60 miles to the Atlantic and
Calabar seaport was partially dredged some 45 nautical miles to the Atlantic.
Ibaka seaport is about 30 nautical miles to the Atlantic and the Lagos seaports
dredged up to about 50 nautical miles to the Atlantic. This is not to say that
some dredging was not easier or harder than the other.
Compare all these to Obuaku in Abia State, which is only 25
nautical miles to the Atlantic from the confluence of Imo and Azumiri Rivers,
of which Azumiri, on its separate merits, lies not more than 30 nautical miles
to the Atlantic beachfront. The less obvious one is the little-known Oseakwa
(Urashi) in Ihiala, Anambra State which is mere 18 nautical miles to the
Atlantic, all with its 65 feet of natural depth, arguably incomparable to no
other River in Nigeria.
Additionally, what is geopolitically known as Igboland today is
far smaller than what it was and constitutionally supposed to be. As far back
as 1856, William Balfour Baikie – one of the earliest and credible Geographers
of ancient Nigeria, had this to say: “Igbo homeland, extends east and west,
from the Old Kalabar river to the banks of the Kwora, Niger River, and
possesses also some territory at Aboh, an Igbo clan, to the west-ward of the
latter stream. On the north it borders on Igara, Igala and A’kpoto, and it is
separated from the sea only by petty tribes, all of which trace their origin to
this great race”. If you’re in doubt, google it.
But with that infamous post-War abandoned property policy and the
egregious institutional injustices in the subsequent boundary adjustments,
coupled with the widespread anti-Igbo gerrymandering, Igbos physically (and
even psychologically) lost geopolitical hold of the delta lands that had vested
in their ancestors for generations. It was such natural contiguity of Igboland
to the Atlantic that enabled Igbo ancestors to behold the Atlantic Ocean and,
in wonderment, they named it Oshimiri – The Great Sea or the Infinite Sea.
The post-Civil War psychological beat-down and gang-up against the
Igbo got so bad and institutionalized to the extent that some of the
descendants of these Igbo ancestors (nearest to the Atlantic and now
geopolitically lying outside Southeast) are no longer sure whether they are Igbo
or not. This is how the notion of Igboland being landlocked quickly gained
traction and became a weapon used to mock Ndigbo and down their merchant
spirit.
The most brazen injustice was in 1976 when the Justice Nasir
Boundary Adjustment Commission made a deliberate business of carving out some
core Igboland territories into some neighboring States of the South-South. But
they didn’t quite make an absolute success of it. They (luckily for the Igbo)
missed the southernmost Southeast lands that possess rivers and tributaries
that meandered through slices of Igboid or Igbo-speaking South-South
territories and terminated at the Atlantic.
For avoidance of doubt, there’s particularly the Obuaku confluence
in Ukwa West (Abia State) that flows through greater Ikot Abasi in Akwa Ibom
State (which has slices of Igbo communities) before expanding out and washing
into the near-reaches of the Atlantic. You can also reckon with the River Niger
which remotely washed into the Atlantic through a vast network of hardly explored
delta creeks and mangrove swamps that abut the Bight of Biafra, now officially
corrupted to Bight of Bonny (that is: Igbani), after the Civil War. To be sure,
Igbani or Bonny is Igbo, whether you deny it or not.
On a side note and in conclusion, it is pertinent to make it
crystal clear that the persistent taunts, mockery and ‘ntoor’ that Ndigbo are hopelessly trapped in Nigeria because their
native land is landlocked (Buhari called it a ‘dot’), coupled with the
misguided refusal to build a seaport into core Igboland are some of the major
factors that have justifiably agitated the average Igbo to the point of seeking
an alternative to Nigeria.
*Ejimakor,
a legal practitioner, is a commentator on public
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