The Terror Of Being Nigerian

 By Obi Nwakanma

Last year my son made plans to buy a ticket and fly down on his own to Nigeria, and spend the summer with his uncle in Abuja and in the village, East of Nigeria. He was twenty, young, and raring to go. He wanted to explore Nigeria on his own.

It was I that stopped him from traveling to Nigeria, much to his chagrin. I had to beg him to stop. News coming out of Nigeria scared the bejesus out of me. Still does. Kidnappings. Assassinations. Disappearances. The sheer terror of being Nigerian today is so overwhelming that just thinking about it gives one a headache. My son, needless to say, was very disappointed.

He said to me, “Dad, all my life you have told me to connect with Nigeria. Now you don’t want me to go visit?” It was an accusation that stabbed at my spirit. But it was true. I had always championed Nigeria. But stuff was happening. Profound changes were reshaping the cultural alchemy of the nation we call “Nigeria.” Intense poverty, political crisis, including the use of state terror and alienation, had changed the Nigerian character.

A crisis-induced psychosis was driving more Nigerians to acts of deliberate and gratuitous cruelty. It is so very sad to observe: the hardening of the soul; the deep cynicism; the fatalism that makes once rational people lose faith about the purpose of community. Cruelty is the product of hate. There are two types of hate: self-hate, and hate of another, the result of “otherisastion” – a psychological process that forces individuals or groups to dehumanize another individual or group.

The Science writer, Geneticist and Computational Neuroscientist, Dr. Kathleen Taylor, examining cruelty from a Sociobiological framework, once wrote in her 2009 essay, that “Violent cruelty is often said to erupt out of nowhere. In fact, there is always a prelude of rising ‘otherisation’: a catch-all term for the social and psychological processes that push individuals and groups into mutual hostility. Stereotyping, avoidance, false beliefs and casual denigration can, if left unchecked, escalate into abuse and outright conflict.

As enmity grows and strong emotions are aroused, the outgroup becomes increasingly dehumanised… . As it acquires the label ‘evil’, rational approaches become irrelevant.” To put it even more simply, in Nigeria, hate has become very casual. Nigerians have become psychologically damaged over time. They have been conditioned to imagine anyone outside of their immediate group as different and therefore alien, and potentially evil.

There is a loss of faith about the ‘shared space’ called Nigeria. The North hates the South. The South despises the North. The Southeast despises the Southwest, and the southwest hates and fears the southeast. The center itself cannot hold. This situation was conditioned over the years by the use of state propaganda geared towards creating inter-group disaffection and fear, so that those who manage to capture the state, can milk the cow called Nigeria with impunity.

While they are at it, they often appeal to an exaggerated group interest. Cruelty thrives on poverty – both material and mental poverty. Those who recruit poorly educated gangs, induce them with little money to go an attack, assassinate, kill, or destroy other people do so, knowing that power is a blunt tool in the hands of the ignorant and mentally poor. In the hands of the enlightened, it is the lightening rod that creates general prosperity; mass well-being; and a happy and healthy nation. But in the hands of the blind, it creates affliction and destruction.

Let us look today, for instance, at what is happening in Lagos. Reports reaching us indicate that the Lagos State government under the current administration has embarked on a targeted destruction of houses belonging to the Igbo in Lagos. Someone in fact sent to me, a video file of the destruction of entire estates, and multimillion-naira homes belonging mostly to Igbo property owners in Lagos, particularly in the Abule-Ado area, and other areas of Lagos.

The official excuse is that these houses were built in areas, and in ways that distort the “Lagos master plan.” But the other reason has been this urgency, by those who now think that they own the stakes in Lagos, to contain what they see as the insurgency of the Igbo in Lagos. It is their version of “the final solution.”

How could anyone, under the current situation of government-induced hardship and intense deprivation, which has found many Nigerians begging for as ordinary as food, find it in them, to destroy the home of another? It is quite simple: they do not see the Igbo. They see their property. The things that they are said to have acquired just by stepping into Lagos, and exploiting Lagos and Lagosians.

All it takes for the Igbo to acquire property in Lagos, by that mindset, is just to come to Lagos, usually empty handed, and walla, you become wealthy on the back of very tolerant Yoruba. So goes the legend. They have called the Igbo “strangers” in their own country, because they “migrated” from the East, into some strange and distant El-dorado called Lagos. But how does anyone become a stranger in their own country?

The constitution of Nigeria makes every part of Nigeria Igbo land, for as long as they are citizens of Nigeria and for as long as the federation of Nigeria remains a sovereign entity. The Igbo can buy land and settle in any part of Nigeria where it pleases them to live. The sovereign document of the Nigerian state guarantees their protection as individuals and the protection of their rights to property. The Igbo have lived for a long time in Lagos.

In fact, for as long as the foundations of Lagos, when it was a “Slave trading” boonie. I have argued on a number of occasions, that if you scratch beneath the Eletu Odibo line of Lagos, you might find their real source in Igbere, in current Abia State. So, the Igbo have been around, and have bought land, including abandoned and desiccated swamp land, filled it, built homes, and settled in Lagos. Indeed, the greatest novelist of the city of Lagos was an Igbo, Cyprian Ekwensi, who lived at that crossroads between Yaba and Surulere, from where he observed and imagined Lagos, and created one of its greatest characters, Jagua Nana.

But they are now called “strangers,” and have become targets of official acts of selective destruction. But why the Igbo? They are not the only Nigerian ethnic group in Lagos. I have heard talks about the Igbo not respecting traditional authority. I have heard talks about the greedy Igbo who wants to reap where he did not sow. I have heard talks of the money-grubbing Igbo polluting the innocent morals of Lagos. Well, I say, you don’t say! Lagos and morals!

Those who govern Lagos have the morality of the pit latrine! How else could the governor of Lagos approve a budget that awards N7. 5 million to replace the liquid fragrance in his office; N440 million to purchase a spanking new, bullet proof Lexus LX 600 as part of the pool of cars for the office of his Chief of Staff; and N3 billion for the purchase of rechargeable fans for the office of the Deputy governor, Obafemi Hamzat? And then guess who pays the tax from which these monies are approbated? You got it! These same Igbo “strangers” in Lagos! Again, why the Igbo? First, is the politics of the rising power of the Igbo in Lagos. They have been ironically awakened to the politics of representation.

For years, in fact, since the civil war ended in 1970, the Igbo ignored the politics of Lagos. Many chose not to vote or contest, or participate. Some who did, left Lagos to contest or vote in their natal homes in the East. But in the last four election cycles, these residents of Lagos have awakened to local politics. They have seen their interests targeted, their real place in Lagos marginalized, their contributions erased, and their taxes used not to elevate them, but to destroy them.

Survival is the basis of politics. So, the Igbo are organizing for their own pie in the politics of Lagos. And they will organize. And it is not inconceivable, given their numbers, that they will vie for the office of governor and possibly win it, and expand their legislative share in the Lagos Assembly. That is the real fear. It is all about the power to control this great city called Lagos. The current targeting of Igbo and their property is puerile scare tactics, aimed at driving them out of Lagos, and containing the inflow that builds their numbers and their electoral strength.

That is a mistake. Those who have studied Igbo psychology know the very stubborn will of the Igbo. The more you target them, the more they become defiant. Many have called on the Igbo to leave Lagos. That is of course, an option. If current attempts force a mass exodus of the Igbo from Lagos, this city will become a ghost town. History is a witness to this fact. But the Igbo should never consider leaving Lagos.

They should dig in; build alliance with progressive, democratic forces from all ethnicities in Lagos; get more involved in the politics of Lagos; create organs that will defend and secure them against state terror, and help build a prosperous, just, and beautiful African city. A great city that will build opportunities and secure the rights of everyone – the Yoruba, the Igbira, the Nupe, the Lebanese, the Igbo and all those who make it home and contribute to its cosmopolitan energy. But it is one aspect of the terror of being Nigerian, that a group could be selectively “othered,” and branded as “strangers,” in their own country, targeted, and set upon, and not even the Federal government would step in to offer them protection.

*Nwakanma, a poet, is a Florida-based professor of English