By Uche Ezechukwu
The late Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, in one of his
indelible songs, allud-ed to Ndigbo and their resilience, thus: “they will
never tire from running if their enemies do not tire from pursuing them”. This
summarises why the Igbo Nation will never stop improvising to survive and stay
ahead of those who they feel, do not wish them well. That is basically the
story of the Bakassi Boys, the veritable children of circumstances, which the
ebullient governor of Abia
State, Dr Victor Okezie
Ikpeazu, announced last week, was being re-invented in his state to save the
day for his state, the way they did between 1999 and 2001.
Most Nigerians only got to hear of the Bakassi Boys as from
the late 2000, when it became a most unorthodox and unusual crime fighting
outfit in Anambra
State, especially when it
became an object of great controversy and jousting between the government of Dr
Chinwoke Mbadinuju and that of President Olusegun Obasanjo, at the centre.
Obasanjo had vowed to uproot the outfit by all means – and in fact did so
eventually – after it had completely de-railed in its initial objectives, and
had become a Frankenstein monster, which started gobbling the people it had set
out to protect. It is significant that Dr Ikpeazu, an ‘Aba boy’, has decided to
resurrect the Bakassi Boys, in what he must have seen as a last resort, just in
the same way that Aba traders had decided to create the original Bakassi Boys
in 1998, when they had been confronted with an unusual level of criminality,
and when the constituted authority had pretended an unusual incapacity to act.
The governor obviously knows how the Bakassi Boys were founded by shoe makers
and other dexterous Aba artisans whose thriving businesses were being laid
waste by criminal syndicates of robbers, kidnappers and cultist, broadly
described as Maffs, just as the herdsmen are today laying waste the means of
livelihood of the rural farmers.
As it happened in the late
1990s, the SAP economic policy of the Ibrahim Babangida had turned out to be a
great blessing in disguise for Igbo business-men and artisans, for whom it
offered a wonderful opportunity to dip deep into their homebred talents to
innovate and produce. Two groups of businesses – the leather workers and
tailors – had benefitted most, as they systematically bettered and perfected
their trades and targeted the ex-port market.
Aba tailors and shoe makers had always been good, but they became
even better when greater opportunities beckoned with the export market that
existed for them all over Africa, the Middle Belt and Asia.
The shoe makers would make good shoes and stamp Made in Italy or Made in Spain
on them and offloaded them on Lebanese and other middlemen and women that
inundated Aba
to evacuate the products. Aba became the
veritable Taiwan of Africa, as other Nigerian artisans, who were not doing as
well elsewhere, relocated to Aba,
in order to enjoy the boom that was taking place.
Many people who resided in Aba did not fully appreciate what was
happening around them, as they were not enjoying the enhanced products that
were being churned out around them. One young man from my village who had
graduated in Biochemistry from UNN had become a tailor in Aba, and had once
made a suit, gratis for me, but could no longer have the time to make more for
my friends or members of my family, as his time was completely taken up with
meeting-up with orders from his outlets in UAE and Europe.
