AREWA YOUTHS; HATE NOT THE IGBOS BUT CELEBRATE THEM

    AREWA YOUTHS; HATE NOT THE IGBOS BUT CELEBRATE THEM         

                                By Chibu  Ndubuisi  18/09/2017

Peace be to you.

“When love is conditional, it last as long as the conditions last but when it is unconditional and irrational it never ceases. Same formula applies to hate. When hate is conditional, it last as long as the conditions last but when hate is unconditional and irrational it never ceases and cannot be reasoned with”. That is why after the 1967-1970 genocide against the Igbos, the Arewa youths can’t stop hating the Igbos because they are a successful people anywhere they are.  To be hated because you are a very successful people, a very educated people, a very successful entrepreneurial oriented people, and a people with a strong egalitarian nature is an irrational hate and can never end because the Igbos can never stop  succeeding.

Why are the Igbos hated? I am going to hypothesize that;

·        They are hated because they are Igbos.

·        They are hated because they are a well-educated people.

·        They are hated because they believe in one Nigeria more than any other ethnic stock in Nigeria as their business interest and investments validates this assertion in the Nigerian space.

·        They are hated because of their egalitarian nature that doesn’t tolerate servitude because they know what it means to be free.

·        They are hated because they are specialist in the creation of social wealth for their people.

Former Governor of Enugu State Dr Chimaroke Nnamani explains the trilogy of the Igbo character to mean, Njepu (travel), Igbamgbo (struggle) and Akpauche (wisdom). An interplay of these variables come together to make them very thick. That is why even after the genocide called the Biafran war, they were able to come back again without government help to rebuild their communities as it is today better than many Arewa communities.

The challenge of the present day Nigeria government is that it is failing to address the root causes of the injustices in the system but rather deepening the wounds with skewed policies.

On the 6^th of June 2017, Arewa Youth Consultative forum issued an ultimatum to the Igbos, to leave the Northern part of the country before October 1^st 2017. In the ultimatum, how to take over the properties of the Igbos were spelt out. This is not the first time it has happened. It first happened with the Nigerian government policy of Gowon who sanctioned a 20 pounds policy even after the mantra of “No Victor No Vanquished”, in the war.  It happened in many other states of the federation, when some properties of the Igbos were called “Abandoned Properties” and taken over. Now it is the turn of the Arewa Youths to do the same. History is bound to repeat itself because men never learn from it.

Following the Arewa Youth ultimatum, the United Nation committee report on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination held its 93^rd session between July 31^st and August 25^th 2017, and issued an “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure”. The committee said, that it was deeply concerned by the rise of racial, hate speech and instrument to violence against the Igbo people, including through recording and wide distribution of a song and audio message in Hausa Language which describes the Igbos in hateful and derogating terms.

Why was this type of proclamation by Arewa Youths possible in a nation like Nigeria?

It was possible because the leadership that benefits from the rotten Nigeria doesn’t want to play the politics of responsibility by restructuring the country, but rather wants to continue with the politics of rudderless voyage, uncongenial vagabondage, and unbridled brigandage cum uncontrollable pillage of oil money.  A leadership that sees peace as a Zero Sum Game, I win you lose like the 97% and 3% position of President Buhari on political appointments cannot be a proper instrument of peaceful negotiation as exemplified by his politics of clannishness and “Daurarization of Nigeria”.

To understand this we must understand what is called the “Dunning Kruger effect”. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is defined as “a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize their own ineptitude.” It is the phenomenon in which “the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his incompetence”.

 This explains the leadership scenario in Nigeria. Even after the “quota system” was introduced in our educational system to benefits the Arewa Youths they can’t still play catch up with other sections of the country, too pathetic. They have shown to be good at education of war as the quit notice explains and the Boko Haram insurrection, that is consuming them equally. The hate that starts with the Igbos never ends with the Igbos.

 The Global Peace Index (Institute for Economics and Peace) gauges global peace using three broad themes

·        The level of safety and security in society

·        The extent of domestic and international conflict

·        The degree of militarization.

Nigeria is well represented in these parameters as we can see in the continuous militarization of the land, the prevalence of the education for war rather than education for peace, the prevalence of fundamentalist expression, the prevalence of the instrument of destruction rather than the instrument of peace, healing and productivity.

How then can the vision of African Union Aspiration 2063 of “building a peaceful and secure Africa” come to be?

Joseph Nye talks about “Soft power and Smart power” the Nigerian government can learn something from this methodology and call off any operation in Igbo Land which is designed to keep subjugating the people.

Michael Franti & Spearhead sang that “you can bomb the world in to pieces but you can’t bomb it in to peace”. The Biafran struggle cannot be bombed in to peace by the Nigerian Army it was tried in 1967-1970, it failed. It will continue to fail if the conflict triggers are not addressed.

The Biafran struggle is not about hating the Arewa Youths. It is about reminding us all, what it feels to be under an oppressive system like Nigeria; the Biafran struggle is about constructing a free society on the basis of respect for all. It is about refusing to bow down to tyrants.

A singer wrote that “there is a crack in everything that is how the light gets in”. the Biafran struggle is that crack in the Nigerian system that needs to be cemented with proper restructuring of the country on all fronts because people will continue to do destructive things if they feel slighted and not given their due roles and recognition.

The use of force only adds salt to the injury of the Igbo people. Martin Luther king has an advice for the Nigerian government, “Hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence.

 Let’s keep negotiating; the unity of Nigeria is negotiable. Nigeria can be negotiated on. Ben Murray Bruce puts it this way that “words have the powers that bullets don’t have; proper communication can achieve what bombs can’t achieve”.

When negotiation fails, it is because the Nigerian government has no other story to tell, they are afraid of their identity shrouded in exploitative parasitic relationship that is built on quick sand which one day will eventually collapse if they fail to negotiate. The Igbos have a memory and that memory is their story and the story is about their identity that is under threat.

The “Make Peace Happen campaign” of the African Union poses a question to all of us and it is “what will you do to make peace happen”? My candid reply will come from Jonathan Sacks who posited that “what makes a civilization survive is not strength but how they respond to the weak, not by wealth but how they care for the poor, not by power but the concern for the powerless, what renders a culture invulnerable is the compassion it shows to the vulnerable”.

The Nigerian government can learn something from the aforementioned quote,  and understand that “what rescues a nation is not weapons but ideas” and to secure the civilization of the Arewa youth, they have to be educated to tell their stories with love and not hate, and acquire their own properties with struggle and not brigandage.

The Nigerian Senate  on the 14^th of June 2017 debated and passed a motion titled “The Need for National Unity and Peaceful Coexistence in Nigeria” sponsored by the 109 senators of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It is a right step but it is not all. More needs to be done to keep sowing the seeds of peace.

September 21^st is world peace day. Thanks to Jeremy Gilley the man who fought to see this vision of “Peace One day” become a global reality, a day when people will be reminded to make space for others not like them in their beliefs, opinions, values and cultures. The Arewa Youths should learn to make space for the Igbos.

As we celebrate World Peace day September 21^st, I urge the Arewa Youths to celebrate the Igbo people because of their contributions to the Nigerian project. A people cannot invest in a system they don’t believe in, the Igbo people believe in this system called Nigeria, even though it is not working properly in its present form but still have the hope that one day it will work better.

The Igbo people believe in the Politics of Hope and their hope can never be diminished by any act of intimidation but can only be reinvented with each passing day.

Let’s play the politics of responsibility together.

Happy Peace Week Arewa Youths .

Peace be with you.