| Igbo are nation builders
–Uwechue
• Being a speech delivered Amb. Raph Uwechue, President
General, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, at the Igbo Day 2009 celebration
Saurday, November
14, 2009
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•Uwechue
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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Every human being on God’s good earth today is simultaneously
endowed with three inter-locking nationalities. The first
is the ethnic nationality into which one is born and, in most
cases, bred with natural distinguishing characteristics and
primary communication mode such as language. In this category
falls the Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Ijaw, Nupe, Kanuri,
Tiv, Berber; Amharic, Tigrinya, Ashanti, Kikuyu, Luo, Shona,
Ndebele, Zulu, Czech, Slovak, Serb, Croat, English, Scottish
and Welsh among a myriad of ethnic nationalities world-wide.
The second is the nation state or country, resulting from
a political arrangement at a point in history, usually bringing
a number of ethnic nations together by force in most cases,
to form a country. In this category fall Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan,
Tanzania, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, France, United Kingdom,
China, India, Canada and the United States of America.
The third is the Continental Nation, grouping various ethnic
and nation states to form the African, Asiatic and the European
nations. Each citizen of today’s world belongs concomitantly
to these three national definitions. I am, therefore, proudly
an Igbo, a Nigerian and an African. Thus, the ethnic unit
is the original building block, the basic infrastructure whose
solidity determines the eventual soundness and stability of
the country and continental super structures.
Thus, for our country, Nigeria, the ethnic nation is the nursery
and primary school for the upbringing of good citizens imbued
with the cherished, time-honoured traditional values of respect
for the elders in the family, law and order in the community,
integrity as a virtue and a cultivated predisposition to serve
the community dutifully and selflessly.
For our country, with its colonial stamp of “made in
England”, the 300 odd ethnic and sub-ethnic units in
this land have good cause to thank God for the astonishing
abundance of human and material resources bestowed on us.
We are still in the process of nation building, struggling
to blend together and harmonise our various traditions, customs
and cultures. Although, this is by all accounts a herculean
task, it is both achievable and supremely worthwhile, as a
successful fusion of so many valuable elements is bound to
bring forth a unique socio-economic product that could astound
the world.
This was, indeed, the focus of the vision of Nigeria’s
founding fathers that we must keep constantly in view. The
recognition of the significance of ethnicity was clear at
the birth of an independent Nigeria in 1960. The larger ethnic
units of Hausa/Fulani-Igbo- Yoruba formed the basis of the
three regions North-East-West. Ethno-based agitations sprouted
in the three Regions. These include the United Middle Belt
Congress (UMBC) Movement in the North, Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers
(COR) State Movement in the East and the Midwest Movement
in the West.
The current concept of six geo-political zones is ethically
based, with three zones accorded to the larger ethnic groups
and, to balance them out, three also to a conglomerate of
the smaller ethnic units.The simple lesson from this arrangement
is that the ethnic units are recognized and adopted as the
building blocks in the ongoing construction work and nation
building process in Nigeria.
In our socio-political and economic intercourse, all ethnic
units (big or small) must be allowed free-play and equitable
access to our country’s resources. The stability of
our country can be affected positively or otherwise by the
perception of these various ethnic units as to their rights
and fair share of the proverbial ‘national cake’.
Sustained inequity could conceivably induce in those units
aggrieved a rethink of the value to them of unity, which otherwise
we all so much cherish and are anxious to preserve. The break-up
of countries, some very powerful and prosperous, like the
former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, took place
along ethnic lines. They are examples that we must eschew
in Africa, already over-fragmented.
It is in the light of the supreme importance of sustainable
unity in our country that I would like us all to recall and
retain in our minds the preponderant contribution of the Igbo
Nation to the quest for unity in Nigeria’s nation building
enterprise.
Political marginalisation
Today, there is the feeling that the Igbo, as a people, are
being deliberately sidelined, especially in the sphere of
political leadership of the country. No Igbo person is deemed
good enough or trusted enough to be put at the helm of affairs,
at the apex management position of Nigeria. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe,
Nigeria’s pioneer titular head of state, took a shot
at the real thing— the executive presidency, in 1979
and 1983.ln spite of his nationally acknowledged role as the
foremost crusader for our nation’s independence, he
scored abysmally in both electoral tests. Dr. Alex Ekwueme
fared no better, even as he teamed up with a scion of the
northern oligarchy, Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Their joint ticket
under the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) won the presidential
slot in the successive elections of 1979 and 1983.
Like today’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the NPN
was the dominant political party at the time. Securing its
presidential candidate’s nomination was as good as clinching
the presidential position. Dr. Ekwueme was poised to replace
Shagari at the end of his second tenure, as the party’s
flag bearer in the election. He was eminently qualified and
was favoured by Shagari himself for the presidential job ahead.
He had to be stopped, hence, the coup of 31st December 1983,
which traded in the remaining three years and nine months
of Shagari’s second and final term, with all its democratic
restrictions, for an eventual collective northern rule of
some 14 years of absolute power, under the successive military
governments of Buhari, Babangida and Abacha. Indeed, Alhaji
Umaru Dikko, former Transport Minister in Shagari’s
administration said this much in an interview he gave in London,
before his attempted kidnap in a commando style, drugged and
gagged in a cage loaded as cargo aboard a plane bound for
Nigeria, on the presumed orders of an embarrassed and angry
Buhari-Idiagbon government. Subsequent revelations by former
senior northern military officers have since confirmed Umaru
Dikko’s candid assertion.
This event denied Ndigbo, perhaps the largest ethnic group
in Nigeria, their ‘federal character’ chance of
producing an executive president and their constitutional
right to exercise presidential powers for a possible eight-year
period of two terms. This callous and contemptuous treatment
meted out to Ndigbo is in clear and cruel contrast with the
compassionate concession, massively supported by Ndigbo, given
to the Yorubas in 1999 to field the two Olus, Falae and Obasanjo
for the presumed presidential slot missed by their kinsman,
Chief M.K.O Abiola, in 1993. Surely, what is considered political
sauce for the aggrieved Yoruba goose, and rightly so, should
equally be tendered to the politically famished Igbo gander.
In the 30 odd years of military rule of our country, apart
from the six months stint of General Aguiyi Ironsi, who was
officially and formally invited by the civilian remnant of
the toppled Balewa administration to assume office as head
of state in January 1966, the closest an Igbo officer got
to governance was the appointment of Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe
as his second in command by the then military president Ibrahim
Babangida in 1985. He was summarily removed in humiliating
circumstances early in the life of that administration.
Sometimes, too much is being simplistically made of random
appointment of talented Igbo technocrats to high profile positions,
where demonstrable competence is usually required to tackle
certain specific and difficult national tasks.
What has been critically absent for decades, and still missing
today, is fair and effective Igbo participation in the national
decision-making process, which is entirely political. Appointees,
no matter how highly positioned, only implement decisions
already packaged and handed down to them. They are hired and
fired at will. Considering their manifest multi-faceted contribution
to Nigeria’s political and economic development, Ndigbo
deserve better than political crumbs from the master’s
table.
At the current foundation laying stage of our national development,
control of vital decision-making positions and organs easily
determines who gets what. If at this critical stage in our
nation building enterprise, the Igbo continue to be excluded
from such positions, in this case, by discernable design,
then no matter how much they struggle, their political marginalization,
with all its negative consequences will endure. No doubt,
the Igbo people themselves have their share of the blame in
this unsavoury saga, especially given the individualistic
and blindly opportunistic attitude of some Igbo politicians,
scrambling for the crumbs of public office in total disregard
of legitimate Igbo collective interest within the Nigerian
family.
The perceived overall aggressiveness of the Igbo in social
and business intercourse creates fright among their competitors
who tend to gang up against them. However; the core problem
for the Igbo today is clearly traceable to the immediate events
that preceded the civil war, 1967-70. The military coup of
January 1966 is central to it all. It created fear and distrust
of the Igbo that are yet to be purged from the national political
system. It is for this reason that I have chosen to base my
talk today on the central theme, ‘Ndigbo: Nigeria’s
Nation Builders’ in order to highlight the enormous
contribution of Ndigbo to the building and sustenance of the
Nigeria project. The aim is to help reassure ourselves, especially
the young up-and-coming generation of Igbo, that in spite
of a few hitches, Ndigbo have, over the years, borne the brunt
of the onerous task of nation building in Nigeria and have
good cause to feel truly proud of their achievements in that
regard.
Nation builders
Igbo political role in Nigeria has been consistent in the
pursuit of national unity and inter-ethnic cooperation. Under
the leadership of the late Owelle of Onitsha, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe,
the Igbo played the role of bridge builders in the fledgling
Nigerian nation. Zik, as he was fondly called, accepted the
leadership of the legendary Yoruba political activist, Herbert
Babington Macauley to form and direct the first truly significant
national political party National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon
(NCNC).
With respected and nationalist Yoruba leaders like Dr. Ibiyinka
Olorun-Nimbe, the first and only Mayor of Lagos, Sir Odeleye
Fadahunsi,the first national vice-president of the NCNC and
second indigenous Governor of Western Region, Alhaji Adegoke
Adelabu, the lion of Ibadan politics, and others including
Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya, Chief Mojeed Agbaje and Otumba T.O.S.
Benson, the then Igbo leadership forged a political alliance
which cut across ethnic boundaries. Such was the extent of
their success that Zik was poised, after the regional election
of 1951, but for a last minute hitch, to become the premier
of the Western Region, the home ground of the Yoruba nation.
The party, which he led, the NCNC and its allies won a majority
of seats in the Western House of Assembly. In the Eastern
Region, the Igbo-dominated NCNC, true to its pan-Nigerian
orientation and commitment, elected as the first mayor of
Enugu metropolis, Mallam Umoru Altini, a Moslem from Katsina
in Northern Nigeria.
Again, in 1957 when the British Colonial Government, under
intense pressure from Southern politicians pressing for independence,
attempted to uncouple the union between the North. and the
South, forged through Lord Lugard’s Amalgamation of
1914, with the offer of Independence to the three Regions
individually, provided any two accepted the offer; a political
crisis loomed large on the national horizon. The Northern
Region, led by the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) took the
position that the North was not ready for that level of political
and economic independence. The Western Region, led by Chief
Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) promptly declared
its readiness to accept the offer. It was the Igbo-Ied NCNC
that held the balance. It was an issue that could make or
break Nigeria, if Ndigbo Nigeria’s Nation Builders the
three Regions chose to go their separate ways to Independence.
The NCNC leader, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, took the stand that although
the Eastern Region was ready to assume the responsibilities
of Regional Independence, its attainment without the North
would lead, in his own words, to the “Balkanization
of the Nigerian Nation” and conceivably a break-up of
the country. The Eastern Region would rather suppress its
appetite for Independence and the obvious gains it would entail
until the Northern Region was ready. That was how Nigerian
Independence was delayed until 1960. In short, the Igbo-Ied
Eastern Region would rather forgo the advancement of its own
political and economic interests than risk the break-up of
Nigeria.
Had the Eastern Region opted for Independence at that time,
the territory under its control would have comprised in today’s
terms the following nine States with their enormous human
and natural resources: Abia, Akwa-Ibom, Anambra, Bayelsa,
Cross River, Ebonyi, Enugu, Imo, Rivers of Nigeria. It would
also have included in all probability, as was the case with
the then Northern Cameroon which became today’s Adamawa
and Taraba States, what was then Southern Cameroon with the
oil rich Bakassi Peninsula well in the middle of a distinct,
sovereign and independent Eastern Nigeria. By 1960, the three
Regions would have become separate sovereign states and there
would have been no question of Biafra’s attempted secession
in 1967 from a non-existing Nigerian federation and the devastating
civil war fought to stop it.
Similarly, when Zik moved to the Federal scene as Governor-General
and later titular President of Nigeria, the NCNC, under the
leadership of Dr. Michael Okpara, of blessed memory, continued
faithfully in his giant and indelible footsteps, the political
bridge-building and nation building enterprise of the Igbo.
At independence, the Igbo-Ied NCNC shunned ,the attraction
of being the senior partner in an East-West Alliance with
Chief Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) and chose to team
up instead as the junior partner, with Sir Ahmadu Bello’s
Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in order to consolidate the
frail and insipid attachment of a wary and skeptical North
to Southern Nigeria. At that time Chief Awolowo’s Yoruba-dominated
Action Group (AG) was viewed with considerable suspicion by
the Hausa Fulani-Ied NPC for its ambition and role in the
then Middle Belt, under the ebullient, intrepid and anti-feudalistic
leadership of J.S. Tarka’s United Middle Belt Congress
(UMBC). However, when the Yoruba Leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo
was accused of treason and incarcerated in 1963, on charges
which many Nigerians believed were trumped up to silence him
politically, the Igbo leadership of the NCNC switched sides
and came to his rescue.’
Dr. Michael Okpara teamed up with Alhaji Dauda Adegbenro,
the acting leader of the Action Group, to fight what the Igbo
perceived as political injustice that could threaten the unity
of Nigeria. They formed the United Peoples Grand Alliance
(UPGA). The leadership, suspicious of NPC’s conceivable
dark intentions, insisted that Chief Awolowo must be transferred
from Kaduna to Calabar for his physical safety. The reason
was that considering. the overwhelming popularity of the Yoruba
leader in the Western Region, the stability and unity of Nigeria
could face jeopardy if something untoward happened to him.
The Igbo were not ready for that risk. For them, the unity
and stability of Nigeria was paramount.
MILITARY INTERVENTION
The military intervention of January 1966, which was to a
considerable degree a consequence of the persisting political
turmoil in Western Nigeria, put an abrupt end to the political
activities of the various parties. That coup, most regrettably,
took the lives of many prominent national leaders both military
and civilian. Behind the facade of general jubilation, which
greeted the January coup among the progressives in the country,
particularly in the South, there was the ominous reality of
an embittered North, the most powerful region in the Federation,
whose overall representation in the army itself kept good
pace with its political dominance in the country. Northern
interests had suffered heavily both in the political and military
spheres. Once it recovered from the shock, the North was bound
to reassert itself in both domains. This, it did brutally
in July 1966, sweeping General Ironsi, who was murdered at
Ibadan, out of power. Some 214 Igbo officers and men were
reported killed across the nation in a wholesale massacre,
which also took the life of Co!. Adekunle Fajuyi, the popular
Yoruba military governor of Western Region, an articulate
Ironsi confidant, known to be a sympathizer of Chief Obafemi
Awolowo. Thus, the circumstances of the January event and
the largely one-sided killings that marked the bloody aspect
of that coup practically made such a vengeful situation inevitable.
For the Northern political leadership, the January 1966 coup
was a plot conceived and hatched by the entire Igbo nation
to seize political power in Nigeria.
Yet, the stark reality of that historic episode is that, as
the British writer, Walter Schwartz put it succinctly in his
classic book ‘Nigeria’ which appeared at the time,
“. . . the coup was lgbo-led, but national in objective”.
Many prominent Igbo officers, starting with the head of the
Army, General Aguiyi Ironsi to Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was
the commanding officer in Kano, were not involved. Indeed,
Col. Arthur Unegbe, the Quarter-Master General, was killed
in Lagos for refusing to cooperate with the coup makers, who
came to him and demanded the keys to the armoury.
This very act on the part of Col. Unegbe, a thorough-bred
Igbo patriot, of giving his life for Nigeria and his absolute
loyalty to the northern NPC controlled Balewa Administration,
played a decisive role in bringing about the collapse of the
coup in Lagos itse1f the very seat of the Federal Government.
Unable to secure the armoury, the coup leaders were automatically
denied control of the most important means arms and ammunition
of carrying out their plan in the supremely strategic Lagos
area. It was, indeed, exactly” this situation that gave
a loyal General Ironsi his chance on that fateful night of
15th January. The troops he rallied at dawn to thwart the
coup had the arms and ammunition to support him. Such was
the extent of active and effective opposition mounted by high-ranking
Igbo officers to ensure the failure of the most unfairly branded
‘Igbo coup’ of January 1966.
The putsch was aimed at dislodging those who held the levers
of federal power and their allies in the Regions. Most unfortunately,
in Lagos it took the lives of the NPC Prime Minister, Sir
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and his close confidant, the Finance
Minister from the Mid-West Region, Chief Festus Okotie Eboh
of Zik’s NCNC party. In the Regions, the NPC Premier
of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, was killed. So also was the
Premier of the Western Region, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola,
an ally and protégé of the Balewa government
and a bitter political enemy of opposition leader, Chief Obafemi
Awolowo, then languishing in prison.
In fact, informed rumours at the time, had it that the young
officers, with a clear patriotic national perspective, had
in mind to release the Yoruba leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo,
from detention and install him as the head of an interim government,
pending a constitutional review and elections.’ Indeed,
the renowned educationist and civil rights activist, Tai Solarin,
came close to confirming that view in an interview he gave
to a national daily a few years before his death.
Chukwumah Kaduna Nzeogwu, the widely acclaimed coup leader
himself put the record this way in an interview he gave to
the magazine ‘Africa And The World’ in May 1967,
“our purpose was to change our country and make it a
place we could be proud to call our home. Tribal considerations
were completely out of our minds. But we had a set back in
the execution” In other words, the intervention of this
group of idealistic young officers, which included many Igbo,
was to help build a better, united and prosperous Nigeria
for all its citizens, totally regardless of ethnicity or other
affiliations.
In relevant retrospect, the similarity between the Major Chukwuma
Nzeogwu led coup of January 1966 and that led by Major Gideon
Orkah in April l990 against the government of General Ibrahim
Babangida stands out in astonishing relief. Both coups were
carried out by young and idealistic middle-ranking officers,
intent on transforming what they sincerely believed was a
rotten Nigerian society. Neither coup was prompted or supported
by senior officers of their respective ethnic groups. But
there is a painful difference in their socio-political aftermath.
Nzeogwu’s coup was branded an ‘Igbo’ coup,
for which the entire Ndigbo must pay a heavy and recurrent
political price. Orkah’s coup was not seen as a ‘Tiv’
coup and justly so, and has no perceivable penalizing political
price tag for the Tiv ethnic group.
For this clearly discriminatory attitude towards Ndigbo, and
in sharp contrast with the unanimous national political concession
given to the Yorubas over the M.K.O. Abiola case, cited earlier,
it is only right to assert that our beloved co-citizens of
Nigeria owe the Igbo Nation unreserved fraternal apology for
visiting an unjust and sustained capital political punishment
on the entire Igbo nation, vis-à-vis their constitutional
right to exercise executive power as president bf our country.
This is a fundamental right already too long denied, for which
Ndigbo gburu-gburu, no matter their individual political differences,
must now unite to fight and secure.
NATIONAL INTEGRATION
On the socio-economic front, the Igbo played and are still
playing a leading role in the promotion of national integration.
Today, there are several millions of Igbo people living, working
and helping to develop significantly parts of Nigeria outside
Igboland. They are in remote villages and towns nationwide.
Be it our country’s commercial cities of Lagos or Kano,
heavy Igbo presence attests to Igbo people’s belief
and commitment to pan-Nigerian nationhood. For the Igbo, anywhere
in Nigeria is home. Indeed, as recently as a year or so ago,
the former FCT Minister, Malam Nasir EI-Rufai, was quoted
as saying that Igbo investment in indigenous private property
development in the Federal Capital Territory, accounted for
some seventy percent of the existing structures. Clearly,
the Igbo put their money where their heart is-Nigeria’s
centre of unity.
CONCLUSION
It is therefore clear that all this long, since the British
colonial administration put together this vast country, the
evident role of Igbo people in the political, economic and
social history of Nigeria has been that of bridge builders
and nation builders. The desperate resort to Biafran secession
in 1967, following successive massacres and tearful exodus
of Igbo from Northern Nigeria the previous year, and its subsisting
residual echo in the emergence of the Movement for the Actualisation
of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), are clearly an
aberration, not an Igbo hallmark, emanating from a sense of
perceived rejection and persecution of a people who have given
their all, in spirit and material resources to the concept
and construction of a truly united, prosperous Nigerian nation.
By all accounts, the Igbo people deserve and richly so, much
better understanding and demonstrable appreciation from their
fellow citizens of their spirited and consistent role as nation
builders and committed custodians of Nigerian unity.
To the Nigeria project, the Igbo have given a great deal yesterday,
are still doing so today and have a lot more in store for
a much greater tomorrow.
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