Igbos, Think Home!

By Chuks Oluigbo/Business Day, Thursday, March 7, 2013

 

When, in the immediate post-Nigeria/Biafra Civil War years, Ukpabi Asika, then administrator of East Central State, told his fellow Igbos that “amnesty does not mean amnesia”, he meant to remind them that though the victorious Federal Government (or the rest of Nigeria, if you like) may have forgiven them, it certainly hasn’t forgotten – and it may never forget. But would he have envisaged that decades later, the Igbos would, unfortunately, themselves relapse into amnesia, forgetting totally the hard lessons of that brutal war? I doubt so.

 

I do not wish to return in detail to the various ways the Igbos have exhibited their collective amnesia since the civil war ended. I have amply dwelt on that in an earlier article “Are Igbos suffering from collective amnesia?” which is available online. The bottom line is this: huge Igbo investments are scattered in all parts of Nigeria with the exception of Igboland. Igbo people are all over the place contributing to socio-economic development while Igboland remains grossly underdeveloped.

 

There is a sense in which one can argue that the civil war experience – particularly the ‘abandoned property’ saga – did inculcate some sense of responsibility into the Igbos. Many of them who had lived in fine mansions in the cities where they had established themselves prior to the war returned home as refugees to squat in mud houses with their relatives in the villages. Reason: they had no homes in their homeland. That sad experience brought about a new thinking – aku ruo ulo (literally, let the wealth be felt at home). The Igbos learnt to take part of their wealth to their native land – in the form of community development projects through the town unions, as well as big mansions. But that did not seem to have lasted for long before they reverted to their pre-war ways.

 

To re-echo the optimism of many a Nigerian leader, this country won’t break up – and nobody prays it does. It’s not our portion (permit me to go Pentecostal just this once), but supposing, just supposing, considering the vagaries of our daily existence in this hole of a country, something happens to Nigeria right now? Sorry to say, but given the unquantifiable loss the Igbos have suffered, in man and material, in riots across Nigeria since 1953, it would be most tragic if, this time around, the Igbos are caught napping, with all their eggs in one wrecked basket.

 

Igbos are a migrant people. That’s given. It’ll sound unnecessarily repetitive to restate the oft echoed sentiment that wherever you go and don’t find an Igbo person, then that place must be uninhabitable. Writing as early as 1957 in West Africa: A Study of the Environment and Man’s Use of It, R. J. Harrison Church did assert that the “Ibo are found in temporary work all over Nigeria, and some 20,000 are employed in Fernando Po”. The Igbos have never looked back ever since; not even the events of 1966-70 could hold them back.

 

As it is, it’s obvious, given their stakes in their various host communities in other parts of Nigeria, that the Igbos cannot possibly return home en masse – permanently. That can’t and won’t happen – not even for those Igbos living in the flashpoints of northern Nigeria. It’s not even desirable at this point. Of course, Igboland cannot even contain all the Igbo people were they to suddenly return home. Igboland is a land-hungry area. Land hunger was part of the reasons the people emigrated out of their traditional homeland in the first place. What can be done for now is for the Igbos to begin to consider taking part of their investments home. It may not be economically viable at first, but it will be, over time, and it’s something worth doing, however you look at it. I often imagine what Igboland would be if just a quarter of Igbo investments in Lagos alone is brought back to Igboland!

 

We can take a cue from the fact that there are many foreigners living and doing business in Nigeria who make huge profits here and repatriate their profits to support the economies of their home countries. Nigerians in other parts of the world are also known to do the same. In 2012 alone, it is estimated that remittances from Nigerians in Diaspora into the Nigerian economy are in excess of N3 trillion. Who says Igbos in other parts of Nigeria (and the world) can’t do the same for Igboland?

 

But first, the governors of the five South-East states must work consciously and painstakingly to woo rich Igbo Diaspora back to Igboland. All this empty media hype won’t go anywhere. The Indian model may be instructive here. Every year, the Indian government organises Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Expatriate Indians’ Day), an annual jamboree of Diaspora Indians, which is also used to attract expatriate investment. The Indian government can do this because it places great premium on its Diasporans and what they can contribute. Shashi Tharoor, India’s minister of state for human resource development, admits: “The importance of diaspora financing – from the remittances of working-class Indians that have transformed Kerala’s countryside to the millions poured into high-tech businesses in Bangalore or Gurgaon by Silicon Valley investors – simply cannot be minimised, especially during a global financial crisis.” Yet, Tharoor makes a case for encouraging the Diasporans to do more, and giving them reasons to do more, because “when India allows its pravasis to feel at home, India itself is strengthened”. The South-East governors can take a leaf from this.

 

For their part, the Igbo Diaspora also have to show a willingness to come home to develop Igboland. Then they can begin by engaging their governors. The onus, as I’ve said, is on the governors to create the enabling environment in their various states to attract rich Igbo people to invest back home, but what if these governors lack the ideas? This is why the Igbo Diaspora cannot wait eternally for the governors. They can, as in the saying, be the mountain that goes to Muhammad. Igbos have developed swamps in the west and deserts in the north for too long, but that hasn’t moved Igboland an inch out of gross underdevelopment.

 

One other option for Igboland is to toe the line of regional integration that has become a fad across the country. As I have argued elsewhere, “To say that the states of the South-East need economic integration as much as other regions of the country – or even more so – is merely stating the obvious. There is no doubt that the South-East is among the least developed areas of the country – if not the very least – in terms of infrastructure, which is worsened by the virtual absence of federal projects in the region. This is one reason the Igbos of the South-East are scattered in all parts of Nigeria and the world where they contribute immeasurably to development, while their home region remains a backwater. Joining forces will likely reverse this trend. Working together, the South-East states, rather than wait eternally for a sleeping – or politics-playing – Federal Government, can pool resources and commence work on the direly needed Second Niger Bridge and such other projects, rehabilitation of the badly damaged interstate roads in the region, and development of other infrastructure that would bring the Igbos back home to invest.”

 

While these things may not be as straight-forward as I present them, and while I can’t claim that this is the final word, I believe it’s a starting point. Let others who have the good of Igboland at heart join this debate. Who knows, we might still be able to redeem Igboland from its present calamitous state; we might still be able to wrest Igboland from the grip of kidnappers, armed robbers and other criminals who have made visiting home a nightmare for many (especially since some pundits believe these crimes are rooted in the widespread joblessness in the land); and we might still be able to move all these Ebonyi children hawking all-what-nots at every bus stop back to their state where they can contribute more meaningfully to the development of both themseves and their state. So help us God.

Police arrests MASSOB leader Uwazuruike, 250 others, in Enugu

FROM SAFER AFRICA GROUP

On 24 August, police arrested the leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Chief Ralph Uwazuruike, along with over 250 members of the organization, in Enugu, capital of Enugu State.

Arrest of MASSOB members

Uwazulike’s arrest followed the earlier arrest of about 200 MASSOB members by the police. The members were arrested as their buses drove into Enugu from different parts of Igboland for the 12th anniversary ceremony of an Igbo youth organization, the Igbo Youth Movement (IYM). The highpoint of the ceremony was to be the conferment of an honour on the ailing ex-Biafran leader, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, currently in a London hospital after suffering a stroke in December 2010.

The MASSOB youth were apprehended on the highways leading into Enugu, by soldiers who said they were instructed to stop them from entering the city. The soldiers first took the arrested youths to the headquarters of 82 Division, Nigerian Army, there in Enugu, before handing them over to the police.

Thereafter, the soldiers raided the venue of the ceremony, the Hotel Presidential, carrying away about 50 members they found outside, in five Hilux patrol jeeps. Apparently suspecting that some of the MASSOB youths may have gathered at Ojukwu’s residence in the former Government Reserved Area (GRA), the soldiers proceeded to search the house, but found none of the youths there.

Arrest of MASSOB leader Uwazuruike

Sources say after he learnt of the arrests, Uwazuruike went to the Police Commissioner’s office, accompanied by the National Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Victor Umeh, and some other leaders. His mission was to ascertain why members of his movement were arrested and to possibly negotiate their release. However, while at the police headquarters, the MASSOB leader was himself arrested and detained around 7.00pm.

Police explanation of the arrests

The State Police Public Relations Officer, Mr. Ebere Amaraizu, had said the MASSOB members were arrested based on an intelligence report which said they were coming into Enugu to disrupt the peace. He said: “We arrested the MASSOB members who are up to 200, because we don’t know their mission to Enugu. We were informed that they were coming to cause havoc. We have commenced investigation to ascertain their true mission to the state”. Police authorities reportedly said Uwazurike was arrested and detained for “treasonable felony”.

Reactions from MASSOB members

MASSOB activists, however, view the arrests as a further incident of official repression of their group. One member said: “This arrest clearly demonstrates the double standards and injustice applied by Nigerian rulers. Niger Delta militants destroy heavy oil installations and they are rewarded with scholarships to study abroad. Boko Haram fighters bomb police headquarters and the government is begging them to come for peace talks. But MASSOB, which has chosen to be non-violent, is constantly harassed and brutalized by the police”.

At the ceremony which the MASSOB youth were going to attend, IYM honoured Ojukwu with an award as the Igbo Icon of All Time. His wife, Bianca, who came back from London for the ceremony, received the award on his behalf.

Do We Really Need An Igbo President?

By Chukwuemeka Umunnakwe, 234 Next

The amalgam of tribes which make up Nigeria are locked in a fierce contest to best one another when it comes to grabbing juicy political offices. Needless to say, these ethnic rivalries are more focused on the offices occupied by the members of these ethnic groups than what the occupants actually do in these offices to better the life of the ordinary Nigerian.

The Nigerian President wields enormous influence no doubt and his office arguably is one of the most powerful democratic offices in Africa. Due to this, which I daresay has been so clearly perpetuated that at times it rivals the absolute monarchy of 13th and 14th century England, the tribes that make up Nigeria are engaged in bickering, struggles and fights to ensure that they produce the President. The tribes also view the office, rightly or wrongly, as capable of having a far-reaching and positive impact on the economic and infrastructural advancement of the tribe fortunate to produce the President.

The craze to produce the Nigerian President has found no more passionate campaigners than the Igbo political elites of the south east region. A good number of Igbo people have been led to believe by their political class that a true integration of the Igbo people in the body polity of Nigeria will occur when an Igbo citizen assumes the office of the President. The Igbo elite and political class have entwined the political, social, educational, infrastructural and economic development of the Igbo tribe with the quest to occupy this office.

Do we, the Igbo people, really need a Nigerian President of Igbo descent? Judging from the performance of past Nigerian presidents in their respective regions, can we honestly affirm that an Igbo president is the silver bullet to the myriad of problems facing the Igbo today? Have we, the Igbo tribe, properly articulated our problems and the solutions to these problems?

Today, the south east reels from lack of basic infrastructure; electricity is epileptic in major cities like Onitsha and Aba and we lack properly equipped hospitals and decent social amenities. The public education is in a shambles while public health is virtually non-existent. Many public institutions crucial for an orderly society are moribund. The state judiciaries have not witnessed any significant investments since the return to civil rule in 1999. Court houses are derelict, court rules are antiquated, libraries are not equipped, judges sit in extreme conditions due to absent electricity and the state universities are glorified secondary schools lacking the requisite manpower and infrastructure.

Unemployment is rife in the south east. The youth that manage to get an education resort to trading while others migrate to Lagos, Abuja or any other part of the country or outside the country, in search of greener pastures. Those unable to get jobs resort to crime. Kidnapping is the new wave.

The south east has the most expensive state schools (secondary and university). There is no free education at the primary or secondary school levels, neither is university education subsidised. Literacy levels have continued to dwindle. There are few major industries in the south east and we continue to witness both manpower and intellectual flight from here to other parts of Nigeria. These are issues that our political class ought to be tackling but they are too concerned about feathering their nests.

Once upon a time, the south east was the most industrially-advanced region in the whole of Africa. Our economy was one of the fastest growing in the world. We were innovative and technologically-driven. However, somewhere along the path, we deviated. We lost our core principles and values of hard work, integrity, independence and intellectual pursuit. Our values became eroded and we imbibed a wanton love for money and material trappings.

We inculcated the habit of worshipping known criminals who made money through atrocious methods; we lost our respect for education and instead placed a high premium on illiterates with bags of money. We elevated illiterates and perennial underachievers to be governors, members of the legislature, commissioners, traditional rulers, among others.

It is time we looked inwards. If we must survive as a people, we must isolate ourselves from the politics of ‘Igbo president' or juicy federal appointments. We must focus on the real challenges facing us. We must articulate an ideology for our advancement which will bind us as a people. There must be a sense of higher duty, higher calling and higher responsibility in our daily existence as a people.

We do not need an Igbo President before our Governors can construct independent power projects, build hospitals, schools, libraries, good roads and provide security. We do not need an Igbo President before the south east states can pool resources together to build an airport, sea port, or railway facilities in our region.

I believe that as an integral part of Nigeria, the Igbo people are entitled to produce the President for the country. We must place ourselves in a strategic position of strength from where we can negotiate. Presently, we are negotiating from a position of extreme weakness and, understandably, we are not being taken seriously. We must first put our house in order. We have to earn the respect of other tribes before we can seriously contest for the Presidency. The Presidency of this country is not for the asking. The rest of Nigeria must see the benefit of having a President of Igbo extraction.

OBI NWAKANMA'S VISION OF A RENASCENT ONITSHA CITY

By Okenwa Nwosu, MD, Igbo Forum

“It was the city that drew the great generation of Igbo, and indeed Southern Nigerian modernists. The city of the great Zik, whose statue still adorns an important historical site of the city; the city of Denis Osadebe, Mbonu Ojike, Nwafor Orizu, Ikejiani, Raymond Amanze Njoku, Pius Okigbo, Chike Obi, Sylvanus Cookey, Birabi, Ben Enwonwu, Cyprian Ekwensi, and too many others too numerous to mention.
It was the city, whose centrality in the evolution of modern Nigerian culture has been recorded permanently in Emmanuel Obiechina’s canonical study of the literature now called, “Onitsha Market Literature,” produced in the great forges of its little presses, much like the grub street, which basically disseminated the most significant tradition of city penny literature in that march towards the modern. Onitsha once had a great newspaper too: the Nigerian Spokesman, which gave this city its certain flavor.

The city exhibits the marks of dystopia. Yet it is a city of possibilities, if only the Anambra state government, can think slightly out of the box and commence an ambitious City redevelopment plan, by bringing a number of things to bear: the reconstitution of Onitsha as a Metropolitan district with its own city government, and execution of a plan that would integrate Ogidi, Obosi, Nnewi, Oba, and the surrounding districts, as part of the conurbation of a new Onitsha Metropolitan District.

This metropolitan authority should then think about raising property and other municipal taxes and begin the very clear process of redesigning and rebuilding Onitsha as a modern, 21st century city that should integrate the grandeur of its own history as the first epicenter of Igbo modernity, and promote that history as part of its culture and image, and its new offering.

This is what great cities do. It should also work inexorably towards the development of its valuable water front into a great residential, business and culture district, with splendid private and public residential facilities, fine offices, great restaurants, galleries, theatres, well designed public parks, and such a place that would draw people to its profitable use, and that would enrich the city significantly; and in some ways, connect it to its twin city across the river, Asaba, for the benefit of all.”

Obi Nwakanma


IF you asked most people today to go to Aba or Onitsha to settle and live, the first impulse would be to think that you are placing a curse on them. And I am totally serious. Young men and women, the most productive and active catalysts of city life, do not find any incentives to go to these once thriving cities of the East to settle, and live a full life.

I once asked a friend of mine who grew up in Onitsha, and who now teaches at the University of Denver, Colorado, if he could ever think about living in Onitsha or raising his children in Onitsha, and his response to me was quite frank: “there is nothing for me in Onitsha!” he said.

It was no longer even the city in which he grew up. The decay of a city like Onitsha is so terrifying that an encounter with both the image and reality of the city is nightmarish - a true ghostly miasma that is.

Until you have felt and seen it, it is quite unimaginable. The sludge of human and industrial waste that runs on the public and private spaces; the sense of the brokenness of everything; the disorder in city planning; in code enforcement; in street planning; in the general ordering and layout of the city makes Onitsha today, one of the most polluted and certainly one of the most ungainly sites of human habitation anywhere on God’s earth.

Yet encrusted in that pod of waste is a possible gem; a once well planned city which becomes only clear from the air, which has only been distorted by the barbarous rage of a most philistine generation for whom beauty and civility are alien values.

Onitsha still has some of the finest colonial architecture which are indeed great set pieces and which could just be rehabbed with a little imagination, care, and some respect for heritage. Yet also, Onitsha is dotted with some of the most monstrous forms of architecture, a pretence at the high-rise apartments, which give little room for aesthetics. The buildings are often largely utilitarian.

They are most times constructed with little rhyme or reason, possibly inspired by the competitiveness of the Onitsha landlord who draws the design on the sand, and builds just to prove to everyone else that his “four decking is higher than yours.”

The result in Onitsha, as one drives in, is a sense or an impression of a vast project – those low income, box-like constructions of high-rise apartments that dot the landscape of American urban ghettoes that are infested with drugs, prostitution and poverty. I have nothing, of course, against urban housing, but let it be built with respect for the people, with a sense of spatiality, with some aesthetic purpose.

Onitsha’s image suffers from its certain lack of awareness of its own history or importance. My early vision of Onitsha was shaped by an early encounter with Chinua Achebe’s novella, Chike and the River, a book I read in primary five.

I also associated Onitsha with what one imagined to be the magnificent bridge across the Niger at Onitsha, which even now, remains as powerful as New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, as an authentic symbol of Nigeria’s entry into high technological modernity.

The Brooklyn Bridge has been celebrated in the epic poetry of great American Romantic and modernist poets like Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, but not the bridge across the lordly Niger in Onitsha. Onitsha was for many years the cultural and commercial center of the East – something of the Boston of Southern Nigeria – with its place as the epicentre of Christian missionary movement into the Igbo heartland.

For many years, it was the headquarters of the Church of the Niger. It was the city of Basden and the Archbishop Denis, as well as the Joseph Shanahans. Those icons of the Roman and the Anglican churches, who ironically were also figures of early Igbo modernity of the late 19th century.

Onitsha was the intellectual capital of Southern Nigeria, with its famous parochial schools, like the Christ the Kings College, the Catholic boarding school for boys, or the Denis Memorial Grammar School, the Anglican equivalent, or the Queen of the Rosary School, the Catholic boarding school for girls, or the famous St. Charles Teachers College, and so many pioneer schools that made Onitsha the gathering of the early Igbo towards cultural modernity.

It was the city that drew the great generation of Igbo, and indeed Southern Nigerian modernists. The city of the great Zik, whose statue still adorns an important historical site of the city; the city of Denis Osadebe, Mbonu Ojike, Nwafor Orizu, Ikejiani, Raymond Amanze Njoku, Pius Okigbo, Chike Obi, Sylvanus Cookey, Birabi, Ben Enwonwu, Cyprian Ekwensi, and too many others too numerous to mention.

It was the city, whose centrality in the evolution of modern Nigerian culture has been recorded permanently in Emmanuel Obiechina’s canonical study of the literature now called, “Onitsha Market Literature,” produced in the great forges of its little presses, much like the grub street, which basically disseminated the most significant tradition of city penny literature in that march towards the modern. Onitsha once had a great newspaper too: the Nigerian Spokesman, which gave this city its certain flavor.

I could go on and on, but I hope the picture is clear, that from the time of the Saro and Caribbean middle class of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and so on, who first constituted the society and culture of Onitsha, of the Onitsha Literary Society, funded by a remarkable whiteman whose grave is still marked in one silent corner of the of the Onitsha city cemetery, to today, a city like Onitsha has undergone radical transformation. A cultured middle class seems absent.

The city exhibits the marks of dystopia. Yet it is a city of possibilities, if only the Anambra state government, can think slightly out of the box and commence an ambitious City redevelopment plan, by bringing a number of things to bear: the reconstitution of Onitsha as a Metropolitan district with its own city government, and execution of a plan that would integrate Ogidi, Obosi, Nnewi, Oba, and the surrounding districts, as part of the conurbation of a new Onitsha Metropolitan District.

This metropolitan authority should then think about raising property and other municipal taxes and begin the very clear process of redesigning and rebuilding Onitsha as a modern, 21st century city that should integrate the grandeur of its own history as the first epicenter of Igbo modernity, and promote that history as part of its culture and image, and its new offering.

This is what great cities do. It should also work inexorably towards the development of its valuable water front into a great residential, business and culture district, with splendid private and public residential facilities, fine offices, great restaurants, galleries, theatres, well designed public parks, and such a place that would draw people to its profitable use, and that would enrich the city significantly; and in some ways, connect it to its twin city across the river, Asaba, for the benefit of all.

This is the only way to stimulate growth and economic development on a scale that is purposive and significant. I have used Onitsha clearly as a foil even in my description of the other city, Aba. I have always said that one of the most important reflections of the kind of mindset that have destroyed once well-made cities like Aba, designed by Pius Okigbo as Development Officer in 1947, is in the destruction of the Aba golf course and its parceling off to speculators who quickly turned this once beautiful place into a monstrous space.

Aba and Port-Harcourt are also inevitably bound to shake hands and rejoin themselves at the hip, as it was once conceived, sooner than later.

And so it is important for the authorities in those two cities to begin the process of joint planning and remodeling, including creating joint sewer districts, protected forest areas, river and lake recreation areas, that would link the triad development from Owerri, Aba and Port-Harcourt, starting at the Owerrinta Port, near Okpala.

But as it is, it seems like very little thinking is going on at a grand scale in government. These cities cannot recover their economic powers, if they do not attract the right kind of human energy. It is imperative therefore, to draw people back, with great schools, great city hospitals, great museums and galleries, and generally, great environments to live and nurture families in a healthy and sustainable way.