Igbo political elite often play the victim. After initial claim of disenfranchisement across Lagos and call for a military takeover if Obi was denied of victory, it was wild jubilation on Monday as they invaded Alausa with Obi party’s flag following INEC announcement of his victory with about 500,000 votes in Lagos over Tinubu who secured less than 5000 votes in Enugu.
But then nationalism among Igbo political elite has always been driven not by altruism but by selfish interest. And no one puts this better than Chinua Achebe in his classic, ‘No Longer at ease’- “we are strangers in this land, when calamities befall the owners of the land, we return home leaving the owners of the land who know how to appease their own gods” Here, Chinua Achebe, as in his other classics, focuses on transformation Igbo experience in strangers’ land while maintaining a dead silence on dislocation and despoliation of host communities.
Thus the buying off of cutlasses in Lagos market by Igbo urban immigrants in preparation for war against their Yoruba host with whom they had lived peacefully before Zik’s return to Nigeria in 1934 was over alleged threat to Igbo leaders.
The derailment of Zik’s ambition to join the colonial legislative council due to Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Dr Olorunnibe’s NCNC intra-party revolt was sold to Igbo urban immigrants as Yoruba tribal war requiring Ozumba Mbadiwe’s call on Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa to cede Lagos from Western Region.
Even the March 5, 1941 Nigerian Youth Movement bye-election, during which Awolowo supported Ernest Ikoli, an easterner from present day Bayelsa against Oba Samuel Akinsanya, his fellow Ijebu man while Zik and his West African Pilot supported the latter, ended with Awolowo being labelled a tribalist by Zik to justify pulling down of the first Pan-Nigeria Movement.
Many Igbo political and intellectual elite including some of my close friends have said it to our face “You Yoruba are very tribalistic “just because we believe Obi’s chances in the 2023 presidential run is very slim in spite of assurances of his promoters starting with some of our mischievous elders including Olusegun Obasanjo, Pa Adebanjo and Pa Edwin Clark who claim to promote his candidacy “for equity justice and one Nigeria”.
They are not telling the truth that in the 1959 election, Igbo-dominated NCNC came first but by-passed Yoruba AG that came second to become beautiful bride to NPC that came a distant third; that during the 1979 inconclusive election, Obasanjo according to Aremo Segun Osoba, by-passed the electoral college constitutional provision, to rig Shagari into office with Richard Akinjide’s twelve two third of a state formula. Igbo NPP immediately offered itself as a beautiful bride to Shagari’s NPN; that in 1993, Igbo supported Bashir Tofa against MKO Abiola. And when Abiola against all odds won by a landslide, some Igbo leaders led by Arthur Nzeribe became instrument with which Babangida annulled the most credible election in our nation’s history.
Until 2022, Obi like most prominent Igbo politicians was in PDP. And without rapprochement or handshake across the Niger with the West, the rejected corner stone, Obi divorced PDP in 2022 and hoped to win Nigerian presidency in 2023.
Obi’s other pillar of support was ‘the obidients’, predominantly made up of ‘Igbo children of anger’ who because of the falsehood they had been fed with tend to hold everybody except Igbo leaders, their scourge, responsible for the plight of poor Igbo in Nigeria.
They seem to suffer from selective perception accepting no other views except perhaps that of Professor Pat Utomi who told them Obi is the best of all presidential candidates because he was such an entrepreneurial genius that he built a house as student of University of Nsukka where the Sultan Of Sokoto lived as a young military officer.
