By Dr. Austin Orette
Every time I have engaged with Igbo people in the discussions concerning how their behavior brought Nigeria to this nadir, they always reply and call me Igbo hater.
What do we call Igbo people who hate Nigerians with a passion? Are they Nigerian haters, Yoruba haters or Fulani haters? Do we call them Isoko haters?
As a people who are part of a majority tribe, they become so defensive when their actions are scrutinized. They are always behaving like the underdog who should have our sympathy.
The Nigeria of today is a creation of the Igbo people. They pushed Cameroonians out. They brought the civil war that made Nigeria a unitary state that is difficult to govern. The minority tribes that are proximal to them want nothing to do with them and this individual assumes I have never read books by non-Nigerians before embarking on these writings. This is the problem .This individual speaks with the authority of ignorance.
I wrote a six part article on how the Fulani people are contributing to the underdevelopment of Nigeria. I had two replies. One actually called and we had a lengthy civil discussion. At the end, he asked what we do now. I said they should pursue education and find a way to educate and get rid of the Almajiri system. I also told him that they should diversify from political power and pursue education and business. I stressed that they are all over the Sahel and they could build more stability in the Sahel through education and business. We had a good chat.
The Igbo will see every critical observation as hatred because hate is probably all they know. That is why they project hate. The truth is bitter because it is antiseptic. The chewing stick is bitter and it does a good job at cleaning our teeth. The Igbo people would rather throw away the chewing stick and emit the stench that can destroy a nation. They did it once and we survived it. They expect us to tolerate their second attempt to destroy Nigeria.
All the bad laws and unitary formation of Nigeria today are due to the dislocation of the Nigerian political system by a group of Igbo soldiers who thought they knew it all. Whatever Nigeria is today is due to the damage done by the Igbo people.
Now, they have another Ojukwu wannabe preaching a more caustic version of Ojukwu‘s separatism and these people want us to take this as a benign issue. The fallacy is that this guy in his venality dare compare what is happening in the North to what is happening in Igbo land. Is this deliberate ignorance or congenital stupidity?
Igbo people are fighting for ethnic separatism like they did before. The Northerners are fighting economic and other social issues. No Northerner has rallied behind any figure to form a Northern Republic. There is no correlation between the two. The Northern problem can be solved if economic harmony is instituted. The Igbo agitation can only be solved if Biafra becomes a Republic.
We are no longer children. Telling us a majority of Igbo don’t support Nnamdi Kanu‘s agitation does not mean a thing. A lot of them are certainly agitating for him to be released without trial. This Kanu issue made me to laud Buhari as a warrior.
If Yakubu Gowon had succeeded in arresting Ojukwu as planned, we could have avoided the trauma of the Biafran war. We had a war, millions died and Ojukwu fled into exile. He was pardoned and the Igbo people gave him a heroic welcome. Did the Igbo people ever think about how other Nigerians feel when they display this utter disregard for us?
Ojujwu is their hero. To those of us who lost a lot due to that avoidable war, Ojukwu is a villain. As soon as he landed in Nigeria, he started campaigning for a political office in a country he wanted to dismember. He joined the party that Igbo people accused of causing their problems. Today his wife enjoys the largesse of a country her late husband wanted to destroy. Ojukwu was not magnanimous to the Ogoni people and he showed it when Ken Saro Wiwa was murdered. This is the hatred the Igbo people have for us. It is pure projection when they say we hate them.
If they really want to find out whether others hate them and why they hate them, they should carry out an anonymous survey and know why.
This writer has gone beyond succumbing to the emotional blackmail of the Igbo people who plant negative stories against Nigeria on the internet.
Governor Charles Soludo demolished houses in Onitsha, no Igbo man or woman complains he hates the people. The governor of Lagos destroys illegal structures and we are told he is anti-Igbo.
Living in the same country with the Igbo people is becoming very exhausting.
South Africans are complaining, Ghanaians are complaining, Americans are complaining. Do all these people hate you? Form your Biafra so you can give them a different version of what they have experienced in proximity with the Igbo people.
Ojukwu returned to Nigeria as a hero and enjoyed plump and pageantry that a magnanimous nation extended to him. We should not be surprised if kanu is released and he is given the same royal welcome by the Igbo people he devastated. This is the reason why I am advocating for the Igbo people to be allowed to have their Biafra because their sense of truth and character is different from other Nigerians. Their heroes are not our heroes. They killed our heroes and they want us to extol their heroes who we consider villains. It is good surgical practice to excise a wound that will not heal and cause and spread dysfunction and infection to the rest of the body. They can never be true Nigeria as long as their longing for Biafra is not sated.
I don’t want to watch a victory parade for Kanu on the soil of Nigeria. They can do that in their Biafra. They can go to their Biafra and close their stores all year round in celebration of Kanu. I am a Nigerian. I wish them well in their new country where imbecility, fake products and disrespect for civilized norms will be the order of the day.
*DR AUSTIN ORETTE WRITES FROM HOUSTON, TEXAS