If the sit-at-home were voluntary and sparingly
used, it would have bestowed credibility on the argument of the general
acceptance of the Biafran goals. All it required was to keep winning
hearts and souls, as more and more people joined the action. But our
people have no such patience. They want it now – nzogbu-nzogbu. Using
the threat of bodily harm to enforce the sit-at-home order, you lose the
moral right to argue that it is a referendum by another name.
In all of his 69 to 79 years in this world, how many times has Bola
Tinubu, the man who could be the next president of Nigeria, visited the
South-East?
I guess that it may not be up to a dozen times. He didn’t go there to
school, compete in debates, quiz or Koran recital challenges. He surely
didn’t go there on a school excursion to visit a major dam or a game
reserve. Who wants to cross the Niger River just to visit Ogbunike Cave,
Ngwo Pine Forest or Oguta Lake? The Umuahia Biafra War museum was not
yet built when he went to school. We know that he did not go to the
South-East to work after school. With Ndubisi Kanu, Ebitu Ukiwe, Anya O.
Anya, Ralph Obioha and others in the National Democratic Coalition
(NADECO), Tinubu most definitely did not go to the South-East to solicit
support for MKO Abiola’s mandate during the pro-democracy movement of
the 90s. When he emerged and became the governor of Lagos State, he had
no need to campaign in the South-East. The same as when he became a
National Leader of the All Progressves Congress (APC).
Why are all these important? What have they got to do with the
sit-at-home order introduced in the South-East by the Indigenous People
of Biafra (IPOB) to add pressure to their quest for the actualisation of
an independent nation of Biafra?
I will get to these in a short while. In the meantime, follow me on this little detour.
While the opinion of Boko Haram members is not seen as the opinion of
the people of the North-East of Nigeria, the same is not true of the
opinion of Biafrans. Outside of the South-East, the opinion of Biafrans
is by default considered the universal opinion of the people of the
South-East. If you are from the South-East, many still see you as a
Biafran, irrespective of how many times you swear not to be allied to
the Biafrans.
We know why it is that way. It is because the people of the
South-East are the most misunderstood people of Nigeria. The Fulanis
come a close second. The misunderstanding is so endemic that the people
of the South-East are beginning to misunderstand themselves as a result.
I am sure psychologists must have a name for this syndrome.
The reason for the misunderstanding is clear. Even though all
categories of South-Eastern people live all over Nigeria, speak various
languages of the places they live in, the same is not true about other
people from other parts of Nigeria within the South-East. Take out the
National Youth Service Corps programme that compels many young educated
and adventurous people to spend a year in the South-East, most Nigerians
would not have any reason ever to visit the South-East.
When IPOB first introduced the sit-at-home order,
the idea was to show that most people in the South-East support their
quest for an independent nation of Biafra. It started as a once-a-year
event, partly to remember those who died in the Nigeria-Biafra War. In
the beginning, so many people in the region did not mind sacrificing a
day to remember the dead. It soon transformed into a tool for achieving
other goals…
There is little or no federal presence in the region to bring diverse
workers from across the country to the South-East. The other reason,
related to the first, is that life is very hard in the South-East. It is
hard for the people in that region, so they leave at the slightest
opportunity. If it is tough for the indigenes to stay and make a living
there, what hope does it offer non-indigenes?
Unfortunately, there is no way of understanding people you have not interacted with, in their natural environment.
It is important to understand this distinction, if one wants to
understand in their proper context, events taking place in the
South-East and put them in their proper framework. This is vital for
people who are not from the region but more cogent for people from the
region but who are ignorant of the dynamics of Nigeria and how they
impact the perspectives of others and the perception they have of
themselves.
When IPOB first introduced the sit-at-home order, the idea was to
show that most people in the South-East support their quest for an
independent nation of Biafra. It started as a once-a-year event, partly
to remember those who died in the Nigeria-Biafra War. In the beginning,
so many people in the region did not mind sacrificing a day to remember
the dead. It soon transformed into a tool for achieving other goals,
including the raising of awareness for other Biafran-related issues. Of
recent, it has become a tool to draw attention to the plight of the
leader of IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu.
As such things are known to transform, the sit-at-home has become so
frequent that it has triggered a backlash and a diminishing return. With
resistance to the order has come fierce enforcement with the force of
arms. The people who initiated it have also lost control, that they
cannot pull it back. Freelance actors, breakaway factions, and others
outside the original IPOB, have seen the tool as one to use to exert
control over the populace. They and their supporters argue that despite
the groaning of the region’s people, it is worth the sacrifice. They
often quote unrelated and unsymmetrical history to support their
arguments.
For 27 years that Nelson Mandela was in prison, if black South
Africans had stayed at home one day of every week, they would have spent
1,458 days at home, which would have been four years of their lives. If
you think that South African blacks are poor now, imagine how poorer
they would have been if they had lost four years of income. And under
Apartheid, the white business-owners would have fired most of them from
their jobs for such action.
While sacrifice has a place in every struggle, it must be
well-crafted and one with the buy-in of a majority of the people.
Otherwise, those imposing the sacrifice are essentially saying that the
people they are fighting for are idiots, who have no minds of their own.
We can be sentimental for the mundane, but
history is not sentimental, not even for the profane. We can sit at home
as much as we like, but we cannot sit on history. Our forefathers said
that the wise ones get the proverb while the stubborn ones bury their
heads inside the bush.
Also, responsible people have compared the frequent and economically
strangulating sit-at-home orders as akin to drinking poison and hoping
that your enemy would die or sitting at home crushing your testicles and
wondering why you cannot get your wife pregnant. The idea that
President Buhari would release Nnamdi Kanu because Igbo people are
forcing themselves to stay at home does not sound like a strategy coming
from those who have a good understanding of how Nigeria works,
especially when it relates to anything tangential to Biafra.
If the sit-at-home were voluntary and sparingly used, it would have
bestowed credibility on the argument of the general acceptance of the
Biafran goals. All it required was to keep winning hearts and souls, as
more and more people joined the action. But our people have no such
patience. They want it now – nzogbu-nzogbu. Using the threat of bodily
harm to enforce the sit-at-home order, you lose the moral right to argue
that it is a referendum by another name.ⓘ
A true voluntary sit-at-home would not need force to get people to
comply. And Igbo people outside Igbo land will voluntarily join in
staying at home. By not joining, they are giving it the thumbs down.
They enjoy the freedom and the advantage that they deny folks at home.
They are endorsing a philosophy that they are better and superior to
those at home. That is a recipe for resentment, which can only lead to
discord and disaster in a struggle like this.
More dangerously, by imposing economic hardship on the home front, we
encourage more people to leave home. That is the inverse of what the
new Igbo awareness should be – which is a return home to rebuild – aku lue ulo.
There is a reason Buhari won’t care if all the markets in the
South-East are closed for the next 27 years. It is the same reason that
Bola Tinubu will not care if school children in the South-East are never
allowed to seat for WAEC again, if pregnant women have babies on banana
leaves at home and children dig graves to bury their dead parents
themselves.
We can be sentimental for the mundane, but history is not
sentimental, not even for the profane. We can sit at home as much as we
like, but we cannot sit on history. Our forefathers said that the wise
ones get the proverb while the stubborn ones bury their heads inside the
bush.
The limit of sit-at-home comes when it begins to crush a man’s testicles.
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo teaches
Post-Colonial African History at the School of Visual Arts in New York
City. He is also the host of Dr. Damages Show. His books include This American Life Sef, Children of a Retired God, among others.
