By David Hundeyin
When we ask the right questions and determine that Nigeria’s historically dreadful treatment of one of its three biggest ethnic groups is neither deserved nor justified, but is actually genocidal and irrational, then we can start making progress in our national discourse. If we admit that something is not fair, then that makes us commit to changing it. If we forever continue rationalising stuff like this, we are merely ensuring that Nigeria will never change the record and dance to something new.
The usual saying makes it seem as if when two elephants fight, they get to walk away unscathed while the grass groans in distress. In reality, grass regrows rapidly, but the elephants sustain severe injuries when they use their tusks on each other. In Nigeria’s case, one such severe injury is the moribund, obsolete and miserable Ajaokuta Steel Mill. At the planning phase, consultants recommended siting the steel mill just outside Onitsha for reasons of proximity to iron ores, cutting down the need for imports.
The Nigerian elephant delivered what it thought was a huge blow to the Biafran elephant by moving the mill to Kogi State for purely political reasons. That was over 30 years ago. Today in 2024, Ajaokuta Steel Mill remains as unused as the day it was commissioned, but with thousands of salary earners and pensioners on its books who have sat there for decades without a single productive day’s work. Nigeria still imports every kind of steel product she needs, and the technology used at Ajaokuta is at least 20 years out of date, making Chinese steel imports cheaper than whatever it could theoretically produce today.
Oh, and guess which group of people control that import industry? Yes. Clearly, it wasn’t only the grass that suffered. Now let’s do a quick mental experiment. Inside your mind, picture the map of Nigeria. Shade the parts of the map where Igbo pogroms have been commonplace over the past 70 years. Now select a different mental colour and shade the parts of the map that are currently suffering from near-total breakdown of security due to violence from non-state actors. Notice how you end up shading the second colour almost exactly over the first. Precisely!
This is not because of some dead man’s curse/karma hocus pocus. There are, of course numerous political and economic factors contributing to the toxicity of such spaces which cannot be explored in this article. However, a key reason is that after decades of the Nigerian state allowing human beings to be slaughtered at the drop of a hat in those places – because the said human beings are named “Chukwuka” instead of “Aliu” – the people there have internalised and normalised such violence.
Long after Chukwuka and Odinanka have fled or died, the sense of total impunity and the feeling of power associated with unpunished violence remain firmly rooted in those places. Inevitably, such people turn their weapons on each other and continue acting out what they first practised on “Igbos.”
Southwestern Nigeria, which has managed by and large to restrain itself from such orgies of violence, is unsurprisingly Nigeria’s safest, wealthiest and most stable region. This is not rocket science. As Chinua Achebe eloquently put it, “We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.” An Igbo proverb expresses this thought more starkly as “Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya,” which means, “He who holds another person down on the ground must stay there to keep him down.”
Back when I worked in Marketing, I had a boss, Ayeni Adekunle who was fond of the Yoruba proverb, “Ninu ikoko dudu l’eko funfun ti’n jade,” which means, “White eko comes out of a black pot.” After 49 years of painful, injurious silence about Africa’s biggest ever genocide, the cleansing effect of finally speaking up will be a great thing. These conversations will be painful. My good friend, Charles Isidi, is a good person to talk to if you want, to get an insight into how raw, pervasive and real the pain still is after all these years.
I remember being gob smacked when he informed me that he knows people whose birth certificates read “Republic of Biafra,” because they were born during the war in a country called Biafra. “Nigeria” to them, was simply this big bully next door trying to kill them for no reason – which by the way, is pretty accurate. So, what do we do when confronted by stories that we don’t really want to hear, and that we don’t know what to do with?
The first thing is probably to listen. Just, listen. Really listen. Don’t interrupt with “Ehn, but you know they couldn’t have known that…” It’s not your story, and it’s not about you. Listen and let people tell their story. Nigeria is not going to fall down and die if we listen to one-third of our population telling us “You know, dropping bombs on my daddy’s head because some guys we never met did something that had nothing to do with us in a place we never saw wasn’t really called for.” It’s a difficult conversation, but not a world-ending one.
Ultimately, the Igbo ethnic group is now probably Nigeria’s most widely-recognised and diffused ethnicity, with the vast majority still holding on to their Nigerian identity. My friend, Ify, whom I mentioned at the outset still identifies with Nigeria and visits from time to time. Despite all that has happened, what binds us all together is still more powerful than what sets us apart. We may have a troubled relationship across ethnic lines in Nigeria, but it can still be salvaged. Like all troubled relationships however, the first and most important step is to have the conversation.
