By Tiko Okoye
In scheduling the Anambra governorship election for November 6, 2021, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) exercised its statutory power to act on such matters.
But it would also seem that the leadership of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) is equally hell-bent on – rightly or wrongly – truncating the election in a no-holds-barred battle over who owns Papa’s land and has the people’s ear. What legendary Afrobeat founder Fela Anikulapo-Kuti once musically dubbed a “stalemate”!
Sincerely speaking, I can’t see how the heavy direct and collateral damages on all sides inflicted by two massive locomotives set on a collision course can be averted.
Funny enough, the South-East leaders of thought are at their wit’s end. I remain fully persuaded that the demands being made by IPOB could’ve been easily settled when the matter was still within manageable limits.
But politicians of Igbo extraction and politicians from other zones in Nigeria – the North in particular as well as wolves-in-sheep-clothing Igbo haters in the South-West and South-South in general, yes! – were playing to the gallery and throwing the bait of red meat in various ways to their political bases. And we now find ourselves in a shit-filled very deep hole. How do I mean?
Igbo politicians who, for real and made-up reasons outside the scope of this essay, majorly belong to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were stoking the fire of civil disobedience via the overt and covert utterances and actions of secessionists in the South-East just to maintain political relevance and literally prevent their APC opponents from coming as close as 50 kilometers from the cooking pot. And the strategy worked very well for them. Buhari received not more than five per cent of the plurality of votes cast in the zone at the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections, and PDP accounted for over 90 per cent of the elective offices.
But elders of Igbo land aver that when a man defecates at the entrance to his farm in the morning, and makes no effort to clear it, he will without any doubt meet the excreta in a more putrid and smelly state on his way home in the evening. That’s what has now happened.
Igbo politicians are now scrambling to diffuse the ticking timebomb because the full ramifications of lost opportunities are beginning to stare them in the face! With one side of the mouth, they are feebly pronouncing that the Anambra governorship election must hold. They have to be very discrete because the South-East version of the “Wetie” debacle of the defunct Western Region in 1965 – the “Sabo” syndrome – is very real.
As a result, they are using the other part of the mouth to shout much louder than they are “pleading” for the election to hold, so that they can enter the good graces of the IPOB leadership as a disingenuous way to procure a life insurance policy.
But the truth is that Igbo politicians cannot eat their cake and still keep it at this stage. It is either one thing or the other given the fearsomely short string attached to the ticking time bomb. They, of course, want the election to hold in order to demonstrate that they still have some form of relevance and control on events unraveling in the South-East. If the Anambra governorship doesn’t take place, nearly 90 per cent of the current class of politicians can as well consider themselves abruptly retired in political limbo.
That being the case – and given that the cardinal principle in politics is that there are no permanent friends except permanent interests – it should come as no surprise to no one that a vast majority of Igbo politicians screaming for Nnamdi Kanu’s release during the daytime are the same ones adopting the Nicodemus approach to visit homes and offices of titans of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to disclose how the IPOB fly-on-the-crotch can be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both sides of the divide!
It has unfortunately become a scenario where there’s no paddy-man in the jungle as everybody now has to begin to search for the best way to minimize political losses and secure personal interests in a you-versus-me tug of war.
I don’t see the Buhari administration abruptly releasing Nnamdi Kanu, no matter the amount of pressure that’s brought to bear on it – not even if the Pope and the Israeli Prime Minister accept to be his sureties.
Truth is that the Buhari administration cannot afford to release Kanu under any kind of arrangement given how he jumped bail and orchestrated a very effective propaganda and PR campaign against the government.
Our politicians know this but it serves their secondary interest well to be seen as those vociferously screaming for the release of “Onyedum” even if they snicker and snigger at him and the organisation he leads behind the back.
So, if the federal government is determined to hold Kanu, and IPOB is determined that the entire state would be under a total lockdown for one week, does anyone need a necromancer or crystal-ball gazer or “prophet” to “prophesy” that rivers of blood would flow in Anambra come November 6?
The federal government has two jokers up its sleeves:
First, if the anarchy that ensues reaches a state that is considered unmanageable, the federal government would declare a state of emergency in Anambra and appoint a hardboiled retired military general as the administrator – just as Olusegun Obasanjo did in Ekiti during his presidency. Such a move would inevitably mark the end of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) as it loses the only state it has controlled in very recent times.
The second joker is that just 1,000 voters or so can decide the outcome of the governorship election. There’s no where in the Electoral Act where the minimum number of votes or voter turnout percentage are stated for an election to pass off as being legitimate. It only requires that the provisions laid down are fully met: (1) The winning candidate must have the the highest number of valid votes cast (even if the winning margin is one or two); and (2) The winning candidate must garner at least 25 per cent of the valid votes cast in at least two-thirds of the LGAs in the state (again no mention of threshold number or voter turnout).
I don’t intend to impugn or malign anybody’s “hard-earned” reputation, but if you still don’t know the only candidate who stands to benefit the most from this scenario it can only mean that you’re a Johnny-Just-Come (JJC) to these climes!
Since it is impossible for the federal government to abruptly let Kanu go – for all the reasons I earlier stated and for the fact that the Buhari government can’t afford to not only lose face very badly – trust the army of viscerally abusive Biafran e-rats on social media platforms – but it would also open a Pandora’s box to wannabe budding and active insurgents, militants, bandits and social miscreants.
So, what do I suggest? That Igbo politicians, influencers, and IPOB leadership tone down the vitriolic effusions and settle for substantive behind-closed-door negotiations with the federal government. The outcome could mean a No-Winner-No-Vanquished political settlement that will see the government withdrawing the charges while not appearing to lose face. It was used to settle the offshore/onshore rift during the Obasanjo administration.
And Yar’Adua also scored a hit with the approach at the height of the Niger-Delta insurgency. But those calling on Buhari to negotiate directly with IPOB are just being clever by half and goes to epitomise their political irrelevance. The likes of E.K. Clarke, Wole Soyinka, and Hassan Kukah negotiated on behalf of MEND. Are there not credible Igbo leaders of thought and academicians who can do the same?
My final appeal now goes to IPOB. What does the organisation really have to gain from the mass killings of Ndigbo and destruction of critical infrastructure? If IPOB is truly seeking to liberate Ndigbo, is turning the streets of the South-East into oceans of blood a rational and logical way to achieve the objective?
The way I see it, only those who believed in the concept of herd mentality, espousing that a vast majority of people should be just allowed to be killed by COVID-19, so that the remnant who survive can be safe. It is demonic and inhuman. At the rate we are going, who would constitute the citizenry of Biafra when the project ultimately becomes a reality?
But my real apprehension is that IPOB appears to be on the cusp of losing total control of the situation. Once when it was reported that Kanu had ordered the lifting of an extended lockdown order because of its deleterious impact on the economy of the South-East, and instructed that the lockdown should be only done on the days he’s scheduled to appear in court, many posters took to social media platforms to reject the order on the basis that it was his attorney not Kanu who changed the order or that Kanu has been compromised in prison by the federal government!
IPOB seems to have unleashed a Frankenstein monster and putting the genie back in the bottle isn’t as easy as expected. Only yesterday, IPOB found itself disclaiming any form of relationship with extortionist armed members of the Biafra National Guard (BNG) who suffered heavy losses in a shootout with Nigerian soldiers.
The real concern is that over 90 per cent of IPOB rank and file fully support and glamourise the antics of the “rogue” (if that’s what it is) BNG. You now see where I’m coming from?
Before misconceptions materialize and speculations run riot, let me hasten to posit that the arguments canvassed here are in no way related to the pros and cons of a Biafran Republic. That’s for another time and place.
For now, I seriously appeal to Nnamdi Kanu and his inner circle to have a rethink. The woes that are set to befall Anambra and the South-East are largely the products of unforced errors. How does the IPOB game-plan to stop final-year Igbo students from writing their exams help secure Kanu’s release from detention? Who exactly gains and who exactly loses?
I can recall that during the last census exercise, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) unleashed a reign of terror in the zone on the basis that “Biafran citizens” should not be counted in a Nigerian census, as if credible census figures would not come in handy in planning the Biafran economic development blueprint. At the end of it all, the Igbo population was heavily undercounted to the point that we moved from the second most populous ethnic nationality in the country to the fourth position – now overtaken by the Ijaws of the Niger Delta!
The national cake is still chiefly shared on the basis of population. So, if you add the marginalisation we’ve been suffering in the hands of the government to the one we brought on ourselves, it becomes Marginalisation-Squared! And the saddest aspect is that we have the power and means to change the narrative on both counts if we really address our minds to excelling in politics the same way we excel in business and commerce despite all the daunting obstacles thrown our way.
And come to think of it, isn’t an organisation in the South-West political zone agitating for an Oduduwa Republic? Why isn’t Lagos and other towns in the zone becoming war theatres like the South-East? Is it that we think that we are more bellicose, belligerent, courageous, and smarter than them? Hmmmm…the answers are blowing in the wind!
