Orlu, Imo State, is again in the news on account of untoward activities by youths in one of the communities in the senatorial district.
By Igbonekwu Ogazimorah
The “Great Sani Abacha” – many will not agree with me – once said in 1996, “if any insurgence lasts 48 hours, then the government has a hand in it.”
I am not sure I recalled his exact words.
Since I made a post on the above matter, I have taken so many calls, some quite illuminating, some raising strong questions, some downright insulting, and the others so simple and neither here nor there.
One of the questions raised was why such acts took so long to be challenged by the authorities. In the first place, it couldn’t have been secret ab initio. Why would such number of young men arrive from nowhere, and take over nearby village farmlands, soon spill to community facilities as the school where they parked stolen or snatched cars, and yet were undetected?
Secondly, when 90 per cent of the villages ran and took refuge in nearby villages or the cities, such ought to attract the attention of the authorities.
Thirdly, when it was rumoured that some villagers were openly extorted by these criminals, some had their vital organs forcibly harvested, it was not possible that the government was not aware. Then, the story that human flesh were burnt, roasted and possibly eaten!
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I took these up with a highly placed security operative. He was frank with me. “I do not want to say that the governor of Imo and his predecessors who are locked up in battles, have a hand. But they have been aware all along. What I can tell you is that Nnamdi Kanu radicalised Igbo youths, and those youths appear to have gone out for hiring. They can be easily deceived into accepting that what they are being asked to do is to realise Biafra, since Kanu has been put out of circulation. But one thing is clear, there are three fighting forces in Imo and environ – forces loyal to IPOB, those loyal to some ex-governors and the others working for the present governor”.
Imo people and their visitors, all minions, take the brunt.
Another source said, “Imo has been unlucky since (Achike) Udenwa left, producing monstrous governors and wicked brutes, as governors. (Ikedi) Ohakim was a brute. He beat up a Reverend Father. His men assaulted an innocent woman on Lagos Street in 2007. He did other terrible things. (Rochas) Okorocha was equally brutal, even though he spiced his actions with some comic gestures. Even (Emeka) Ihedioha, in the few weeks he governed, started with demolition of structures built with public funds just to spite his immediate predecessor. And the present governor, embattled with acceptability questions, appears to push this with seeking acceptance and elevation among some power brokers located in palaces in Abuja.”
Uzodimma can be said to be assailed by inferiority complex and greed for power and money, believing that the more wickedness he visits on his people would amount to higher acceptability within the national power cabal. Okorocha, Ihedioha and Ohakim may just be the eruptions of unrefined power characteristic of persons who had so hungered for it and did not even realise that they already had it and should stop fighting for the power already on their lap.
Anyway, my interest was on the forces at war in Imo. Many of the persons who called to show their anger at my post held that IPOB could not be human eaters. They continued with the claim that IPOB/ESN had been occupied with fighting off killer herdsmen and battling the security forces that had visited their members with vicious tactics. They insist that any oddity on the ground was done by government forces. Personally, I do not find these outlandish. Security forces actually do terrible things to hang opposing forces. I was privileged to meet an old Irish reverend gentleman in Dublin in 1998. He was one of the executives of the world relief operations during the Nigeria – Biafra war.
According to him, “the Nigerian security forces, led by members of British Special Forces did many atrocious things in order to incur the hatred of mainland Igbo by their minority ethnic neighbours. .. they burnt people’s homes, destroyed their economic property and infrastructure, all to impress it on the people that they were hated by the Igbo. Once, a British man walked up to me and requested some assistance. I asked him what he was doing in that village near Calabar. He told me that he had come to mark some trees for his lumbering business. Later that day, some natives came up to me to report that the Ibo had inscribed their names on their cocoa, rubber and palm trees, an indication that they were fighting the war to seize their property and lands. They announced that if the Igbo would so soon target their economic trees even as the war was only a year old, then they were doomed in Biafra. I quickly realigned and understood the actual mission of the British man I saw earlier that day. That way and many other ways, they achieved the severance of the relationship of those ethnic minorities with the Igbo.”
Indeed, I had heard and read many similar accounts. If then the resent Nigeria security forces consider it appropriate to use these horrendous acts in Orlu to secure people’s hatred and rejection of IPOB, they will not hesitate to use it.
But where would IPOB stand in this? It cannot be completely absolved because it started with psychological working up of the minds of the youths to frenzies of unreasonable proportion. Then left them without command! To worsen matters, it remains the lone quasi-military organisation whose mode of command and instruction down the line is the public communication channel. It never cared about the impact or weight of utterances of their leadership on the common herd. If Nnamdi Kanu is altruistic – I want to think he is – he ought to know that no leader speaks at the drop of the hat. When he said police men should be roasted, he probably did not mean it in the literal sense, but that was exactly what youths saw when they allegedly killed and roasted a police man at Ogidi during the #EndSARS crisis. In effect, the presently reported carnage in Orlu is easy to impute on them. When Kanu said that he could “play god” as he had the “power of life and death,” youths were likely to attempt to match it up with shows of bravado and unreasonable acts.
Agreed, the Kanu rhetoric is not too widely off the mark when juxtaposed with similar actions of liberation fighters, but none I know ever used the public/open channels to pass its command. They cannot be misread. They must be directed in interpretation of their statements.
When Kanu achieved the present massive followership, he was supposed to be sobered by such power he amassed and begin to be more humane, less heard, more thoughtful, clearer, but firmer. The Mbaise-Onion-truck incident would have taught him some lessons. He actually moaned that the looting took place. He almost cried lamenting such belittling act of the youths, and he offered to refund the owner. But he has yet to be schooled in the minds of social categories.
On the rampaging governor and ex-governors in Imo State, I am inclined to believe my source that these are political differences carried too far. The net worth persons said to be involved have been the reasons the security forces had not acted in time. They had the right information on time. They knew that the premises of a Primary School had been confiscated by the criminals as their command headquarters. They knew that people who were arrested, or kidnapped, or invited, and taken into the grooves hardly returned alive. Indeed, a source said, “nothing about their operations, both in the bush and the entire community, was secret.” This now raises the question, why did it last so long before the invasion by government forces?
There is this pedestrian view that “the Buhari government does not bat an eyelid if the Igbo destroy themselves.” There is also this view that “they are protected by some powerful persons,” just as there is this other view that “everything is working to discredit IPOB which the Federal government is desperate to present to the International community (whoever they are) as terrorists.” Your guess may be right. It may also be wrong. One unimpeachable truth is that all the State governments know, and have full data on non-State-actor settlements in Igboland. Many others also know. The governors adopt different attitudes: “let the sleeping dogs lie”. “As long as they do not carry out their acts against my people”. “Who wants mortal enemies few months before leaving government?” etc.
It really beats me how a person would carry out such horrendous acts just for political points. Political differences, ONLY, for that matter.
Whichever way, Ndi Imo and indeed the rest of Ndi Igbo are in hot soup, not because the Federal has turned its red eyes on the people – its reddened eyes have been on the Igbo since January 1966 – but because its millions of youths, jobless, hungry, angry, brainwashed, ill-educated, are poised to act in ways that will upset, unseat and decimate their elite, believing that these stand in their ways to achieve Biafra. And diaspora Igbo are working hard to realise this.
Ogazimorah, a lawyer and former newspaper Editor, wrote from Enugu