Soludo and Onitsha market politics: Amid the unabating uncertainties and killings in the Southeast, caution became the operating word among Onitsha traders and traders elsewhere in Igbo land. They were responding to a threat that was real in scope and substance. But in playing the federalist script, Governor Soludo chose to rework the context to meet his purpose. He oversimplified the inherent complexities to make the matter appear as easy as ABC. The traders are victims of the failures of the Nigerian State. But Soludo cast them as aggressors. Their decision to forgo business and profit for safety was a reaction and not a provocation. The issues are wider but Soludo only chose to hide behind a finger to advertise a correctness that left him embarrassingly exposed as an opportunist… The ongoing drama of “Onitsha Market Politics” being staged by Soludo for the Abuja audience cannot cause the rising sun to set forever as desired by General Gowon. Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB are only a phase in a running struggle. If justice fails, the set Biafran sun shall continue to rise again either as IPOB, MASSOB or whatever.
By Abraham Ogbodo
I have heard about Onitsha market literature. I did not know about Onitsha market politics until now. The idea has come through Charles Chukwuma Soludo who is a professor of economics and Governor of Anambra State. I shall come back to this. There are a few more things that I know about Onitsha market and Onitsha town. I know, for instance, that everything that holds value is available for sale in the market. What is sellable and buyable that is not available in Onitsha market might very well not exist on planet earth. Such is the character of the market which also defines the character of the city.
Outsiders conceive Onitsha as one expansive market-space where all the inhabitants are traders who are either selling or buying something. I used to think that way until I got into St Patrick’s College, Asaba in the early 80s for my Higher School Certificate (HSC). And until as recent as 2004 or thereabout, I had thought that Onitsha was all about the clusters of concrete high-rises that are visible along the main transit routes to Enugu and Owerri. On this day however, I did not enter Onitsha from the ‘Head Bridge.’ I did from the northwest through Awka. I cannot recapture the defining features of the route, but I got suddenly offloaded into a different Onitsha where the streets were well paved and lined with trees.
I was disoriented. The setting was so far away from the observable ugliness of the concrete jungle on Upper Iweka and environs. It is the same ascending freshness that comes with transiting through Lagos mainland into the serenity of Ikoyi on the Island or the beautiful avenues in inner Apapa. I had just gatecrashed into Onitsha GRA. It is the part of the city to look out for Peter Obi when he says: “I live in Onitsha.” It is also the area to find the palace of the Agbogidi, Obi of Onitsha, Nnaemeka Alfred Achebe.
Indeed, there is more to Onitsha than buying and selling. It has its traditions, politics and even academics. But the market remains a common denominator. Everything in Onitsha and the larger Anambra State plays around the Onitsha Main Market. It is the spirit that provides the life. I do not have the current ranking but once upon a time, the market was said to be the biggest in the West African sub-region. Some said it was the largest in Africa with ripple effects in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The Onitsha Main Market is truly a big deal. It should be a place of a particular concern to any wise ruler of Onitsha City including the Governor of Anambra State and the Obi of Onitsha. Bulk of whatever hits the state treasury as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) comes from the market. If Peter Obi governed Anambra State for eight years, discharging all governmental commitments without owing or borrowing shi shi from anywhere, the market and its economy played a major role in the attainment of that superlative administrative feat. The Onitsha Main Market is to Anambra State what the Niger Delta is to Nigeria. It is a fiscal lifeline. It is not to be toyed with.
Therefore, if there must be Onitsha market politics after Onitsha market literature, which describes a flurry of literary pamphleteering in the middle of the last century in Onitsha, the rules of engagement cannot be entirely dictated by one man called Prof. Charles Soludo.
The market is a private sector enclave. It is not a department in the Anambra State government. It is also not a department in the business faculty of a university. It is a practical space with real time operators who are locked in constant bargains for good and services to generate personal value. Their take home depends on the volume and toughness of their bargains. They are not civil servants who earn and keep earning high irrespective of productivity. In the real sense, the Onitsha market man and woman have more reasons to be passionate about the market than a Prof. Soludo or any other person that operates by the books.
Besides, there is a language for scholarship. There is also a language for public administration. Neither aligns with the language spoken in open markets. In ordering the Onitsha traders to open shops on Monday in defiance of the sit-at-home order by the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), Prof. Soludo had cried more than the bereaved. He spoke as if the arising losses from the prolonged closure were more on government than they were on the traders themselves. No Igbo trader likes to lose ‘market.’ He does everything to entrap a potential buyer to express effective demand. If the traders chose to lock shops against their customary instincts and drive for profit, it must be for a higher consideration.
And that was the truth. Amid the unabating uncertainties and killings in the Southeast, caution became the operating word among Onitsha traders and traders elsewhere in Igbo land. They were responding to a threat that was real in scope and substance.
But in playing the federalist script, Governor Soludo chose to rework the context to meet his purpose. He oversimplified the inherent complexities to make the matter appear as easy as ABC. The traders are victims of the failures of the Nigerian State. But Soludo cast them as aggressors. Their decision to forgo business and profit for safety was a reaction and not a provocation. The issues are wider but Soludo only chose to hide behind a finger to advertise a correctness that left him embarrassingly exposed as an opportunist.
All the same, there was a temporary relief. The market opened on a Monday for the first time in about a decade this week. The traders should be happy recovering a crucial business day that had been forcefully taken by IPOB.
The story, however, does not, and will not end, with the return of trading in Onitsha Main Market on Mondays. The wider issues are woven around the long-standing main issue. This is the refusal of the victorious allies to show magnanimity in victory and welcome back Biafra into Nigeria, 56 years after the rebellion. Nnamdi Kanu and his characteristics are only symptoms. His eradication does not stem the real ailment. Out there on the national stage, there is a conspiracy to avoid the reality. To live in everlasting denial and think that Ndigbo had been too broken by the tragic circumstances of the 30-month war to ask critical questions about their stake in the Nigerian project.
That is pure illusion. It is the kind of illusion that comes with victory. That same feeling had led the victorious allies in 1919 to impose the Treaty of Versailles on defeated Germany. The terms precipitated a negative transfiguration called Adolf Hitler. The lessons thereof were very bitter. In 1945, after the WWII had been won and lost, all sides at the negotiating table had become wiser. And so, instead of impossible conditions to punish the vanquished Axis Forces, they first created the United Nations from the ashes of the League of Nations and went ahead to do a Marshall Plan to create capacity for Europe to recover from the devastation of the Second World War.
Let’s drive it home. Gen. Yakubu Gowon had made a couple of macho declarations at the end of the civil war. One was particularly emphatic. Gowon had said: “the so-called rising sun of Biafra is set forever and never to rise again.” Part of the efforts to make the sun to remain perpetually set in the west (and the north too), and not to ever rise in the east, was to act as if the civil war did not happen. A place called Bight of Biafra along the Gulf of Guinea suddenly disappeared from the coastal map of Nigeria. Nigerian History was yanked off the school syllabus at basic and secondary school levels to give ample room for revisionism to foist fraudulent narratives about the civil war and what led to it.
Nnamdi Kanu did not live through the war. The civil war started on July 6, 1967 some two months before his birth on September 25, 1967. Most of the IPOB activists are younger and might have been born long after the war ended on January 15, 1970. They only grew to reconnect with the sociological and ideological foundations of the Biafra rebellion due to the enduring faultlines of the Nigerian Federation. It tells one story. That the rising sun of Biafra did not set forever after all. The conditions to make that possible have been conspicuously absent. It partly explains why Nnamdi Kanu will be put in jail for life while peace talks are held between government and killer herdsmen. It is why unarmed IPOB agitators were hurriedly branded terrorists to be mightily crushed by President Muhammadu Buhari while the same Buhari patronized armed Boko Haram fighters as freedom fighters. It is also why the Southeast is hardly in contemplation in the scramble for and allocation of political privileges including occupation of the presidency in Nigeria.
I only wish to add that what requires justice cannot be settled by politics or force. Justice must prevail. Soludo and other political leaders in the Southeast understand this. What is lacking is the courage to take this point to the centre with a singular voice for determination. This is the other side of the Ndigbo tragedy. You may call it self-cancellation.
Meanwhile the ongoing drama of “Onitsha Market Politics” being staged by Soludo for the Abuja audience cannot cause the rising sun to set forever as desired by General Gowon. Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB are only a phase in a running struggle. If justice fails, the set Biafran sun shall continue to rise again either as IPOB, MASSOB or whatever.
