• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

What is the way forward for Nigeria’s Igbos?

Igbos

Let’s be honest, Nnamdi Kanu’s methods won more enemies than friends for the Igbo people. As a proven flight risk, the best we can (and should do), is to insist that he has a fair and quick trial.

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Having said that, members of the Igbo elite should focus on how to prevent someone like him from dominating the conversation again. The gaps that the man exploited still exist. Young Igbo boys are being killed in the South-East by the security forces, extra judicially. What are the Igbo elite going to say about it?

Read Also: Nnamdi Kanu’s arrest and matters arising

The bad economy is hitting the Igbo people. Trade, a sector which they dominate without contest, has been in recession for at least three years now. This means lost jobs (formal and informal) for Igbo boys. How will the Igbo elite pressure the government to fall away from this ill-advised import restriction that is clearly not working, and even worse, causing a food crisis in Nigeria that will affect Igbos and others?

It is said that a hungry man is an angry man, so as the food situation gets worse, and more people get angry, they will look for who to blame, and it is clear that elements in this government are more than prepared to push this blame to the Igbo.

If such sentiments are tapped into in a time of increasing frustration and deprivation, then the Igbo elite must be prepared to receive a flood of refugees from other parts of the country. Are they thinking of this as a possible scenario and making plans to prepare to receive them?

Cycling away briefly to South-West Nigeria, and the treatment meted out to Sunday Igboho and his followers, when juxtaposed with Nnamdi Kanu’s arrest, and the kid gloves being used on bandits in the North, portend ill for Nigeria’s economy.

Generally, what these developments mean is that true to Kanu’s animosity with the Nigerian state, not all regions are created equally. Each geopolitical zone is unique for its contribution to the Nigerian state but the Buhari government in its parochial approach to governance has failed to appreciate these differences. This has been the basis for Kanu’s message.

The decision to kowtow to demands by faceless Niger Delta Avengers twice and in quick succession as well as doling out cash ransom to bandits ravaging the North, while sending the military after Kanu and Igboho, is very instructive.

The government could respond in the way and manner it did because in the North, the bandits are the President’s kinsmen and from antecedents dating back to speeches and patterns of federal employment, the President has demonstrated that he does not have any misgivings about treating them specially. The Niger Delta is the key to the revenue of the Nigerian government. The oil economy is still formidable and economic diversification to reduce dependency on the black gold has not deepened and does not bring the kind of quick, steady money that oil brings and sustains Buhari and his government. This explains why he could afford to hold talks with Tompolo while dispatching the military to the South East and South West, Nigeria’s two most economically productive geopolitical zones outside of oil.

Unfortunately, people are watching, and positions are getting harder. You could see this by the defiance of the anti protest order by the government as people trooped out in support of the Yoruba Nation protesters in Ojota over the weekend. What future leaders or demagogues in the South East and South West are likely to do going forward will be to look for leverage against the FG, dig in and look at developments at their own pace and increase the call for restructuring a position that Buhari appears to have very recently softened on.

Circling back to the South East and this is a very good time for people from the region to begin to hold their elected leaders accountable, ask for greater infrastructural development in the region, emphasise productivity and increase trade with others, especially in the South-South. All the talk in some quarters of boycotting elections, starting from November’s Anambra elections should be killed.

On the issue of the vacuum that the FG’s removal of Kanu has created. That vacuum existed before he filled it. His forceful removal leaves that vacuum widened. It must be filled quickly. It must be filled not with hateful rhetoric that gains the Igbo more enemies, especially from their near abroad, but with hope. How can that hope be created?

The Igbo elite need to find ways to create jobs for their people despite President Buhari’s insipid economics. Igbos pride themselves on being smart people. I believe we can do it. We should.

Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence