At the Aka-Ikenga dinner celebrating the founding of this association of Igbo fat cats in Lagos, Governor Raji Fashola, either out of postprandial volubility, or in a bid to be charming among friends, or even as some have suggested, enhance the political fortunes of his friend and fellow partisan, Dr. Chris Ngige in Anambra, offered what had been termed an “unreserved apology” to the Igbo. His apology was for the apparent mischief of selectively targeting and “deporting” some Igbo to Onitsha in one of the most unprecedented constitutional gaffes in Nigeria.
I still think that the victims of this governor’s act must sue the governor and the Lagos state government and enforce their rights under the rule of law. In any case, Fashola assured the Igbo cats in Lagos with whom he was dining that evening, that he was thoroughly misunderstood, and that his actions were by no means influenced by any antipathy toward the Igbo.
The Igbo, he said, were not in his crosshair. He had nothing against the Igbo he said. Once again, he invoked the loyalty of his fair-haired friend, Mr. Ben Akabueze, a commissioner in his cabinet, as proof of his geniality with, and fairness towards the Igbo. Akabueze, he says, is his sidekick on all important matters and in the most crucial occasions. He did not quite put it this way: he said this Igbo commissioner in Lagos was privy to the sanctum sanctorum of Lagos affairs, which is, the mind of Raji Fashola, where all things happen. Every decision he makes, he first consults good old Ben, including apparently, the decision to forcefully remove the Igbo scum from the streets of Lagos.
Perhaps Ben Akabueze helped him come to that inevitable decision too that the Igbo scum must be removed to disinfect the streets of Lagos. With such an Igbo confidante, Fashola suggests, how could he be against the Igbo in Lagos? Lagos gains from his intellect and service. Lagos gains from his tax. Lagos gains from his acumen. He has lived more in Lagos than he has in Anambra and has contributed far more to the economic and social life of Lagos than he has ever contributed to Anambra. He made a choice to live in Lagos, and deserves his place in Lagos and in the cabinet of the government of Lagos, as a resident Lagosian. This is the point of all this: that one gesture of kindness to a single Igbo, does not mean anything; does not in fact mean much to the Igbo if they feel themselves generally harassed, targeted, isolated, and ghettoized in Lagos where they have every rights to be as much as any other Nigerian.
My friend C. Don Adinuba, who has waxed quite lyrical in many an instance about what ought ultimately be seen as Fashola’s left-handed magnanimity, may continue to defend his friend, and highlight all the tokenist conducts that elaborate the critical lie; and Fashola may also continue to count among the many cows he received on his father’s funeral, a long herd from the Igbo, what we need to really situate in Fashola’s apology is that it is not “unreserved.” Oh, no. It is left-handed charity. How, he asked, could the Igbo not get a handle on their lives, to the point that many are forced to flee their homeland and migrate to their people’s homelands? Fashola implies extreme Igbo poverty and incompetence. No, Fashola, the Igbo are not escaping from Igbo land. They are seeking wider opportunities afforded by the possibility of the wider world. There is often in the minds of the likes of Raji Fashola, the idea that Igbo movement within Nigeria is the result of poverty in the East. Those among the Yoruba people of the South West who travel a bit more know the difference. It is easy to live in the fierce bubble of metropolitan Lagos, and imagine that the Nigerian world begins and ends in Lagos, and that nothing happens elsewhere.
There has been a false narrative over the years that have consigned the East to some cauldron of poverty, from where the Igbo have emptied into the wider space of nation and beyond. Indeed, seeing many Igbo outside of Igbo land, many are often drawn to conclude that the East is empty of people but the hardiest of impoverished survivors, and that in its pitiless and Hobbesian space of poverty and hardship nothing but crime thrives. Well, Raji Fashola played up that tenor again in his speech at the Aka-Ikenga dinner. It is in the nature of Aka-Ikenga that no one stood up to respond to Fashola’s wild assertions about the East.
Well, perhaps here is the occasion to discharge that duty for Aka Ikenga, and to teach Raji Fashola to be a bit more circumspect about the things he does not know. First, and he can find this out himself, the East of Nigeria is one of the most economically vibrant regions of Africa. The scale of entrepreneurial activity hits any first-time visitor with the electric charge of truth. It is a vast workshop. Travelers to the East note something that is often missing elsewhere in Nigeria: a vast indigenous system of industry that thrives and hums like a dynamo.
Artisans are at work; professionals are at work; you have a vast pool of the most educated people on the continent creating a very dynamic interaction; expanding the frontiers of trade and production. Perhaps Fashola has not been to Enugu, Owerri, Port-Harcourt, Aba, Onitsha, Asaba, Awka, Abakiliki – the major Igbo cities, or even the surrounding cities of Calabar, Uyo, and Eket, and he’d certainly come to understand that there is no other region in Nigeria as fully developed as the East of Nigeria. That there is vibrancy to life that draws people every weekend to what I call the highlife corridor – Owerri to Port-Harcourt, with its redolent epicurean feel; that for as long as I can remember, through community initiatives, Igbo towns have built roads, schools, hospitals, and every social amenity that connects people.
The first thing Raji Fashola would note about the East, should he dare to visit, is that through Azikiwe’s model of Community Self-Help strategy of development, the Igbo have created some of the most livable spaces in Africa. I travel around the East, and I’m struck not only by the elegant architecture of their country homes, a vast range of styles that I’ve not encountered anywhere else in the Nigeria, but you feel the comfort of highly educated citizens liberated from the general poverty of illiteracy.
It may not be so much from the work done by this generation of Igbo leaders. But it is the foundational legacy of a culture that seeks continually to better itself through constant movement and re-invention. The Igbo move, not because Igbo land is too poor for them. They always return to it in any case. They move because they are restless questers after novelty. They move because they feel themselves free people, who have no fear of kings, and who consider themselves individually autonomous and unwilling therefore to be bound to any single place or any singular authority. They move also because of what Kenneth Dike described as “land hunger.” This is the reason behind the Igbo movement out of Igbo land. Fashola’s talk about the Igbo situation misses its mark, and once more confounds us.
source -the vanguard
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