11 hours Ago By Guardian Nigeria
Evangelist Elliot Ugochukwu-Uko is the Founder of Igbo Youth Movement (IYM). He is also the Secretary of Eastern Consultative Assembly (ECA) and Deputy Secretary of Igbo Leaders of Thought (ILT). In this interview with OLUDARE RICHARDS, he speaks on the protracted political crisis in the South East region, which has negatively impacted the economy of the zone and made life brutish.
He points out how the crisis can be resolved, warning that the delay in addressing the problem is not helping the country. The South East has gradually metamorphosed into a totally different land within the past decade or so. What is your take on the situation in the region? It depends on the perception of the individual.
I agree with you that so much water has passed under the bridge. The South East has an admirable history. A great but silent revolution spearheaded by visionary leadership stood the region out 80 years ago.
The region stood out between 1940 and 1965. Within those years, the people were transformed from bottle washers, messengers and cooks to clerks, store keepers and retailers. They embraced education with both hands, caught up and overtook others by building schools through community efforts and granting scholarships to bright students.
That 25-year leap hasn’t been replicated anywhere in the world. The first coup put them in trouble; the second coup decapitated them and the very brutal war crushed them completely. Their resurgence from 1970 moving forward shocked everyone.
The failure of their political class to appropriately handle Ralph Uwazurike’s Movement for the Actualisation of Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) from 1999 moving forward sowed the seed of what is happening in the region today. The region’s leaders failed to understand that the solution lies only in identifying why hundreds of thousands of mostly youngsters were following Ralph and paying monthly dues in the belief that they would soon have a new country where they would be treated with dignity. I was privileged to have an intense relationship with the man who led Ndigbo through the war and I believe his postulation that the solution to the agitation was to draw the agitators close to monitor their decisions.
Keeping them away could turn them into loose cannons. He met with Ralph every Sunday at his Enugu residence. The agitation was anchored on the desire for justice and equity.
The political class of the region sadly agreed rather with the central authorities that military clampdown was the solution. When Ralph raised the Biafran flag at Aba and jumped on a bike 25 years ago, the clampdown on the agitators began. That strategy of containment has not resolved the situation.
So, when Nnamdi Kanu emerged and grew the membership into millions, it became difficult for the leaders to reverse their preferred strategy of containment, especially when they had congratulated themselves that they had solved the agitation by discreetly inspiring Ralph’s bodyguards and close aides to revolt and seize his country home at Okwe in Okigwe for several years. They believed they had degraded him. They had no idea that a fearsome hurricane was brewing through Nnamdi’s broadcasting from London.
Nnamdi literally grew the agitators into millions with strong Diaspora structures in many countries. The stage was set for a showdown. The authorities didn’t understand that it was high noon.
They applied the same old strategy and the region became convoluted. The situation snowballed into the current ugly situation, simply because no attempt has been made since 1999 to identify the root cause of the anger, frustration and bitterness that led to loss of faith by millions of citizens in the region and to address them. Had that been done before now, the agitation would have been easily resolved.
The format of deploying military operations over the years simply gave the agitators the impression that there are no plans whatsoever to ever address their grievances. A lot of people deliberately refuse to ask how the agitators have sustained their agitation for 25 years. The answer is simple.
They watched as they were treated differently. They know that they are suffering humiliation and ill treatment because their parents fought and lost a war. They groan and reel under grave injustices they won’t want to transfer to their own children – unjust census figures, creation of states and local governments deliberately skewed against them; there is virtually no federal presence in their region.
Seaports and railways are non-existent in their region. They were convinced that if they do nothing about the unkind and unjust situation, their own children will be sentenced to the same fate. They watched when Ibe Kachikwu, as minister, dispatched to negotiate with the Niger Delta Avengers; they watched as Godswill Akpabio, as minister, rushed personally to the creeks to meet Tompolo.
Operations Cobra Jump, Viper Sing and Anaconda Cry seem reserved for them, while they are described as ‘five percenters and dot in a circle’. They concluded rightly or wrongly that nobody cares about their plight, as they are proscribed and tagged miscreants, criminals and terrorists. They concluded that they are being told you can go to hell.
For decades, the agitation boiled until three years ago when violence was sadly introduced to the milieu. Had the authorities sought to address the root cause of the anger that drove the agitation long before now, it would not have drifted to this very ugly situation. The agitators made many mistakes, but the political class underrated the frustration driving the agitation.
Is there hope for an end to the agitation? Dr Alex Ekwueme pleaded with me to bring the agitators to him so he would plead with them to embrace restructuring and to avoid violence by all means. I did that. He begged Nnamdi in my presence to avoid violence of any kind.
I also took Nnamdi to traditional rulers, senior clerics and revered elders. Seventeen meetings were held between May and August 2017. The agenda was the same – to get them to remain non-violent and to trade restructuring as against secession.
Archbishop Maxwell Anikwenwa almost wept in my presence pleading with Nnamdi to adopt restructuring as opposed to secession. When Nnamdi finally yielded and agreed to adopt restructuring Nigeria and infrastructural development of the region at the historic meeting with South East Governors on August 30, 2017, I called Ekwueme on his sickbed in London and relayed the exhilarating news to him. I don’t know what actually transpired a fortnight later at Afara Ukwu, Abia State on September 14, 2017, the eve of the concluding part of the peace effort.
That changed everything. It seemed some people had other plans. You see, I dutifully shared with leaders of my region my personal experiences in the 1980s and 1990s, as I organised my IYM seminars for Igbo youths all over the place.
I noticed the frustration and bitterness in the hearts of the younger generation of Ndigbo. They simply don’t want to bequeath to their own children the humiliating second class situation they painfully found themselves in post civil war Nigeria. They are hungry for fairness and equality.
I discovered that delegates to my IYM programmes said the same thing in Lagos, Aba, Enugu etc. And these youths never met each other and didn’t know each other. My resource persons like Dim Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu, Admiral Godwin Ndubuisi Kanu, Comrade Uche Chukwumerije, Prof.
Ben Obumselu, Chief Sam Mbakwe, Chief C. C. Onoh, Dr.
Chukwuemeka Ezeife, Chief M. C. K.
Ajuluchukwu, Senator Onyeabor Obi, etc were asked similar questions during the question and answer sessions at such seminars. The loss of faith among the young people, especially those on the lowest rung of the ladder, was real. They saw themselves as onlookers and spectators within the Nigerian project.
They believe that they are hated, resented, despised and ill-treated. Many believe they will never get justice in Nigeria. That’s the foundation of the agitation.
If your teenage son runs away from home and plans never to come back because he thinks you, your wife and his siblings do not like him or want him; when you are told he is at the park with his knapsack heading to a neighbouring country, you will not solve that problem by sending Operation Python Dance to go and deal with him. You will better solve the problem by going to embrace your son at the garage and speaking softly to him. You tell him how much you love him.
You apologise on behalf of other family members who offended him. You drive him to a restaurant and have lunch with him; you buy him new clothes and sneakers and you drive him home and then wisely hold a family meeting and you ensure that moving forward, everyone is given a sense of belonging; that no one is isolated, mistreated or made to feel hated. It doesn’t matter that his decision to run away from home was petit, childish, injurious to himself and actually wrong.
As a father, you ensure resolution and closure. And everybody’s happy again. Is resolution and closure of the agitation feasible in the present circumstance? The Good Friday agreement that brought resolution to the IRA agitation for a separate Northern Ireland succeeded because the desires of the Irish agitators were addressed.
My fear over a prolonged agitation is the response and reaction from children of slain agitators in the near future and very young people who march with their parents waving Biafran flags in all the major cities of the world. I fear that future leadership of the agitators may emerge from the ranks of the little ones in the future. This is why I fervently pray for early resolution and closure by identifying the source of the fire and fixing it.
The only attempt to address the root causes of the agitation was made nine years ago when the then governor Dave Umahi invited me and pleaded with me to bring the entire leadership of the agitators for a meeting with the authorities to identify their anger. I did that. This was six months into his first term.
The effort could not fly and did not bear fruit. Genuine effort at sincerely addressing the root cause of the anger that powers the agitation will restore normalcy. Those angry youngsters are scared of the future.
The unitary structure creates apprehension about the future; some people believe the future of the country is bleak under the present constitution. The delay in restructuring Nigeria contributes to the loss of faith that creates fear of the future in the hearts of compatriots. Their belief that the absence of Federal Government-driven critical infrastructure in the region is deliberate also increases loss of faith in the system.
Thirdly, delay in identifying the root cause and fixing them seems to suggest disregard for the people of the region, who think they are treated with contempt and disdain for losing a war almost 55 years ago. They yearn for justice and equity. They yearn for a level playing field for all, true federalism, regional autonomy and devolution of powers.
They desire to see a new working Nigeria. It is not true that this current unitary structure will make Nigeria great. Crises in the North West, North East, Middle Belt etc, clearly illustrate a need for change of the template, structure and ground norm holding the country together.
Delay to reinvent, rejuvenate and reinvigorate Nigeria is unhelpful. It is sad the South East is going through these temporary challenges..
