There has been a
spate of criticism and worry from the Eastern end complaining that President
Buhari’s appointments thus far have been lopsided, and has generally ignored
the South-Eastern Igbo in large part, and the minorities of the South, to some
extent.
The president’s
profile of appointments to key military, security, and corporate institutional
positions has tended more to be from the North. In a sense, the President has
made the office of the president, the face of his administration, a profoundly
regional one. The most disturbing to most people was the quick overturning of
the appointment of Mr. Nwabueze C. Obi, as the acting MD of the National
Maritime and Safety Agency, NIMASA, replaced with Mr. Haruna Jauro in quick
order on the orders of the president.
There is on the
surface, a very clearly regionalist bent in the president’s appointments so
far, which prompted Dr. Ezeife, reportedly, to snap at the president’s
appointment of Dr. Ibe Kachikwu as the new MD of the NNPC – the first of the
president’s Igbo appointees. “It is not enough!” Dr. Ezeife says. In a
multi-ethnic state, such as Nigeria, with a history of distrust, people have
come to regard familiar faces and familiar names they can identify as the basis
for securing group interests.
There is very
little doubt that the Igbo are a very robust group of Nigerians with their own
sense of a strategic interest, and anyone who ignores the Igbo does so at
really great risks. I feel certain that President Buhari knows this too. The
Igbo have proven precedence of action, once they choose to create synergy, and
common cause. And their impact could be devastating. I will cite four
historical examples.
Between 1895 and
1930, with British colonial forays into Africa late in the 19th century, the
Igbo put up one of the toughest resistances against British colonization in
Africa. While the Igbo fought, some of its neighbors fell in quick order.
For instance, in
January 1903, twenty four British officers led a column of 700 African soldiers
of the new West African Frontier Force, many of them Hausa, fresh from the
Ashanti campaigns, and marched on Kano, and defeated it at the battle of
Bebedji. The Emir of Kano, Aliyu, was in flight, while his brother, Muhammed
Abbas was installed as a British puppet. Emir Aliyu was soon captured, exiled,
and locked up in the British military garrison in Lokoja where he died in 1926.
The British defeat and killing of Sultan Attahiru, and the Magajin of Keffi,
among many in Burmi on July 27, 1903, marked the formal end of the Caliph’s
resistance in Sokoto against the British.
Southwards,
exhausted by internal rife and the hundred-year civil war following the collapse
of Oyo, the Yoruba historian Johnson wrote that it was the Yoruba Obas
themselves who wrote and invited the British to come and colonize Yoruba land.
Oba Ovoranwen of Benin was quickly defeated by the British and exiled to
Calabar, where he too died in exile. But the British fought the Igbo for thirty
years, in five campaigns from 1900to 1930, until the British forced the High
Priest, Eze Nri Obalike, to appear at the Awka Courts in 1930. Historians like
Don Ohadike have written eloquently about the Ekumeku movement and the Igbo use
of guerrilla warfare against the British.
Meanwhile, the
previous year in 1929, Igbo women had driven away the colonial warrant chiefs,
imposed on the Igbo by the British. All that prompted, in an attempted to
understand the Igbo, the British government under the Colonial
Governor-General, Sir Ralph Cameron, to send a series of Anthropologists to
study the Igbo. One of them, Sylvia Leith-Ross, came in 1930, and wrote the
book, Among African Women, with the preface by Lord Lugard. She noted thus in
her book about the Igbo: “these people are not intimidated by us, and are
rather amused by us. They watch us and learn quickly what we know. God help us
the day they climb the ladder.”
By the 1930s,
following their work as technicians, tradesmen, mid-level clerks in commercial
and government jobs, and artisans helping to lay the North-South Rail lines,
the Igbo, had fanned across and settled in what is now modern Nigeria.
From 1937-1957
they had enough national density to mobilize and rally round Dr. Azikiwe, and
were the arrowheads in the anti-colonial nationalist movement that forced the
British colonialists out of Nigeria. By 1967, finding Nigeria no longer
suitable for their collective interest and protection, they staged an exit and
declared their own state of Biafra. The Igbo remain the only one of the major
groups in Nigeria to mobilize an army, create an independent state, and fight
in defence of their interests; and they have the capacity to do so again if
they feel themselves, and their collective interests threatened. For three
years, they fought, and in 1970, exhausted and surrounded, they agreed to a
negotiated end, and returned to Nigeria.
But I do know
that they did not feel themselves defeated, as elements of the S Brigade under
Tim Onwuatuegwu, among whom my uncle, now a Professor of Geophysics, had been
trained and prepared to activate the guerilla phase of the war nation-wide
should there be need to defend the Igbo in 1970. Nigerians should thank General
Gowon, and the late MD Yusuf, who made it part of his policy, to absorb key
members of the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters, into the Nigerian
Intelligence Services to tamp down that possibility.
The Nigerian
government knew that the Igbo were the only part of Nigeria that had highly
trained combatants with field experience who had circulated into civilian life
as traders, artisans, students, university professors, civil servants,
teachers, and other professionals, and you do not mess with people like that.
Nigeria gave the Igbo their due up till the middle of the 1980s. I have
outlined these simply to suggest that President Buhari, himself a combatant of
the last war, knows the Igbo, and that he would not take Igbo interest for
granted.
General Sam
Momah, once Buhari’s Principal Staff Officer has reminded the Igbo that some of
the President’s best friends are Igbo. I do believe him. I also think that this
president has a right, indeed an obligation to his office, to choose whomsoever
he likes, from any part of Nigeria, to do the job. Fair representation is
fantastic. But the president is possibly signaling an important message, that
these ethnic or regional considerations, should not be at the detriment of
competence and trust. The people he has chosen so far, seem competent. All we
need to do is keep them under scrutiny. What the Igbo should campaign for is
that no matter who occupies a public office, no Nigerian, Igbo or not, must
suffer discrimination, or be the subject of selective targeting, in the
exercise of the function of any office. Nice as it might seem to see a familiar
face in the picture of the president’s team, I should prefer that the president
be pushed more in the direction of influencing more direct federal investments
in Igbo land, to alleviate the problems of the high unemployment rate in the
region.
The president
does not need to love the Igbo, but he must assure them just and equal
protection in his government in terms of direct benefit to their wider number.
Not to do that will certainly rouse the Igbo to seek justice by all means
necessary.
Besides,
President Buhari will not be the president forever, and the precedent he sets
today, might mean, that whoever becomes president after him, may as well choose
his key staff from his region, for as long as they satisfy the criteria of
competence, integrity, and fairness in the execution of their jobs. The Igbo
should therefore be patient, and circumspect on this matter of the president’s
political appointments: let him do his job, with the men and women he can trust
to do it.