The calls came to me in quick succession – from the United States and some cities in Nigeria – concerning the health and accommodation issues of the distinguished poet Odia Ofeimun in Lagos.
My not living in Lagos now meant I could not be fully abreast of the matter, so I quickly sent some messages to our mutual friends in Lagos.
I was determined to set forth to Lagos from my Awka, Anambra State locale but my travelling on the bad roads could mean my sleeping for days on end in the vehicle around the evil gullies of the Benin Bye-Pass.
One may even get kidnapped along the way without the government or anybody coming to one’s aid.
The demons of death are on the loose, arranging mayhem and spreading annihilation all over Nigeria.
We walk an ungodly but very familiar Nigerian road littered with shattered bones and broken dreams.
The struggle for political power is all the rage with the ruling party bent on retaining power and abandoning governance while the opposition has been sundered into a divided house of woes.
There is nowhere to run to for help because everything else has been put on one side when partisan politics is the only goal.
The Sheikh up North screams that re-presenting the Muslim-Muslim ticket in a multi-faith country clearly shows that Muslims are more in population and must perforce win all elections.
The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) that went to advice President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on the distress in Nigeria gets tagged as supporting the opposition.
It is little wonder then that the character that acted in the movie “Living in Bondage” which helped to give birth to Nollywood is now croaking in forked tongues given that the damned country is dying in bondage.
The dangerous times of Nigeria today cannot but force one to look back in anger at the country’s history on how the land came to this pass.
A lot of ink has been wasted on the colonial policy of the British in amalgamating a tripod with three unequal legs.
As Lord Harcourt said back then, there was the need to join up the big Northern youth that was sapping the British home economy with the Southern “lady of means”.
This British arrangement was done even before the discovery of oil in the selfsame rich South.
With the opening of the colonial files of Britain, it has been revealed that the colonial masters deliberately enthroned the North over and above the entire country by rigging the census and the independence elections.
The British ostensibly left in 1960 following Nigeria’s arrival at flag independence, but the reality today is that the potentates of the North continue to insist that this country owes them a living, even at the expense of their very own people!
When the military struck in January 1966, it was translated as an “Igbo coup” which led to the wanton massacres of members of the ethnic group until the bloodier revenge coup of July 1966 returned power to the North.
The Northern revenge coup-makers were screaming “Araba!” or “Secession” until the British High Commissioner told them that they risked going home to sure death in their arid region.
The attempt to address the Nigerian debacle in a meeting at Aburi in Ghana was thwarted in Lagos after the far-reaching accord had been adopted.
Then there was war.
The aggregation of forces in the Nigeria-Biafra war did not help matters as the North somewhat inherited the mantle of defending the federal cause.
The Northern Christians who enforced the return of power to the North back in 1966 “because they killed our brothers” have had sordid tales to tell ever since from their Muslim brothers.
The then Western Region and the minorities of the South and North found a ready ally in the Northern “federalists” in fighting “secessionist” Biafra dominated by the Igbo.
The eminent historian Prof Ebiegberi Joe Allagoa bears me out on the fact that Isaac Adaka Boro led his “Twelve-Day Revolution” largely because he was afraid that power has left the North following the January 1966 coup made by Majors Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Chukwuma Nzeogwu, as he writes in his 2004 book, The Uses of Hindsight as Foresight: Reflections on Niger Delta and Nigerian History:“The Niger Delta activists also tried to forge an alliance with the politicians of Northern Nigeria. Indeed, it was the fear that the murder of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa in the 1966 military coup had destroyed the final hope of the peoples of the Niger Delta that persuaded Isaac Adaka Boro to launch his ‘Twelve Day Revolution’.”
Of course Isaac Boro died fighting on the Federal side during the civil war, and there is the official no-go history that he was shot from the back by his so-called allies!
The embrace of the North was taken to a new height in the course of the war and after by my friend Ken Saro-Wiwa such that when he was ignobly hanged by General Sani Abacha it became the lot of the ex-Biafra leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu to lament thus: “What do you want me to do in the circumstances when Ken was killed by his mentors?”
It’s even easier for Igbo quislings to make it in Nigeria as per serving to build a cosmetic costly coastal road when literally all the inland federal roads are in total disrepair!
Totalitarianism of a tribal trend has been em-placed since the days of President Muhammadu Buhari, and President Tinubu has added new cubits against the grains of the constitutional Federal Character.
Nigerians must as a whole insist that we are ruled by constitutional means instead of the wishes of some devil-may-care power-grabbers.
What has to be understood is that real development does not depend on where power is based.
Otherwise the dominance of the North in ruling the country over the years since independence would have transformed the region beyond all others.
The basket case supervenes until credible elections are instituted for Nigerians to be ruled by persons they truly voted for instead of dying in the bondage of state capture.
Meantime, Poet Odia Ofeimun is still on my mind…