What the Igbos want in Nigeria (1) By Obasi Igwe

Members of the Movement for the Survival of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) during their rally to mark the 17th anniversary of the movement, yesterday, in Awka, Anambra State.

AFTER waiting in vain for sixty fruitless years after Biafra, what the Igbos see in Nigeria is a country that probably have another chance to be a united and peaceful. What they need and want for the country now, is the ultra-modernisation and reopening for full commercial use by the Igbo nation and others, of the Igbo ports of Port Harcourt, Bonny, and Opobo; their road, rail and air links to inland Igbo commercial centres of Agbor, Asaba, Onitsha, Nnewi, Owerri, Enugu, Azumini and Aba and, by so doing, the economic and financial re-empowerment of the Igbos, starting with the underservedly impoverished southern Igbo communities of Ikwerre, Etche, Bonny, Opobo, Obigbo, Ali-Ogba, Ndoni, Ahoada, Egbema, etc., collectively known as the

Mbamiri. Though ultimately inseparable from it, this need is different from the issues of restructuring enveloping the rest of society today. The lingering neglect of these Igbo ports, and the attempts to reduce them either to mere barricaded bastions of selfish oil greed or centres of falsified historical imaginations, are clearly seen by the Igbos as a continuation of the wartime economic blockade, starvation and impoverishment as weapons of war, and the cruel ethnic cleansing programme unlawfully imposed by the Gowon/Diete-Spiff alliance upon divers aboriginal and migrant southern Igbo communities after the civil war, under the coded name of Abandoned Property. No one is proposing the seizure of anybody’s properties, or expulsion of any groups; only that they should return to the status of vibrant cosmopolitan Igbo port cities, as they were intended by their founders, and developed as such.

Igbos are not planning to cheer a post-ethnic-cleansing “plebiscite” to determine the wishes of anybody, the same way no other people, such as the Yorubas would, vis-à-vis Lagos, after they have been uprooted from parts of their homeland, and replaced by those that little deserve to be implanted there. The Igbos opened, owned and reasonably developed these ports and, for almost 600 continuous years of European contacts, exclusively used them in the albeit evil slave trade and, afterwards, the legitimate oil trade, the exports of coal, as well as other commercial activities, even before some tribes were belatedly persuaded into the benefits of international trade, and transition from wandering to settle bands. The well-publicised East-West Road and Coastal Railway, would not be roads to nowhere, and the Bakassi/Calabar-Katsina Ala highway not seen as an invitation to internal colonialism, if those conceiving them do not do so as a means of diverting attention and development from central Igboland, or endorsement of the ethnic cleansing and mythical “landlocking” policy theorised for the sea people. Utilisation of the Lagos ports The Igbo nation remains grateful to the Yorubas for so long permitting the utilisation of the Lagos ports, but do not forget that since the mid-15th century, Igbos have been used to their own Igbo-based coastal export trade, and that the nation’s Atlantic history was dominated by the struggle for the emancipation of Africans from slavery, whether in the high seas or the plantation Americas, and would want to continue from their own homeland the maritime revolution they started hundreds of years ago, for the benefit of themselves, the East, and Nigeria as a whole. The above, in a nutshell, directly or indirectly already expressed in various ways, and consolidated at the Oputa Panel and other gatherings, is what the Igbo businessman, farmer, teacher, etc., need; certainly not the six geopolitical zones excluding the coastal and western Igbo areas, being trumpeted by some well-connected people, whose only intention or unintended consequence is to consolidate the atrocities priorly committed against the Igbos, and further compound their problems. Now that many Nigerian coastal tribes, like the Igbos for a long time, have come to appreciate the necessity for a dynamic ports system, the latter cannot be helped by positions-seeking, ideologically empty and historically irrelevant economic summits that ignore the Igbo maritime traditions, or speculates upon their continuation from empty space, while shying away from, as if they never existed, the accumulated achievements of Igbo civilisation that are already there to build upon, but which they seem scared to mention. 


To be continued....


Prof Igwe teaches Political Science at the University of Nigeria,Nsukka.

Credit:  http://www.vanguardngr.com