In his self-serving, Buhari-is-best-and-almighty-savior-of-Nigeria interview published in various Nigerian media under such title as “El-rufai Passes Vote Of No Confidence On Jonathan, says Buhari Was The Best”, (http://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-672172.0.html#msg8363287 ) in response to the just concluded elections in Nigeria, El Rufai’s opinion (to which he is of course entitled) and assertions are predictable, but also ill-informed and insensitive.
In his self-serving, Buhari-is-best-and-almighty-savior-of-Nigeria interview published in various Nigerian media under such title as “El-rufai Passes Vote Of No Confidence On Jonathan, says Buhari Was The Best”, (http://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-672172.0.html#msg8363287 ) in response to the just concluded elections in Nigeria, El Rufai’s opinion (to which he is of course entitled) and assertions are predictable, but also ill-informed and insensitive.
El Rufai claims that he was inspired to join public service by Buhari himself because of Buhari’s putschist regime of 1983 to 1985 in Nigeria, “with the rules of discipline, probity and integrity.” Haba! El Rufai! What discipline? Here is a man who broke the soldier’s and officers’ oath to his own country and sacked the elected government. Here is a man who broke the military discipline of respect, obedience of rank and following of orders, by his act of performing a military coup d’état. You consider him disciplined?
Where is the probity El Rufai talks about and would blindly impute to his master, Buhari? How does ruling by military decrees allow for “probity”, especially when “immunity clause” is decreed for him during and after his regime? Buhari was so corrupt (and drunk) with power that he directly murdered at least 2 Nigerian citizens by making one of his decrees retroactive. This must be where that “integrity” gets it meaning?
Just how do you spell, “Treason”, anyway, so that it doesn’t also spell El Rufai’s “discipline,” “probity,” and “integrity”? Yes, Buhari still receives at least 2 pension packages from the government of Nigeria at the expense of the peoples most of whom live in poverty: as a retired military officer and as a previous head-of-state (military at that—puke!) of Nigeria. Then, there is his membership of the Council of State from where he draws more pay. These are the trappings of El Rufai’s discipline, probity and integrity for a man who should rightly and legally be in jail and or should stay off politics if he had any sense of honor at all? Or, if Nigeria was a “normal country” with citizens who care about human qualities? Sure, let him follow Buhari. Nigeria must to them be like a harem, best ruled by a psychopathic strongman to be emulated for discipline, probity and integrity; don’t blame them, there may in fact be no discernible difference between how a harem works and how Nigeria functions.
One could ignore El Rufai’s defense of Buhari and defense of CPC’s conduct with regards to the post-election mayhem which the latter both incited in Northern Nigeria. But he brought up the issue of Jonathan mentioning Biafra in response to this violence in Northern Nigeria: “...And when Jonathan chose to speak, he was raising the specter of Biafra. That was not a responsible response, with all due respect.”--El Rufai. Apparently, Jonathan’s mention of Biafra irked El Rufai more than the bloody mess his own master and own political party (and his own attitude) had wrought.
But the question has to be asked, why is it not a “responsible response”? Is it because the word, “Biafra”, has been uttered by the most ranking Nigerian leader and politician, where previous suppression policy was to never mention Biafra, at the risk of death, as El Rufai and his fellow Northerners and some Nigerians would have (and have had) it all along? Is it because Biafra is anathema, according to El Rufai and those of his ilk? Is it because the mention of Biafra is tantamount to Treason, where Buhari performing a military coup against an elected Nigerian government is not?
It could not be because Jonathan’s Biafra analogy was off—no. Students (good students) of history and sentient human beings—even Nigerians among them—and those who were there will agree with President Jonathan’s assessment that it was conditions such as were evident during this violence in Northern Nigeria which led to Biafra. El Rufai’s shallow comparisons citing previous post-election violence designed to foreclose on this analogy only reveals a studied myopia and deliberate bias on his part.
Biafra happened because Northerners targeted and killed Igbo in Northern Nigeria in 1966 with a thoroughly lethal ethnic cleansing program. The safety of the Igbo could not be guaranteed anywhere else in Nigeria and on Nigerian soil then. As a matter of fact, the one guarantee at that time was that you would be killed anywhere in Nigeria if you are Igbo. Denied of safety in any other part of Nigeria, guaranteed that they would be killed in any other part of Nigeria, the Igbo had no choice but limp back home to their own ancestral lands in Eastern Nigeria. When the Northern-run military government of Nigeria led by Gowon insisted on coming after the Igbo in Eastern Nigeria on the latters’ own soil, the Igbo had to defend themselves. That’s how Biafra eventually came to be declared. The idea and spirit of Biafra is that if the safety of your ethnic group cannot be guaranteed and, if in fact you are selectively targeted for killing and murder, and having retreated to your own shell, you are still being hotly pursued, you have to defend yourself and part of that defense is to divorce yourself from the machinery that has the intent of annihilating you. Nigeria—the whole of Nigeria, including of course its government—was clearly intent on annihilating the Igbo. It was all about ethnicity. It was all ethnic.
Far and above the usual across-the-board rigging of Nigeria’s recent elections, farther yet from the mantric but oxymoronic chants of “free, fair and credible elections”, the striking (though not surprising) pattern that emerged out of the electoral process is that of “ethnic voting.” Even Religion and Region were more or less mere proxies for ethnicity. The violence of post April 2011 elections in Northern Nigeria was purely ethnic. It was initiated by one ethnic group, and it zeroed in on select ethnic groups. What made it even more ominous was that it is the same ethnic group which foments and initiates this type of violence each time, elections notwithstanding. Even Reuters, the news agency, got tired of concluding its reports of such violence in the past with the trite and trifling signature-paragraph something about episodic sectarian violence in Northern Nigeria; recently, it took it seriously and reported factually that the killing is happening every day now. Ethnic-based killing—every single day! what we knew since 1970.
If you lived in Hausa-Fulani (Muslim) Northern Nigeria in late April 2011, and you were not Hausa-Fulani (though you be fluent in the language and or are Muslim), you and your family were targeted to be killed, your property and business destroyed. The government offered you no security: you could run into a local Police Station for protection, and the Police would just hand you back over to your chasers, knowing fully well that you would be killed there and then—and you were, brutally; even as the Police watched. Now, consider that the Igbo as a group usually constitute the largest non-indigenous ethnic group in most states in Nigeria, including Northern Nigeria (where, thanks to that, Jonathan was able to garner at least 25% of the votes even when he lost). It is true that the Muslim also targeted Christians—and guess who are the majority Christians? And yes, a few Muslim leaders were also targeted because they were accused of and perceived as helping the “enemy” (non-believers) by their fellow Muslim attackers.
So here you are, living in Buhari / CPC country; it is 2011. Muslims have targeted you for killing because you are not Hausa-Fulani and you live among them. The government of Nigeria is unable to help you. The state government can’t help you. The Police won’t help you, either. What do you do? Run to your Church so you can at least be praying when you are hacked down? Run to your home? And on they come. Burning and killing. What do you do next?
Folks, for those of you who have no idea, that’s what led to Biafra. El Rufai should really be ashamed of himself for abrading Jonathan for making this analogy, and for trying to make it look like Jonathan did nothing while the North burned because in Rufai’s judgment, Jonathan did not care enough about the North. This was not a North-on-North violence, as El Rufai wants to paint it; it was Buhari-cum-El Rufai’s ethnic Northern people starting pillaging against non-Muslim and other ethnicities, especially the Igbo, living among them, knowing fully well that the government of Nigeria would not and could not protect their victims. The hapless victims could not flee (had nowhere safe to go), and had no other recourse than to run into set death-traps and die—which happened to many—or stand against all odds in self-defense. Ethnicity—that was the real contention and mechanics.
It is so nauseating to read El Rufai sitting down there and pontificating, coolly defending his master, doing a dry analysis of a bloody and fleshy, nasty, unconscionable and unimaginable, unjustifiable event, with no feeling at all for the real situation, and completely devoid of empathy and emotion. His psychobiology must not allow for his attempting even stepping into the mind of a grieving mother mourning the untimely and gratuitous death of her son or daughter with a heaviness that would sink an entire galaxy. But, what else do you expect of a self-acknowledged Buhari pupil?
The problem with Nigeria is not elections. It is ethnicity: ethnic groups that won’t and can’t get along together. Elections are only another convenient excuse where anything is just as good to spark lethal inter-ethnic trouble. Compounding this problem is the issue of psychological denial—the unimaginably and unbelievably smug attitude by Nigerians that these difficulties cannot have anything to do with their basic ethnic intolerance and incompatibility. Thus, El Rufai goes on and on about election process and equipment, while not wanting to hear about the real underlying problem which Jonathan mentioned. It is really about Biafra: yes, the specter of Biafra is the only appropriate issue to raise here: in a psychotic relationship programmed to target and kill you just because you are of a different ethnicity , it is best to leave and live rather than die, helplessly forced into it together.
In his obviously inspired analogy, Jonathan even reminded Nigerians of not just why and how Biafra came to happen, but that Nigeria / Nigerians have refused to deal with the relevant issues. Enter El Rufai’s Buhari, once again. Recall the Oputa Panel (aka “Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission”) inaugurated in 1999, which could have / might have done for Nigeria / Biafra what the Truth and Reconciliation hearings did for post-apartheid South Africa?
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First, Buhari and his fellow ethnic Northern born-to-rule-rs considered themselves untouchable and above the process, too arrogant to participate, using the courts which they controlled to justify their contemptuous and spiteful boycott of the proceedings, where even Obasanjo, the then President of Nigeria (with a certain Caesarian complex of his own) at least deigned to submit himself to the Panel. Second, when in addition, IBB of the same born-to-rule ethnic club went to court and prevailed on the courts to prohibit the publication of the reports of the commission, it benefitted Buhari just as well: he had won again. Regardless of the letter of the law which Buhari and IBB were hiding behind in their manipulation of the courts, how about the spirit of reconciliation, how about facing the facts and implications and complications of Biafra? Here was a golden opportunity for Nigeria / Nigerians to learn and to heal, but Buhari was against it, being part of scuttling it, making sure that President Jonathan’s observations are in fact accurate: Nigeria / Nigerians do not want to do the healthy thing of facing and dealing with Biafra.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200108130095.html
How ironic, yet completely logical and instructive, that El Rufai would be defending the same Buhari today, while at the same time foaming at the mouth at Jonathan’s mention of Biafra!
It may well turn out that this may be the only honest and accurate analysis that Jonathan makes as a leader of Nigeria, which does not mean that he will act as if he understands the import of his statement about Biafra. After all, Gowon, as the leader of the Northern Military Revenge coup of July 1966 also made the most important admission relevant to Nigeria on his bloody ascension to Nigeria’s throne then: “…the basis of unity [of Nigeria] is not there.” Yet, he was to turn around and lead Nigeria to war, on behalf of his ethnic Hausa-Fulani masters, against Biafra, to “keep Nigeria one,” along the way committing the most horrendous genocide by starving to death over 3 million non-combatant Biafran children, pregnant women, old men and old women. Today, Nigeria is still not one, and never will be. (By the way, by Gowon’s own admission, his own children do not want to live in Nigeria). Even Obasanjo, who is so proud to have “defeated Biafra” in 1970, made the most characterizing statement while President of Nigeria that “Nigeria takes one step forward, then, two backwards and two sideways”, an accurate profile—of a failed nation doing the drunkard’s walk to oblivion. That’s Nigeria’s victory-over-Biafra prize. Yet, he refuses to admit and see that if the ethnic groups forced into unworkable “one-Nigeria” are de-coupled, they, as individual nations, each can and will move forward to join the rest of the Human Race.
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It’s all about ethnicity, stupid! For Nigeria and her problem/solution, it was never about elections; it is never about anything else, for that matter. The specter of Biafra will always be there, until all the ethnic groups are set free to forge their own consenting and mutually beneficial inter-national relationships and pursue their individual destinies. In these contemporary times, this is embodied in the concept, principle and practice of Self Determination: each nation has a right to the complete control its own destiny. That is the spirit and meaning of Biafra.
By Oguchi Nkwocha, MD
Nwa Biafra
A Biafran Citizen
[email protected]
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