Opinion: A Nigeria Of Irrevocable Similarities Or Irreconcilable Differences Is Equally Possible, By Moses Okezie

As written by Moses Okezie

A Nigeria Of Irrevocable Similarities Or Irreconcilable Differences Is Equally Possible

...........It's up to us.

My Dear Compatriot, I hear your question. The Igbo want a Republic of their own. How you decided all the Igbo are in on this demand beats me, but that's beside the point now. A group of their fellow citizens up North have 'graciously' asked them to vacate their territories under threat of, exactly what? Genocide? And you want to know why they have not jumped at the offer. I mean, the ultimatum ought to add fillip to their separatist leanings, right?

Daalu. I'll try to answer from a strictly utilitarian point of view, no bullshit.

You are aware that you look more 'Igbo' than some of us, right? Your wife is Igbo, I believe, in which case your children are part-Igbo, right?

Well, if it starts, in the way and manner propagated by that quit notice, you know that I know that the 'enforcers' thereof, the mob, will not have time to scrutinise and authenticate State of Origin Certificates kwo?

So, what are you still doing in the North then?

Or you think it will be a civilised rite of passage where the compliant South-southerner or Middle-Belter will be painstakingly picked out and protected while the 'secessionist' Igbo, including mixed tribe wives/husbands and their offspring, are viciously excised? Much good that line of thinking did those who towed it in 1966 and the aftermath.

And that is exactly why whatever Nigeria decides to do with herself must be negotiated, put to the vote in a referendum and executed more in legal precepts and democratic principles than in physical upheavals and forced migrations.

That is if we decide that my own preferred option, to wit, a united Nigeria that guarantees social justice to all citizens (very important), is not tenable. To echo the Acting President, we are truly better together.

Most States have created many more LCDAs than they have constitutionally recognised LGAs because people, even of the same ethnic stock, feel a disinclination to stay with their kith and kin due to real or imagined marginalisation. Despite their 'irreconcilable differences' nobody has issued the other an ultimatum for applying for excision from their current shared geopolitical space, whether LGAs or States.

Which means the ultimatum issued to Ndigbo must be predicated in something else besides the agitations by a section of us for a Biafra whose physical or sociocultural bounds no one seems to have a frigging certainty about.

The Irish and the Scots have been trying to break away from the UK for like, forever? The Irish even resorted to terrorism for many years via the infamous deeds of the IRA, but the UK treated those as criminal offences, to be dealt with according to Law. Ordinary, law abiding UK citizens of Irish extraction did not get tarred and feathered with the same brush, nor did they get ultimata by say, hot-headed Welsh or Celtic youths and ordered back to the Irish Homelands under threat of genocide.

Even after several failed separatist referenda, the Scots and the Irish continue to function in the UK without any let or hindrance to their rights as citizens. That is the way it is done in the Civilised World.

I know that in your heart of hearts, you know that a free and fair referendum on Biafra in Igboland today will have no certainties of sailing through because even Ndigbo are not yet ad idem on the idea of a new nation whose incidents are not yet fully worked out. Moreover, the Igbo have become a yarn integrating through every geopolitical fabric of this nation. Unraveling them is bound to loosen the rest.

For instance, my inlaw from Koton-Karfe and I have yet to work out how to share my younger sister (same father, same mother) and her 5 children. And that is just the beginning of our irrevocable similarities.

We need to let the embers of 1966 die, or let the conflagration consume everyone.

The choice before us is therefore very simple: Irrevocable similarities or irreconcilable differences?