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“Are you not an Ibo?”

I sat in one of
those red LTC buses on the way from Ikeja to my job at the Central Bank
in Tinubu Square, Lagos, in April 1967. At Ojora, armed soldiers had
sauntered into the vehicle at a checkpoint. A dozen men and women
earlier bagged at the checkpoint lay face down in a shallow pool of
water percolating from an early Lagos rainy season. This form of
water-boarding, supervised by soldiers, was meant to humiliate them in
the eyes of others and send a message to the secessionists. My reply to
the soldier was that I came from Ghana, and if he wished we could go to
“my high commission” on Moloney Street for authentication.

There is the
anecdote of an Igbo during the Biafran War who faced the same question,
but claimed he was from Benin City and therefore Edo. It was, of
course, untrue. A federal soldier, according to the story, asked him to
prove it by saying something in Edo. The Igbo man started singing
Victor Uwaifo’s popular hit, ‘Joromi’. The soldier buckled over with
laughter. Unfortunate incidents are sometimes funny.

It was not the
last time I’d had to lie about my ethnic origins to save my life or
avoid extortion by uniformed and civilian gangs in what is supposed to
be my country. Forty-five years on and I am once more thinking and
strategising, mapping out how to escape if push comes to shove; keeping
indoors, watching the conflicts in Egypt, Libya and the Ivory Coast
while my non-Igbo friends roam and play golf.

The Yoruba man
sitting next to me on the bus that fateful morning in 1967 had sighed
before exclaiming quietly, “If only Ojukwu will stop this thing, eh?”
The elections of 2011 and their outcomes have little to do with Ojukwu
and the Igbo. Notwithstanding, losers are sporadically hunting for
scapegoats and appear to have found them where slaughter and spilling
of blood from other tribes is a recurrent ritual.

If the opposition
to the PDP had been serious, why did we not see a subordination of egos
and agreement on a grand coalition? Any intelligent individual should
have realised that once the PDP introduced geopolitics as a deeper
manifestation of “federal character,” the results of presidential
elections were always going to be defined by intra-party primaries,
deals and manipulations. Paradoxically, what was designed to unite
Nigerians and offer equal political opportunities does prove to be
divisive, and in the main has achieved the opposite.

The historical
polarisation along ethnic and religious lines which existed since 1914
worsened with the advent of democratic governance. As a result,
Nigerians now feel constantly piloted by unconstitutional governance
mechanisms and less by the country’s constitution.The young, jobless,
poor and uneducated easily lose control at the slightest provocation or
instigation.

People have
screamed in condemnation of zoning political power in this country, or
questioned the role of traditional rulers in what is supposed to be a
republic. Others call for a sovereign national conference to avert a
final solution, a bloody showdown. But these voices remain small fish
in the massive Nigerian ocean in which sharks are not listening.

Chinua Achebe had said he would like to return as a Nigerian to the
‘next world’. Most of us would welcome re-incarnation if it was
possible. I’d certainly wish to come back, via my parents as an Igbo,
but not within a Federal Republic of Nigeria. In their darkest hour,
the Jews of Europe fled to Israel and other places of refuge. The Igbo
have nowhere to run!