IGBOZURUOKE FORUM

By Clem Aguiyi,

When in one of my articles I offered sincere prayers for the good health of President Muhammadu Buhari, some readers to my dismay wrote back to call me names.

One particular reader called me a ‘sell out’ and the other something I will be uncomfortable to reproduce here. ‘Sell out’ because I prayed for the president and wished him a speedy recovery?

These category of readers cannot understand why the President deserve our prayers after superintending the massacre of Shiite Muslims, the slow genocide of the people of Southern Kaduna, the brutal killings of Biafra agitators, the near wipe out of Agatu village, the invasion of Enugu State by Fulani herdsmen, the unlawful detention of Nnamdi Kanu of IPOB, El-Zakzaky of Nigerian Islamic Movement and a list of several other violations.

I am not the one to make excuses for President Buhari’s intransigents. No leader in living memory has treated the Igbo with contempt than President Buhari.

He has wrecked more havoc on the Igbo psyche unlike any other. His regime is guilty of several violations against the people ranging from the violation of their right for political freedom which include the right to self-determination, social equality to economic freedom and freedom of association. But shall we return evil for evil or wish President Buhari dead for that matter? I insist President Buhari needs our love and prayers.

He deserves good health so that he can see how good his deputy is looking, acting the President; his Vice President is saying the right things, doing the right things and exciting the nation in just over 40 days; peace and calm is gradually returning across the nation and the economy picking up for the first time in two years.

I need Buhari to see how his enormous power would have been put into good use for the common good of all. I wish him good health so he can see the futility of being opposed to a renegotiated and restructured Nigeria. No one with a chance of repentance should be allowed to perish a sinner and persecutor of the brethren.

As Christians we are enjoined by the Holy Book to pray for the sick and love those that hate us. Love and empathy remain our strongest weapon and greatest hope in this confused world.

This is a fact I want our Ndigbo to imbibe. We must therefore see Buhari’s actions and inactions against us as a blessing in disguise. At least he made it possible that we are rallying around and talking seriously for the first time since after the civil war on how we can pull together to develop Alaigbo, the land of our fathers.

Nelson Mandela said of the man who led his defense team, Bram Fischer, SC, (a Boer) that he was the greatest South African. When he was asked why, Mandela explained that unlike himself, Bram Fischer fought his own people, adding, “it is easy to fight others but the greatest battle in life is a fight with your own people.”

As Ndigbo we must also look into the mirror and confront ourselves with some home truths. Getting Ndigbo, especially those for Brexit or death to recognize that there is still hope in a restructured Nigeria is one hard thing I have attempted doing in recent time.

Perhaps harder is getting my people to accept that we have our fair share of blames for our woes due to our dereliction to hold our political actors accountable.

It is not the fault of the Hausa-Fulani that we are not blessed with an exciting leadership since the advent of this democracy. We have no good reasons for letting our governors escape with daylight robbery of the scant resources accruing to us.

In Akwa Ibom I witnessed the transformation undertaken by Governor Godswill Akpabio. I also marvelled at the miracle of Gombe by Dankwabo and of course the transformation of Lagos by Babatunde Raji Fashola, a legacy being sustained by Ambode. All these great achievements happened inside Nigeria with all its imperfect arrangements.

Compared to the deplorable state of the Igbo states, the level of urban decay which Aba and Onitsha typify compel me to advocate that we drag all our past governors from 1999 to an open market square and whip their bare buttocks.

May be 24 lashes laid on each of their bare buttocks will assuage our anger and drive some sense of urgency into the brains of our current and future gate keepers.

It’s important for us to devise a strategy that will hold our political leaders accountable if we are to have a pathway to resolving our numerous problems especially in the physical redevelopment of Alaigbo and enthronement of planned, controlled, deliberate and new-build physical development of Igbo states. According to Jerome Okolo, one of the Igbo greats in a contribution made to the Igbo Intelligentsia Forum, “the WHO in 2016, came out with statistics pointing out Onitsha as the most polluted city on earth on account of PM10 pollution.”

But before we argue on the veracity of WHO claims, we can at least attest to seeing our unfortunate brothers, sisters and uncles dying of bronchitis and pulmonary failure caused by pollution.

Some of us have noticed the creeping commonness of cancers, caused by our polluted environment. Yet we are doing nothing about achieving a clean and safe environment.

Yet, we poison our people – including mother’s, and our most precious and vulnerable-babies – people who live with Chinese insecticides (as mosquito killer’s), otapiapia (as rat killers), germs and viruses in stagnant water that they wade through every day as they step on human and animal fecal matter, while they breathe the dirtiest air on planet Earth: This is us. We should be terrified about what we are doing to ourselves and outraged at the auto genocide of our own race.

The Hausa-Fulani hasn’t killed anything near the number we have killed by living in the kind of places we have allowed to carry on existing due to bad leadership.

Not that we shouldn’t be vigilant about external adversaries, but we must be quite callous and not truly interested in our future survival if we make excuses for places like Aba, Onitsha and a hundred other dystopias that before our eyes have turned into little versions of hell. My point in this write up is that we must make no excuse for bad leadership.

We must not waste a four-year term with any mediocre governor with no sense of urgency to transform Alaigbo physically. We need rapid development so we can attract thousands of Ndigbo in the diaspora, who are now peaking in numbers as they come to retirement and have lots of money in America and self-investible retirement pots of money in the UK.

These people typically have access to a million dollars in the average but virtually none of them would physically stand the idea of retiring to present day urban squalors like Aba and Onitsha.

Newtelegraph