Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2015 07:32:29 +0100
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Resolving the Igbo Non-Question: Pitfalls of Jibo's Single Strand Ethnic Narrative by Okey Ibeanu: III
From: kciwuamadi@gmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
CC: oibeanu@yahoo.co.uk
Resolving the Igbo Non-Question: Pitfalls of Jibo's Single Strand Ethnic Narrative by Okey Ibeanu
We suffer for this. So many people charged with informing us, with informing themselves, are just sitting still.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dear Jibo,
Preamble
I am sure that by the time you get to read this, your latest "Deepening Democracy" article on "resolving the Igbo question" would have gone viral on Facebook. Certainly, that is what public intellectuals crave, and I am sure you expect that to happen. Like many people, I have admired you for many years, not just because of our longstanding friendship, but also because you are a fine political scientist and a strong activist. And it is precisely because of that admiration and long friendship that I must now break my usual studied silence on contemporary Nigerian politics and its dominant framing. It is also important to do this for a second reason. I am aware that several young Nigerian social scientists and civil society activists regard your opinions as the epitome of political analysis. I am also aware that many people in power and those in its hallowed corridors listen a lot to you. I therefore think that it is extremely important to provide this preliminary reaction to this Igbo question thing.
Bruno Bauer
Jibo, you could not have chosen a worse German philosopher to frame your discourse than Bruno Bauer. A German Rationalist philosopher, Bauer was renowned for his now profound and now perfunctory critiques of religion, especially the Bible. However, if you had researched Bauer a bit deeper, you would have found two things: First, is the difference in narratives between Brauer and Jews on the situation of Jews in Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries. While Jews framed their situation in terms of "Jewish Emancipation", culminating in a Jewish State, Bauer framed it as the "Jewish Question", a problem the solution of which lies in Jews recanting their religion. The second thing that you would have found about Bauer is the prevalent accusations of anti-Semitism against him at the time. To be sure, some have argued that the accusations were unfair, considering that Bauer was as scathing in his criticisms of Jews as he was of Protestants. Still, without doubt, as a popular public intellectual of his time, Bauer's views on German Jews was an important moment in a long lineage of "solving the Jewish Question", which culminated in the "final solution".
Single strand narratives
That leads me to the second pitfall in your article: the limits of single strand narratives. European Jews demanded a solution for their emancipation in a Jewish State; the Nazis sought a final solution in the Holocaust. The Jewish State, born out of resistance to oppression and a cry for emancipation was finally created in 1948 by expropriating the people of Palestine and it has since become one of the most oppressive States known in history, denying Palestinians their own emancipation. Many people, including Nigerians, still persist in the uncritical framing of the Arab-Israeli problem as one of emancipation of Jews who fear annihilation in the land given to them by God. Such single narratives not only oversimplify very complex situations, but also provide only a single cipher through which to look at the world. Like all one-eyed views, single narratives are jaundiced. Often, single strand narratives are driven by the heart and not the head and they go where preconception leads rather than where evidence points.
A single strand ethnic narrative
They are even more so when they are ethnic narratives. You complain that Chidi seeks to tar you with an "ethnicist" brush. Unfortunately, that is what you get when you pursue an ethnic narrative. Your rebuttal of that is in two parts: First, that ethnic politics is the empirical reality of Nigerian politics and second that you have always campaigned for issue-based politics. However, by putting forward what seems like an ethnic reductionist analysis and not trying to transcend ethnicity, even when empirical evidence points to the contrary, you appear to support it. Political science is not just an empirical science; it is also a normative science. Moreover, issue-based politics can also be ethnic!
Honestly, Jibo, I also read into your analysis that your "Igbo question" is essentially an ethnic question to be solved politically, with the Presidency, the Holy Grail of Nigerian politics as its ultimate trophy. Everything else then becomes a seamless tributary of this ethnic narrative. For instance, you portray the Biafra agitation as a fatal disconnection between the Igbo elite and a teeming young lumpen Igbo. But then, you suddenly give it an ethnic twist. You suggest that the former has not only oppressed the latter by cornering all the benefits from the Nigerian State controlled by Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani elite, but had even conspired with a former President of Yoruba extraction to shoot and kill them. You also suggest that the ill advised support of the Igbo elite for Jonathan has terribly set them back on the journey to an Igbo Presidency and this is perhaps the worst reflection of the inability of the Igbo elite to play the ethnic politics necessary for winning the Presidency. You even suggest that Igbo's offended the Yoruba with a book written by Achebe. To quote you verbatim: "Chinua Achebe hit the Yorubas very hard at a time he should have been thinking about an alliance with them to confront the North. Teaming up with Goodluck Jonathan produced petty rewards for a few but it rolled back the schedule for an Igbo Presidency". What could be more ethnic reductionist?
This type of single strand ethnic narrative may be popular since it has been the most widespread and persistent framing of contemporary Nigerian politics, but it leads to unimaginable pitfalls. By totalising and homogenising it covers more than it reveals. Igbo's suddenly speak with one voice and act together in common interest, as do the Yoruba, Hausa and Fulani, except that the last three know how to play the right ethnic politics, but not the Igbo. Suggestively, playing the right ethnic politics in the 2015 general elections was for the Igbo elite and consequently their lumpen youth to support General Buhari. Yet, of the 4.2 million votes cast in the March 28th Presidential election in the six South-West States, Buhari scored 2.4 million to Jonathan's 1.8 million, a margin of about 600,000 votes. Does this mean that the Yoruba ethnic group supported Buhari and disliked Jonathan? By the way, what about the many other ethnic groups in Nigeria whose votes were split between the two candidates? Your repeated reduction of voting in the Presidential election in the South East to ethnicity is somewhat curious – Jonathan cannot speak a word of Igbo and has never called himself Igbo! This thing about everybody who comes from North of the Niger-Benue being Hausa and any body from South of the Benue being Igbo is fascinating.
I need not say that the Biafra agitation is more than relations between an ethnic elite and ethnic lumpen youths. Those young people are framing a struggle steeped in their material conditions of life – unemployment, poverty, etc. The leadership of their States (and nation as well) has failed them, but not because they are Igbo leaders, but because of broader issues of political economy, which you very well understand. How an Igbo Presidency would solve these agitations, a notion that is implied in your narrative, beats me. For your information, the worst repression of the Biafra agitation was under Jonathan, the supposed "half-Igbo President". Is it not clear to you that the struggle for Biafra has become a metaphor for changing the material conditions of these young people?
Finally, you may recall that I had twice taken issues with you on these single strand ethnic narratives. The first was over your Electoral Geography book in which you tried to attribute specific behavioural attributes to ethno-regional elites. Your book for instance had said that Igbo political elite is preoccupied with seeking money, are kidnappers, etc., basically things to that effect. I had warned against such stereotyping and argued that you can find thieves and kidnappers across Nigeria. The second time was during our rural banditry project, which you curiously framed as a "Fulani Question". In one of my responses, if you recall, I had stated as follows: "What is the Fulani question? Nomadism and the sustainability of transhumance and the conflicts arising from them create a Fulani question as much as conflicts involving itinerant traders create an Igbo or Hausa question! The fact that many conflicts involving the former also involve Fulanis and those involving the latter also involve Igbos or Hausas does not create a Fulani question, Igbo question or Hausa question."
I will tell you my major concern about posing these "ethnic questions". They have a ring of specific ethnic groups constituting a problem to be solved! As somebody who commands the minds of many young people and the ears of many policy makers, you must be extremely careful about the way you pose these issues.
Best regards and happy birthday in arrears. Unfortunately, we could not celebrate our joint birthday together this year. I really missed it.
Okey
--------
Okechukwu Ibeanu
Research Professor
Institute for Development Studies
University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus
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The Igbo Question: A Response to Jibrin Ibrahim
By
Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Identity politics in Nigeria is very much alive, well and thriving. It's an elite preoccupation. Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim is one of Nigeria's most astute and reputable political scientists. He is a very able thought leader, civic activist and intellectual and an unlikely convert to the visceral world of Nigeria's rent politics of identities and "tribes". That is why his recent article on the "Igbo Question" merits attention and deserves a response.
In the article, Dr. Ibrahim organizes his argument around the assertion that "the Igbo elite has a strong empirical basis to read Nigerian political history as one of failure and frustration for them." In support of this, he asserts that "after the civil war, there was a co-ordinated policy of pauperizing the Igbo middle class" and "this was followed by routing the Igbos from the commanding heights of the economy". According to Dr. Ibrahim, the "Igbo elite…. refused to change their narrative about the Nigerian state and today the initiative is out of their hands." He does not necessarily say what this constant narrative is or when it began. However, the article laments that "the biggest failure of the Igbo elite is the incapacity to play the political game" and, switching from analysis to clairvoyance, concludes that "teaming up with Goodluck Jonathan produced petty rewards for a few but it rolled back the schedule for an Igbo Presidency."
Some people will read the article as somewhat favorable even if patronizingly so, to the "Igbo". The declared goal of Dr. Ibrahim's column is "Deepening Democracy". Far from deepening democracy, however, the article stunts it. From a long-standing advocate of inclusive civics, this article corrodes coexistence and disappoints on many fronts.
There are many flaws with both the methodology and argumentation in the article. Let me begin with the methodology. Clearly, ethnicism remains an effective organizational tool of Nigerian politics and many would argue that it is the province of political scientists to observe and analyse it. How this is done, however, matters. The historic methodological flaw of ethnicism is to racialise the politics of opinions and association and then homogenize them based on genes or tribal identity. That is manifestly unsustainable. Whoever the Igbo are, they are not a horde of undifferentiated morons. They're capable of and have always had political difference. In a democracy, tribes don't vote; citizens do. To imprison political analysis in the mindset of homogenized tribalisations, therefore, is to deny the possibility of an evolved civic capability in Nigeria generally and in the Igbo in particular.
A related point is the convenient adaptability of deployments to which tribe and ethnicity are put in such analysis, with the effect of denying the considerable progress that Nigerians have made towards mutual co-existence. Take the case of former Kano State Governor, Sabo Bakin Zuwo. Governor Bakin Zuwo was Nupe. That would place his origins somewhere in present Niger State. But he was elected first as a Senator and then as Governor by the people of Kano. Yet, to most in southern Nigeria, he was "Hausa" or just "Northerner". Similarly, Kogi and Kwara States are part of the historic northern Nigeria. So, persons from these states would be "Northerners" but, if they are of Yoruba stock, then many would rather prefer to exclude them from "the north" by referring to them as "Yorubas" because the Yoruba are supposedly not of the north even if millions of them are in it. However, when it comes to "flexing" (to use a contemporary Nigerian slang) with demographic politics, the Yoruba of Kogi and Kwara are conveniently counted as "We North..." By the way, Kaduna Nzeogwu was from the Mid-West (and until 1963 of the Western Region) but it was convenient in the narrative of the 1966 coup to re-create him exclusively as "Igbo".
Dr. Ibrahim's article didn't just indulge in staple homogenizations and mutabilities of Nigerian ethnic politics; it also conflated race and geo-politics in its analysis. Its focus was probably on the South-East of Nigeria but his framing was Igbo. Just as the North and Hausa or South-West and Yoruba are not the same thing, Igbo and the South-East aren't the same. One is a geo-political invention; the other is an immutable racial identity. One can be reinvented; the other can't. As with all things incapable of being changed, generalisations about tribe and race risk and invite credible accusations of bigotry.
In reality, though, the underlying generalisation that is evident from the article arguably reflects its author's personal views about "the Igbo". If that is so, then this is quite troubling because it could suggest his cupboards of tribalisation in Nigeria are in gross arrears of his professed ideals. Even worse, it would illustrate the tendency of Nigeria's elite to feed our mutual illiteracies about one another rather than alleviate them. Their goal, of course, is to sustain the prejudices that feed the zero-sum politics of rent, put-downs and exclusions.
This leads to the more substantive problem with the article: its banalisation of politics and its commitment to the Bantustanization of Nigeria. Dr. Ibrahim's article speaks about the "political game" and, somewhat hubristically, determines losers (and therefore winners). But, surely the question must be what winning means in Nigeria's politics. In an earlier article, Dr. Ibrahim had recently written about Barewa College, the legendary High School in Katsina State that appears to hold a patent on producing Presidents and powerful people in Nigerian politics. But what have these people accomplished for Barewa, for their people or for Nigeria? All the Presidents he pointed to are from "the North". But what have the peoples of this region had to show for their political musical chairs? Despite this lock on power, all the three zones and 19 States of northern Nigeria put together have less Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) than the six states of South-South Nigeria; the seven States of North West Nigeria (a zone that is a net importer of human resources from other parts and with nearly 30% of Nigeria's population) together have just a little over half of the IGR of the five States of South East Nigeria which is a net exporter of human resources to the rest of Nigeria. How can that be progress and what does that mean for politics and our notions of winning and losing?
Speaking about political game and how it has been banalised, the Niger Delta produced President Jonathan for five years and three months and yet the East-West Road which leads to his village remains for the most part a crater. The road to President Obasanjo's house in Otta (the Abeokuta-Lagos Express Way) was, similarly, one of the worst in Nigeria under his Presidency.
In this Nigerian political game, the people seem to be the football that the elites use for their kick-abouts. I can honestly understand a claim that any people have lost out in the political game if Dr. Ibrahim or anyone could point to any verifiable legacies left by the supposed tribes of winners except the supposed Brownie Points that come from producing elites with an equal opportunity commitment to the pauperization of all of the country. The most far reaching of such legacies have come from people who didn't exercise federal power: Ahmadu Bello, Obafemi Awolowo, and Michael Okpara.
Nigeria deserves to be freed from the tragic consciousness in which enlightened people think that politics is about capturing power with no real benefits to the human beings who make power worth exercising. If we cannot elevate the tone of our politics or its analysis, we can at least decide not to continue to trivialise it.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Resolving the Igbo Question
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 30th November 2015
In 1843, the German historian and theologian Bruno Bauer, wrote the polemical book, "The Jewish Question", following strident demands by Jews for emancipation. He argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only if they relinquish their religious consciousness, since political emancipation requires a secular state, which he assumed did not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion. Bauer contested the assumption that a people can seek emancipation based on religious particularism, while following the French Revolution, the world was moving in the direction of equal rights for all. In his response to the debate, Karl Marx queried the notion that one group could seek emancipation while the reality was that every group was in bondage.
The Igbos, we are told need emancipation from an oppressive Nigeria which has been oppressing and marginalizing them since independence. Karl Marx would ask them if all groups in Nigeria have not been oppressed and marginalised as well. In addition, he would point out what history has done to the Igbos since colonisation, transforming them from an egalitarian society to one of the most unequal societies in the world in which abject poverty cohabits with the opulence of some of the richest people in the contemporary world. I fear for a Biafra in which these two groups will confront each other. Above all, I fear for a Nigeria in which similar inequalities exist and the masses from all ethnic and religious groups have been systematically oppressed and marginalised since independence.
The current movement for Biafra is a very serious one because it represents a complete fracture between the Igbo elite and their masses. In the Internet, former Governor Peter Obi is accused of using Nigerian soldiers to massacre an estimated 5,000 militants of MASSOB in the period 2006 to 2009 under the direction of former President Olusegun Obasanjo who was said to have given the 'Shoot-at Sight Order'. During the period, "Nigerian soldiers were said to have been on rampage at Onitsha, Nnewi, Oba, Ihiala and environs shooting, killing, and maiming anything that has a suspicion of being MASSOB." If today the disaffected and poor Igbo youth, just like the Boko Haram fighters, are defining their governors and elite as central to the problem, there is no surprise that no one has a clue in terms of responding to Lenin's question – what is to be done.
What the Igbo intellectual class has done is to develop a coherent marginalisation thesis, which the Igbo lumpen proletariat took and is running with. The thesis focuses on the issue of state creation, the Igbo presidency and the impact of the civil war. We recall Chinua Achebe's book – "There Was a Country", in which he made unambiguous comments of the complicity of the Nigerian state and its leaders at the time, Yakubu Gowon and Obafemi Awolowo in starving over two million Igbos to death, why should not be surprised that the Igbo youth are be furious at what was done to their grand parents. Why should they have listened to General Gowon when he responded denying the charges and claiming that it was Ojukwu who refused the offer of a humanitarian corridor? Even the number of two million starved to death, who is checking its veracity. Gowon's "no victor, no vanquished" sounded generous but maybe all it did was block debate on the issue for too long.
There is no doubt that the civil war of 1967 to 1970 was the most serious threat to the existence of Nigeria as a country and it led to the loss of one to two million lives, depending on whose figure you accept. It should be recalled that just before the war, Western leaders had warned that if the East goes, the West will follow. That threat was not put into action and Awolowo, the Western leader was released from jail to serve as Finance Minister and Deputy Leader of the Federal Executive Council.
The fact of the matter is that the Igbo elite has a strong empirical basis to read Nigerian political history as one of failure and frustration for them. It's a narrative that sees a proud and hard-working people, "the Jews of Africa", that have been forced to play second fiddle to the other for too long, especially the Hausa-Fulani ruling circles. Following the coup and the subsequent massacre of Igbos in 1966 in the Northern region, and the subsequent declaration of secession by the Eastern region in May 1967, the Igbo elite had assumed that other Nigerians would not fight to keep them in the Federation. They were wrong. Other Nigerians fought to preserve the Federation and the result was the thirty-month civil war and the heavy death toll.
In his book, "Igbo Leadership and the Future of Nigeria" Arthur Nwankwo argues that "Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo". Nwankwo tells us that the Igbos are more cosmopolitan, more adopted to other cultures, more individualistic and competitive, more receptive to change and more prone to settle and work in other parts of the country than other Nigerians. This reality, he says, is overshadowed by the myth other Nigerians persist in spreading that the Igbo are aggressive, arrogant and clannish. This purported attitude of other Nigerians towards the Igbos he points out has led to the development of a "final solution" aimed at neutralising and marginalising the Igbos after the civil war. This is seen to have occurred in two ways.
After the civil war, there was a coordinated policy of pauperising the Igbo middle class by the offer of a twenty-pound ex gratis award to all bank account holders irrespective of the amounts they had lodged with the banks before the civil war. This was followed by routing the Igbos from the commanding heights of the economy by introducing the indigenisation decree at a time when the Igbos had no money, no patronage and no access to loans to compete for the companies. In addition, landed property owned by the Igbo was declared to be "abandoned property" particularly in Port Harcourt. In the public service, the Igbo elite were marginalised by the refusal to re-absorb most of their cadres who had attained high positions in the armed forces and the federal public service.
It is in this context that many within the Igbo elite have come to understand the policies of "no victor, no vanquished" and "reconciliation, reconstruction and rehabilitation" announced after the war, as a lie. There is room to debate these issues today as they feed into persistent demands for the creation of an additional state in the South East and the clamour for an Igbo Presidency, which increasingly appears to be a mirage. Of course since the end of the civil war, there has been a remarkable Igbo economic and commercial élan. The marginalisation did not work at the economic and commercial level and the success of the Igbo come back is one of the remarkable stories of our time. It might be precisely because of this success that bitterness persists among the Igbo elite on why other Nigerians appear to believe that they should continue with the politics of second fiddle. The problem has been that as they Igbo elite became more successful, they refused to change their narrative about the Nigerian State and today the initiative is out of their hands.
The biggest failure of the Igbo elite is the incapacity to play the political game. To be major players in politics requires team and coalition building. If the Igbo elite really wanted to get the presidency, they should have developed a more inclusive narrative about the Nigerian State, they needed to convince and reassure the others not frighten them about a revenge mission. Chinua Achebe hit the Yorubas very hard at a time he should have been thinking about an alliance with them to confront the North. Teaming up with Goodluck Jonathan produced petty rewards for a few but it rolled back the schedule for an Igbo Presidency. With this failure of the elite, the Igbo lumpen have seized the initiative of following the path of disintegration. Its time to talk frankly.
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