By Pat Utomi
I read with much appreciation and delight Festus Adedayo’s column on Abati and Davido as Cockroaches.
I do not know how they did it but the Nigerian Tribune is justifying its longevity by giving our country the gift of great columnists. Every week I read with a sense of satisfaction these Tribune columnists and feel grateful that the grand era of the Newspaper column has yet to evaporate. Peter Pan, Sad Sam, Ayekoto, etc. brought light to darkness. The Tribune columnists flood this present darkness with exhilaration like the experience of the floodlights of Liberty Stadium brought us as children in the 1960s.
But I respond to Festus Adedayo’s thoughtfulness in that piece not as a once-upon-a-time columnist myself but as a worried citizen on the one hand and as a social scientist concerned about the state in post-colonial Africa, especially about how the nature of that state prolongs the misery of the poor and vulnerable, and how the world views Africa.
Identity politics and ethnic baiting captured in the metaphors of Cockroaches and ‘cut down the tall trees’ in the run-up to Rwanda’s genocide are, in my view, the result of leadership failure.
Why did America become a melting pot and divisive politics make Africa a poster child of state failure?
One Ronald Reagan video tells that story well. The story of American exceptionalism and the blending in.
The so-called Igbo/Yoruba divide building up, as Adedayo points out, with possibilities of terrible foreboding yet to be fully appreciated by their champions, is a classic example.
I would like to speak to that as one who has been a cockroach in many seasons.
For one born in Kaduna, baptised in Jos, started school in Kano, witnessed the pogrom in Gusau in 1966, and part of the civil war, including the civilian massacre in Asaba in 1967 and 1968, I first got sensitive to the cockroach syndrome as an undergraduate at UNN in 1973/74.
My horrific war experience did not raise my sensitivity as much as the experience of 1974. Maybe becoming more mature made that so.
Seeing all of the other four universities in Nigeria at the time shut down from protests on the anniversary of the Adepoju killing by police at UI, I became part of a group that challenged the SUG calling for action. A few students understandably distraught that they lost three years while colleagues at Unilag, UI, Ife and ABU carried on with their studies, shouted at me ‘You Yoruba boy go and read your book’. I was not a Yoruba boy but a citizen who placed a premium on human solidarity.
Even with the wounds of the civil war then so fresh, the typecasting of people on ethnic lines was nowhere as horrible as it is today. Surely, my group of friends which included people like Folu Ayeni, the 1975 valedictorian at UNN who many years later founded Tantalizers with his wife Bose, my classmate from High School in Loyola College Ibadan, Gbenga Sadipe, Idiat Adesanya, Ronke Ashaye and even current NAFDAC DG Prof Moji Adeyeye were in the circle I spent much time with.
Did that make me Yoruba? Clearly not. But the experience points to the danger of typecasting people.
Twenty years later the elections of June 12 got annulled. With no thought to the ethnicity of Chief MKO Abiola, I rallied professionals with an OpEd piece: We must say Never Again. Public court records suggest I survived two assassination attempts for the effort of the Concerned Professionals.
Years later I was chatting with a young CEO of a multinational from my part of the country on an unrelated subject when he remarked that he was a final year student in the university when the CP protests took place. He said he was put off by the fact that of the 39 of us that signed a published petition only myself and two or three others were not Yorubas. I had no recollection of how many signed the petition nor had I ever given thought to the ethnic mix of the protestors.
Then my classmate from Nsukka, Femi Kusa, wrote a vitriolic bashing of Igbos. I responded with an expression of my surprise at what I thought was uncharitable ethnic bashing and baiting. That alarmed me to the nature of the poison being concocted.
From my work in political economy, I have celebrated what American political scientists Robert Melson and Howard Wolpe called competitive communalism in which ethnic nationality groups competed on who would most bring progress to their regions at the birth of self-government in Nigeria.
It required political leadership to continue to harvest the benefits of Federalism and the competition doctrine without spilling into debilitating dislike for people of other ethnic nationality groups.
I became acutely sensitive to the fact that political actors were exploiting the emotions of identity politics. This was getting so divisive I feared it would make for a narrative that would make Nigeria unattractive for investment for both Nigerians of some disposition to risk and foreigners.
Opportunities to do something about my concerns kept coming.
When the Oba of Lagos was said to threaten to drown Igbos if they did not act a certain way and opinions went wild I called for calm as the Oba had no tools to effect such a threat but was probably joking as he often did.
A few Igbo businessmen said to me that my intervention calmed nerves and nipped overreaction in the bud. On a visit to the Oba in the palace, his daughter reminded him how she told him I saved the day.
Then the Reverend Ladi Thompson came to see me to proselytize his initiative on bringing the Igbo and Yoruba elite together to discuss and shake hands. I told him I was chair of the board of trustees of Nzuko Umunna which had organised the handshake across the Niger summit which brought many Yoruba leaders to Enugu for the first time. His ideas were in tandem and music to my ears.
I accepted Thompson’s invitation to host the YIGBA meeting at my home in Lagos. And the heavyweights came. From the Yoruba side, they included Ptof Akintoye, former Secretary of UPN, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, Dr Christopher Kolade and dozens of other Yoruba prominent people. From the Igbo side came past and future presidents of Ohaneze like Prof Joe Irukwu and Prof George Obiozor, General Ike Nwachukwu and dozens more.
Prof Akitoye set the tone of the conversation by recalling a visit to Chief Obafemi Awolowo just before he passed. He said Chief Awolowo lamented that he did not manage to fix the Yoruba/Igbo rift and that he then charged both him and Chief Olaninwon Ajayi to make that bridging project a top priority.
On my part, I invited the distinguished submitters to try reading Jared Diamond on the evolution of human civilization and migration in man’s birthplace in Africa. I assured them they would find the Igbos and Yorubas were close cousins and words like those which identify body parts, as language developed, before some migrated further East on the West African coastline would be similar. So the fact that imi in Igbo is imu in Yoruba, enu in Yoruba is onu in Igbo and eti is nti should make these cousins better behave towards each other.
So how did we get here that I, the ‘Yoruba boy’ of yesterday, received a storm of insults from people who have either not read what I have written or interpreted every word from the prism of their bias because they identify me as Igbo?
When I listened to a senior US diplomat who monitored the elections in Lagos in March of 2023 recount his observations and being traumatized by it, two emotions flowed through. One was to think of Dr Michael Okpara and the details of his support for Adegbenro and company during the elections in the Western Region and of my own half-a-century of bridging effort. I decided my time was verged on waste. All are these because a few desire power no matter the cost for sustained social advance, the peace of a people and history’s judgement.
I realise this is not a uniquely Nigerian problem. Jurgen Habermas finds democracy and modernity to converge around rational public conversation but the philosopher of the public sphere can probably see how politicians play emotion in many countries, giving people like Joshua Greene at the Center for Moral Cognition at Harvard much to study about ‘ emotion, reason and the gap between us and them.
Last month I participated in part of the Rwanda Genocide conference at California State University in Sacramento. As I bantered with the Attorney-General of Rwanda I could not but wonder why politicians have not thought it proper to call off the people they have unleashed on social media to spread hate.
The cost may prove devastating for all. The book I am currently working on looks at how politicians underdeveloped Africa. It is to put in perspective Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and not to question the merits of his thesis. Divisive plays on emotion constitute one way the politicians keep us poor. Whether they are conscious of it or not is another matter.
As a cockroach baited from both sides through many seasons of angst, I can feel the looming danger.
•Patrick Okedinachi Utomi, is a Political Economist and founder of the Centre for Values in Leadership.
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