By Obi Nwakanma
Boko Haram issued an ultimatum to all Christians and Southerners to leave the North or face attack and death. This threat came with a backdrop already dimmed with blood.

The group had murdered security personnel, attacked mosques, carried out a low-grade military action or insurgency against the federal government, and seemed to move at will against what seemed like half-hearted efforts at deterrence by the Federal Government. Soon, the bombs exploded at the Madalla Church killing parishioners that were mostly of Igbo ethnicity.

Then, came the Mubi massacre of Igbo folk who were meeting to decide how to convey the corpse of their kinsmen killed by Boko haram back for burial in the East. That killing is one of the most dastardly attacks yet in this current episode of Nigeria’s national crisis.

Then the attacks widened, in Kano, and other places, and the picture it created was once more the grounds for a new pogrom. Advise came from left, right and center for the Igbo to leave the North and return to the East. To their credit, the governors of the South-Eastern states, where most Igbo are to be found today in Nigeria appealed for a greater calm, and urged the Igbo to remain wherever they are making their legitimate lives in the Nigerian federation. I endorsed that call.

The historically-minded will remember that it was the systematic and selective annihilation of the Igbo and other ethnic Easterners in the North that had set the stage for the civil war between Biafra and Nigeria that ended in 1970 with many more millions dying. More than three million people, depending on whom you asked.

The Igbo had fled from their places in the old federation in 1966, returned home to their traditional or ancestral lands, and compelled by national insecurity, had declared the Eastern region as the republic of Biafra – a protective space surrounded by a cauldron of hate.

That did not protect them. In a bid to force them to return to the Nigerian fold, an alliance of local and international interests besieged the Igbo in their lands and levied a devastating war that buckled them for forty years.

Perhaps the situation has changed in the minds of many. But let me put this in clearer terms: the situation has not and cannot change for the Igbo for as long as they constitute what may always be known as “the Igbo problem.” The Igbo problem in Nigeria is marked by ambivalence and ambiguity.

The Igbo situation provokes a deep slipperiness in the Nigerian mind: other Nigerians seem unsure what they want with the Igbo: they would neither let the Igbo go nor let the Igbo stay. It begins to seem as though the Igbo is the albatross on the Nigerian neck.

This question of the Igbo in the North of Nigeria and elsewhere continues to reverberate. Joseph Kennedy Waku, in an interview two weeks ago in the Sun newspaper said, “the Igbo can leave the north if they want” and that “no one is targeting the Igbo” His argument is quite placid on the face of it: the Igbo, like other Nigerians, have a right to exist anywhere in Nigeria, Mr. Waku affirmed, and I endorse that sentiment.

But that no one is targeting the Igbo? That the Igbo are surreptitiously organizing violence against their own interests in the North as a foreground for secession? This is a wicked and profoundly disturbing argument by Waku, increasingly, a hawk in what seems to be a North-South power struggle.

Last week, the columnist Amanze Obi also raised the question once again for the Igbo: “to flee or not to flee?”he asked pointedly. His argument is that the Igbo will remain vulnerable within Nigeria for as long as they continue to migrate, settle and invest massively in lands not their own.

My problem with Dr. Amanze Obi’s premise is the presumption that traditional Igbo land is the boundary for the Igbo in Nigeria. The Igbo chose to ignore that boundary the first day they moved up north helping to build the railways and working in the tin mines of Jos, and spreading into what has become the modern nation of Nigeria as Nigerian citizens. Nigeria is Igbo land, from Kaura Namoda to the Islands of Bonny.

From Lake Chad to the Atlantic belongs to the Igbo, as to other Nigerians, and any attempts to restrict, contain, or diminish that right constitutes an infringement on their citizenship which must be enforced by the federal government.

It took President Kennedy to move the US National Guard to enforce the civil liberties of African-Americans in Alabama who had been segregated and quarantined and prevented from enjoying the benefits of their citizenship.

That is why the Federal Government is constituted. It must take the Federal government to put down some boots on the ground to protect citizens from the menace of local criminal and terror groups.

This is what we must insist upon. To demand of the Igbo to abandon their lives, their investments, and their lot and “return” to the East is to demand Seppuku of them. If the federal government is unable any longer to guarantee the security of the Igbo north and south, then indeed, it behooves the Igbo as a “nation of people” within a nation to design, organize, and maintain their own security, seen and unseen, as an act of self-defence.

The Igbo must organize their own security strategy within Nigeria if Nigeria’s Federal government is unable to guarantee Igbo security within the nation. The challenge of course is that it would create parallel authority, but if that is the only option left for the Igbo, so be it.

My point in the end is that the Igbo must never allow, tolerate, or permit anybody to force them out of Nigeria. Indeed, this was the very clarion that Ojukwu sounded to the Igbo in his last years, when he went to Kadunain 1998 and admonished the Igbo to “stay and fight” for their rights and their security wherever they lived, and never to flee. I endorse that Ojukwuan doctrine.

I also endorse the fact of cooperative security: the alliance of all potential victims to come together in the North to secure themselves against a vicious adversary like Boko haram. Finally, let me say this: Boko haram is low grade insurgency and will peter out with a well-coordinated military and security action against it.

Nigeria has the human and material resources to root it out under this president. It’ll only take political spine. There are those who say Boko Haram is the armed wing of an old, entrenched but disappearing Northern establishment.

If so, that establishment has played its worst hand in this game, and Nigeria is closer to solving the nationalist question first raised in 1953, when the North, fearing Southern domination rejected political independence from Britain.

That fear persists. But Nigeria remains, and must remain a federal republic; a modern, secular nation of diverse people, who have the right to cross borders and live without molestation anywhere in Nigeria. The Igbo, as always, must lead that fight for a new Nigeria. They cannot do so by fleeing the north. That’s not an option.