BY GAB EJUWA

IT was simply natural that angry reactions had trailed the initiation of the National conference recently, coming as to did from the Itsekiri nationals all over the country, who had felt and rightly too, that they were being willy-nilly exorcised from the Nigerian nation, an insalubrious development that assumes dilating significance and irony when the commander in Chief happens to be a fellow delta who must here been living and interacting with the Itsekiri on a daily basis in the past to the surprise of Nigerians the Ijow have over to people representing and no one ogori and itsekiri . Understandably on March 8 the Itsekiri had protested their exclusion from the conference threatening secession if the situation was not redressed immediately. High profile Itsekiri Chief and amazon Chief Rita lori Ogbebor said our exclusion from the confab is the last straw and we are {therefore} prepared to go out of Nigeria. Another Itsekiri youth leader, Mr. Alex Eyengho, decried the exclusion of his people from the conference as further proof of the systemic and systematized marginalisation of his ethnic group by the federal, state and local governments.

The Iwere Development Association (IDA), the umbrella body of the Itsekiri nation had given the federal, Delta and Edo State Governments as well as south – south leaders 48 hours to reverse the monumental madness. It is pertinent to note that according to all the Itsekiri individuals and corporate group that had reacted to this potentially- explosive issue, the auspicious development was not really surprising, since the subjugation and marginalization of the Itsekiri people has been the stark reality of the Nigerian sociopsychology for a long time now, even though in actual fact the Itsekiri nation has been in existence for over 700 years, a fact even underscored by the fact that an illustrious Itsekiri called     Chief Dore Numa was one of the advisers of Frederick lugard, the colonial Chieftain who represented the Olu of Warri on the Amalgamation term.

Although the exclusion had come and gone the after-effects are still very much unfortunate and rankle which is why it is crucial, with the benefit of hindsight now, to do a flashback and reappraise the political faux pas and see whether there are pertinent lessons we could learn which would help us as Nigerians in our noble quest to strive to live together and come to terms with our personal and ethnic individualities, note least of which is our cultural diversity.

First and foremost, the stark fact that such in illustrious ethnic group could be missing from a supposedly national record attests eloquently to the fact that we as a people do not have a sharpened or augmented sense of farness and egalitarianism. In plain language, it means that we are naturally crooked and devious and that if we have any piety at all, it is rather superficial. In a country where there are churches and mosques almost in every street corner, it is a big shame that we strive to manipulate people and records to our unfair advantage.

Furthermore, this embarrassing exclusion draws an unusually-big question mark on the efficiency of our communal memory not less so our record keeping mentality or rather, the lack of it. It goes without saying that if a little job of vetting, editing and accreditation had been one on the original list in the office of the secretary to the federal Government, the howling anomaly for such.

It was-would have been discovered and corrected before the whole process viral. It simply implies that our lofty secretariat on the rock had simply, gone to sleep on duty not any less implicated right in the confine s of our highest offices is the depth of focus and vision we accord to our development concepts and imperatives. One, ordinarily, would have thought that any developmental idea or impetus which our leaders, or rather rulers, would foist on us as country would have been heartily ruminated upon thought through and perfected. There is certainly no evidence to even infer that the national confab did go through the process quality brainstorming and review. The evidence tilts heavily in favour of a conference that had been just a momentary brainwave, unflatteringly compounded by a play-it-by ear mindset an unsavory implication of desultoriness and perfunctorness in the marbled chambers.

Perhaps the most devastating import of this exclusion saga certainly is the degree of the collective depreciation and atrophy the mined of the big chief and his minions have attained sequestered as they are from quotidian reality by a rocky enclave that might have been sited on a metaphorical Olympus Granted that mistakes are normal in the human plane it is well night in conceivable that an army of government operatives and bangers on would all fail to identify and correct a simple perhaps typographical error, in spite of intimidating CV’s and degree of comfort perhaps that was even the problem: the whole presidency having become so sedentarily comfortable corpulent and intellectually longuid that they could not lift even a lone finger to do legitimate work.

And that, I think, is the diacritical moral of the whole exclusion saga. The concrete and physical act of exclusion of an ethnic group from national consciousness and reckoning parallels piquantly the metaphorical dialectical Oynamics and politics of exclusion (from wealth distribution) of and sustained all through the years by the power elites and pimps, whether of military or civilian persuasion Apprehended through this larger metaphorical prism it.

*Mr. Ejuwa, a journalist,  wrote from Lagos.