By Ausere Ofureku Saiki 

The story as titled above making an appearance on page 13 of the May 26,  2026 edition  of Vanguard Newspaper by one Alemma Ozioruva Aliu should ordinarily deserve no attention for being already known within Igarra as one of his  numerous self or sponsored attempts to rewrite the history and also distort the customs of Igarra. However, the need for a rejoinder of this sort is premised on the potential his article carries in deceiving the mostly unsuspecting non-Igarra people of the general reading public. 

Every community has a duty to its own history, a responsibility to ensure that the stories told about its origins, its customs, and its festivals are the ones that actually happened, not the ones that certain interests find convenient to tell. Igarra, that ancient and storied community in Edo North, has accumulated enough of its genuine history to have no need of borrowed mythology or invented traditions. It is in that spirit of fidelity to fact that the Eziobe Group of Clans speaks today. 

It exists. But it exists in a specific and limited context, as a localised ritualistic practice whose reach does not extend beyond certain quarters of Igarra. To call it a festival in the full cultural sense of the word would be a generosity that the facts do not support. Over 95% of Igarra people, including the overwhelming majority of those whose traditional  heads are the Oshidu, The Otu, The Oshemi and The Oshemdase, do not reckon with Ubete in their cultural calendar. It does not attract tourists. Ubete celebration is therefore limited to Otaru and his minority subjects in Igarra hence It does not generate the commercial activity that characterises Igarra’s genuine festivals. It has never, in any serious cultural reckoning, occupied a place among the landmarks of Igarra’s festive identity.

The question then is why anyone would seek to elevate this practice to the status of “Igarra Day” a designation that, by its very construction, claims to represent the whole of Igarra’s cultural life. The answer, unfortunately, is not difficult to find when one examines the geography of custodianship in Igarra. 

Igarra’s fourteen prominent families are distributed across the authority of five traditional heads: five families under The Oshidu, five under The Otaru, and one each under The Oshemadase Oorenyi, The Oshemi Onanyimi, and The Otu Baja. The festivals of genuine cultural weight in Igarra; the Aba Festival, Ochionine, Ofuofifu, Ukuokiku, and the New Yam Festival fall under the exclusive custodianship of families within The Oshidu’s authority and those of the other traditional heads. None of them belong to the Otaru. It is precisely this absence that animates the push to repackage Ubete as something larger than it is.

  Should any festival ever carry the designation of “Igarra Day,” that deliberation would properly belong to The Oshidu, The Oshemadase Oorenyi, The Oshemi Onanyimi, and The Otu Baja who are the traditional heads under whose authority Igarra’s major festivals actually reside. It is not a decision that any single head can take unilaterally, and certainly not one that falls within the purview of the Otaru whose families hold no custodianship over any of the actual native festivals in Igarra. 

The sincerity of the claim that Ubete is Igarra’s premier celebration is further called into question by a telling contradiction: the very figures who advance this claim are known to make considerable effort to attend every edition of the genuine native festivals which all fall under the custodianships of Oshidu, Otu, Oshemi and Oshemdase, and opportunities to address gatherings of spectators during them. One does not scramble for relevance at another’s festival if one genuinely presides over the community’s most important celebration. 

By contrast, no Eziobe clan head (Oshemi, Oshemdase, Otu or Oshidu) has ever sought, in all of Igarra’s recorded communal history, to attend or participate in the Ubete celebration. The imbalance speaks its own language.

The matter of historical accuracy extends beyond festivals into the founding narrative of Igarra itself. In recent times, a story has circulated attributing the founding of the current Igarra settlement to a figure named Ariwo Ovejijo, described as a prince from Idah who, denied the kingship stool, migrated to establish Igarra. This narrative is historically insupportable. 

In the full chronicle of kings who contested the Idah throne, particularly in the well-documented 15th century and post-colonial succession disputes, no figure by the name or title of Ariwo Ovejijo appears in any contemporary historical account. The name itself reveals the problem: “Ariwo Ovejijo” is a phonological corruption of the Yoruba expression “Ariwo Obe Jojo,” meaning “the sound that emanates from a seething pot of soup.” Igarra people share no linguistic affinity with the Yoruba and have no shared ancestral tradition with them. That this Yoruba salutation has been pressed into service as the name of Igarra’s founding father is not merely an error; it is a fabrication, and a traceable one. Furthermore, among the  Eziezu themselves, there is actually no unanimity of opinion about the founding of Igarra. The Ariwo Ovejijo centred narrative is a recent politically inspired theory which is full of both logical and chronological defects as told by Otaru Adeche Saiki in a recent publication by him on behalf of his subjects. 

The Eziobe Group of Clans has raised these objections in previous publications. To date, no clarification has been offered in response. That silence is instructive.

The 600 year treaty described in the article under scrutiny here is best suited for fairy tale because  all reliable and plausible accounts of the migrational history of the Oshuku peoples among whom Igarrans belong put the founding of Igarra in the 1740s which is still less than 300 years ago as at present. It should be recalled that the same Alemma Ozioruva Aliu had sometime in 2017 published an article in which Aba Festival of Igarra is adjudged to have clocked 288 years as of that year. A juxtaposition of this with the unanimity among all Igarra people that Aba Festival is as old as the founding of Igarra easily exposes this 600 year old treaty story as a poorly thought out revisionist tale. 

Igarra is a community of genuine historical depth and cultural richness. It needs the internal cohesion that comes from an honest, shared narrative. The distortion of native laws, customs, and historical facts fractures the communal trust that is the foundation of any collective push for government attention and development. 

The festivals of Igarra are real, celebrated, and in the case of the Aba Festival, internationally recognised. The founding of Igarra is documented, traceable, and does not require the invention of Yoruba-named mythological figures to be compelling. The custodianship of Igarra’s cultural heritage is properly constituted, clearly mapped, and does not admit of unilateral redefinition. Igarra deserves better than a rewritten history. And its people deserve the dignity of a communal story that is true.

*Saika, a traditional titleholder, writes from Igarra