BY ABIA ONYIKE
ON Wednesday, September 28, 2011 in Abakaliki, the Ebonyi State capital, a public lecture was held to mark the 2011 Igbo Day celebrations, officially hosted by the Ebonyi State Government.

On this auspicious occasion, a leading Igbo politician, a serving, three-term Senator of the Federal Republic and a seasoned dialectician of Nigerian power politics, Comrade Uche Chukwumerije took the centre stage and delivered a thought-provoking lecture titled: “Wake-Up Call: Path to Igbo Self-Rehabilitation”.

The opening paragraph of Senator Chukwumerije’s lecture did not mince words. He averred that: “The dialectical flow of Nigeria’s history has now swept Ndigbo to what Zik once described as the brink of an open grave. Ndigbo must today, not tomorrow, regain themselves and re-assert their corporate personality in our multi-ethnic federation or diffuse into isolated individual entities in the anonymity of Nigeria’s multitude”.

The lecture harped on the need for Igbo synergy in socio-economic and political affairs, after lamenting the crippling Igbo condition in Nigeria’s multi-ethnic nation-state. He argued that “the South East has remained a war-ravaged economy”, being the result of the 1967-1970 civil war.

“Today, South-East Zone still carries the open wound of a savage genocidal war. She is the back water of Nigeria, scoring low in economic, political and social indices,” he argued.

In his reaction to Chukwumerije’s treatise, a respected Nigerian journalist, Mr. Festus Eriye, writing in his column in The Nation on Sunday October 2, 2011 dissected Senator Chukwumerije’s articulate presentation beyond recognition, introducing irrelevancies, calculated innuendos and whipped up sentiments, bordering on orchestrated insinuations.

Eriye’s reaction, titled: “Uche Chukwumerije and the uses of Militancy”, was a case of isolated analysis and unguarded reductionism because it ignored the overall patriotic message, contained in the Senator’s injunction on the Igbo nation to engage in the re-construction of their battered cultural identity, reversal of their status of economic relegation and the assertion of their full constitutional rights in the Nigerian federation.

Of the 16-paged lecture, Eriye merely paraphrased a single line and took it out of context and raised an alarm that Chukwumerije had embraced violent fringe groups, which he argued was a “recipe for disaster”.

But Chukwumerije had opined that “youths are the teeth of the fangs of any disadvantaged group struggling for redress. Distancing ourselves from our main youth organisation like MASSOB will cost us the leverage necessary to redirect their energies to constructive ends WITHIN THE AMBIT OF THE LAW”.

Then he added that ” the causal relationship between OPC/June 12 and South-West access to the presidency or between youth militancy and Niger Delta’s current access to the Presidency, or between a politicized Boko Haram and North’s determination to win the next round of presidential election points to the fact that youth militancy has become an effective weapon in the armoury of group struggle”.

It was from here that Eriye created his own jaundiced quotation, thus: “The Igbos should incorporate the MASSOB into its system to ensure that an Igbo emerges as President in 2015”.

The above concocted version credited to Senator Chukwumerije by Eriye is nowhere to be found in the lecture document. Eriye should have waited to see the document before rushing to his column, if he was intent on properly educating the public instead of craving for newspaper headline fantasy.

The Senator’s central argument was that the dynamic and creative energies of the youth should be redirected to constructive ends WITHIN THE AMBIT OF THE LAW, and that youth militancy has became a strategic weapon in power struggle. These are concrete facts of political life which bear universal relevance for all ages.

Eriye’s dismissal of the potency of the role of militant youths in deciding major political outcomes in the country lacks depth. For instance he noted that “it was not youth militancy that made Goodluck Jonathan Acting President in 2010; it was goodluck and providential positioning.

If a Yoruba was Vice President to Umaru Yar’Adua at his demise, the chatter of a thousand Niger Delta AK47s would not have reversed the constitutional order of things”. This submission seems to suggest that the variables for garnering power in any political struggle can be pre-determined and subjected to the organic law of certainty.

But even the factor of goodluck and providential positioning can only be relative, because what constitutes goodluck to a chap in Yenegoa may be viewed disastrous to another chap in Katsina. The questions we have to ask Eriye are: What role did the Niger Delta youths play in creating national awareness regarding the plight of the oil producing communities?

Was it not the youths of the area who began the political agitation for self-determination for the people of the area? The struggle dates back to the time of Isaac Adaka Boro (who started as a student activist at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the 1960s) and Ken Saro-Wiwa, before the emergence of the pro-democracy movement which was in alliance with the Niger Delta activists and helped to bring their case to the front burner of national discourse.

One can say that without the antecedents of permanent youth struggle, the idea of getting someone from the Niger Delta for the Vice Presidency in 2007, may still have remained a remote possibility. It was at those stages that the foundation was laid for the ascendancy of Goodluck Jonathan to the Presidency.

Eriye’s attempt to x-ray Senator Chukwumerije’s political career and reference to his socialist convictions should not have been part of the discourse, except that some Nigerians have formed the habit of preferential judgment to suit their parochial worldview.

Talking about the Senator’s stint in the IBB regime, where he served as Minister of Information has become a refrain for some uninformed or mischievous commentators in Nigerian politics. When did it become a sin in Nigeria for socialist ideologues or progressive politicians to serve military governments in Nigeria.

During the civil war, under the regime of Gen.Yakubu Gowon, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was Minister of Finance; Bola Ige served as a Commissioner in the then military regime of the Western State while Dr. Tunji Otegbeye, the leader of the defunct Socialist Workers and Farmers Party of Nigeria, SWFPN, operated as an unofficial diplomat for the Gowon administration, in-charge of Soviet Affairs. Even Mallam Aminu Kano and Anthony Enahoro were Ministe
rs in the cabinet.

In the 1990s, Ebenezer Babatope and Dr. Olu Onagoruwa served in the military regime of the late Gen. Sani Abacha. Why should the case of Senator Chukwumerije be singled out for condemnation, with the charge of opportunism?

The point has to be made that the progressive political movement in Nigeria has undergone severe mutations since the civil war. Otegbeye himself, in his book, The Turbulent Decade, published in 1999, referred to this development as the “political polarisation and dispersal” of the progressive camp, which paved the way for unfettered military dictatorship in Nigeria, the rise of billionaire giants alongside the grinding poverty of the masses”.

The socialist movement was weakened when the so-called progressives joined the military government at the centre, in the face of the obvious fact that the Eastern masses were facing extermination. That was against the universal principle of the socialist international.

If Eriye and his co-travellers were socialists themselves, then one would have referred them to the prescriptions of Rosa Luxembourg – a German socialist-who articulated what should be the proper conduct of socialist partisans in the event of bourgeois wars as against wars of national liberation.

Let it be well understood that some Igbo patriots in the Nigerian project often felt betrayed by the turn of events, especially given the fact that their early spirit of pan-Nigerianism was subverted by bantustan elements who raised the banner of tribalism and ethnic nationalism in the wake of the anti-colonial struggle.

Even now that ethnic nationalism has acquired a militant character, the Igbos will not be the first to throw stones. But that does not mean that they should be taken for granted or their rights trampled upon.