In Nigeria, the primordial fights the modern
The nation is struggling to emerge and become a modern state that runs by modern principles but the old ideas, the old concepts are fighting seriously against the modern.
In Nigeria, there is a big fight between the modern and the primordial. And it is hardly noticed. The nation is struggling to emerge and become a modern state that runs by modern principles but the old ideas, the old concepts are fighting seriously against the modern. The nation has one choice, to emerge and forsake its very ugly and slow past or cease to be a nation.
It does seem that the modern will win over the primordial. The first is the choice between recruitment of leadership by pure democratic principles or recruitment by a crude traditional system of imposition by the so-called ruling family system. In the traditional system, the rulers are picked not by democratic principles where all are equal and intending rulers submit to an election where each person has just one vote. Rather traditional rulers are picked by divination or by a set of kingmakers both of which are subject to manipulation or falsification. While the nation pretends to embrace democratic principles, you still see the politicians filing before the traditional rulers either to buy traditional titles and with them win popularity with the rulers and with the people who still think the traditional rulers are, ordained by the gods. Yoruba of the southwest believe their kings are second to the 'orisa;' in the north where Islam is the dominant religion the emirs hold sway because they hold their power to religion or certain family traditions.
The southeast which was very republican was copying its brothers and sisters in the southwest and the north by creating kings who imposed themselves on the people. Achievement is the major determinant of things in the East, call this wealth if you will; a man was reported to have bought kingship in his town because he had enough money to buy all the kingmakers and impose himself as king. Ndigbo has further developed the practice of having kings outside their domains. They say this was developed to protect the interest of Ndigbo anywhere they live outside their domains in the southeast. But this extension of what has become traditional with Ndigbo is creating and conflicting with the modern in places where Ndigbo lives in Nigeria. They are not able to integrate and adjust with their host communities.
Their host communities therefore are always suspicious of the Igbo. It is already creating tension in Lagos where the Igbo have bought land and built properties. Ndigbo feels it has a claim to Lagos because she, as claimed has the majority of the population. Lagos indigenes and other Yoruba who also immigrated to Lagos took up battle with Igbo. Politicians, notably Bola Tinubu now president took advantage of the conflict to whip up support for his candidacy. Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, an Igbo politician also took that advantage and pushed hard to win Lagos. Obi won the presidency in Lagos but his party, Labour, could not repeat the feat at the governorship elections which took place a week later, where the Labour Party candidate, Gbadebo Rhodes Vivour a Yoruba man born of an Igbo mother and Yoruba father but with almost no trace of Yorubaness in him ( he speaks Igbo fluently but has little understanding of Yoruba) was trounced by Babajide Sanwoolu, a full Yoruba who was the candidate of the APC, the party that fielded Bola Tinubu as presidential candidate. Ndigbo by tradition do not sell land in their domain to foreigners but buy even with aggression in other lands where they live and do business. This is setting the nation on fire with accusations of domination and land grabbing against the Igbo. The Igbo model of investing in lands and properties in other lands present a modern opportunity of really mixing the diverse peoples of Nigeria but the Ndigbo refusal to jettison its tradition of not selling land to others in its domain does not sit well with Nigerians from other ethnicities.
If Nigeria can overcome Igbo primordial instincts and let it allow others to buy land in its domain and encourage the Igbo modernism of foraging into other lands among other ethnicities, Nigeria will emerge into a modern state. A young Igbo man built a very expansive hotel on Victoria Island in Lagos, a very exquisite area of the city. His Igbo kith and kin criticized him that he should have built that hotel in Ndigbo domain. That was the Ndigbo primordial instinct but the young Igbo adventurer knows that primordial instinct in business is suicidal. He knows Igbo are not pleasure-seeking people so the hotel business will not sell in the southeast. The hotel business has a greater chance of success in Lagos where the Yoruba live with their easy-going pleasure-seeking attitude. An Igbo Eze once told this writer: "Igbo man no go give you money." We were marketing a magazine which we had planned to celebrate the death of a Ndigbo icon, the late Chief Emeka Ojukwu, who led the defunct Biafra in the tragic civil war. As he said, we found out. A people that is stingy with money will not patronize hotels. The young Igbo businessman resolved the conflict between primordial and modern in favour of Lagos. The governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwoolu, the Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu to whom the young Igbo adventurer prostrated in the Yoruba fashion and the Emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero were all at the opening of the hotel and all spoke glowingly of the young Igbo entrepreneur, an indication of his wise choice and success.
Igbo want the miracle of Lagos to also happen in their domain back home. If their businessmen and businesswomen would set up business in the southeast as they do in Lagos, the southeast would be more beautiful and richer than Lagos, they reason. They are also pained because Igbo businessmen are women are not setting up business in their domain. But this will never happen until they change their attitude to other ethnicities and especially in the hospitality industry, and learn to chill out some more.
President Bola Tinubu and his newly appointed Chief of Army Staff, General Taoreed Lagbaja are having a hell of a time managing the fire over the killing of about 120 citizens in Tudun Biri, Kaduna State, who were said to be celebrating the birth of Prophet Mohammed (SAW) but were mistakenly bombed by the drones of the Nigeria Army. The Army claimed that it was a mistake and promised it would never happen again. A drone accident is not new, it happened a while ago in Somalia in the hands of soldiers of the United States of America who mistakenly bombed a woman and her four children in a pickup vehicle. The woman and her children were mistaken for terrorists and killed by American military experts. But in Nigeria, the primordial kicked in, General Taoreed Lagbaja and his boys are trying to curtail the population of the north by killing that number of its indigenes. If they were not on a mission to curtail the population of the north, they hated Islam, the religion of the people. More salt was added to the injury because Major General Valentine Okoro, possibly an Igbo, commands the One Division of the Nigerian Army, Kaduna, nearest to Tudun Biri from where the drone was launched.
The Army's explanation that the terrorists who have been giving the Kaduna citizens a hell of a time often embed themselves among the civil populace using them as human shields will not assuage this primordial instinct, it is an opportunity to exact some pound of flesh from Tinubu and General Taoreed Lagbaja who they demanded must be made to resign. Former President Muhammadu Buhari failed woefully to tackle terrorism in the north but when Bola Tinubu mounted the saddle he decided to employ technology to tackle the problem by carrying the war to the terrorists in their den which included Tudun Biri in Igabi local government area of Kaduna State. That the terrorists have killed thousands of people all over the nation matters nothing to the primordial people, they are better preserved than killed, more so when they are Muslim kith and kin. Nigeria must win this war of primordial instinct. Now the war over the terrorists who became terrorists in the first place because they were denied modern education and left to have wild animals in the forests as their neighbors for many years. Without drones the war over bandits and terrorists will not be won; without education for all and sundry more dangerous phenomena will develop and Tudun Biri will not be left out. I'm persuaded that the primordial will give in to the modern. The traditional institutions must be laid to rest because they represent the primordial war against the modern, for example, the explosive claim recently by the Oba of Benin, Ewuare 11, that Benin found Lagos which is setting the nation on fire now. What is the use of that history at the present moment?