For the Nnamdi Kanu theatre, two eyes saw it in Nigeria. For one, it was a gangster act. For another, it was a sleek score for Nigerian Intelligence.
For the Igboho saga, no one saw the attack as act of heroism. It was a forest cat nibbling a rat.
But the matter for this essayist started before the two onslaughts.
The intelligence forces invited the acerbic cleric Gumi over. It was not to probe or poke him. His hoary beard and whirlwind tongue remained intact. It was the show before the show-off.
They gave Gumi a slap on the wrist. Kanu had cuffs on the wrist. For a different grist, Igboho had blood on his street.
I wonder how a southern priest chummy with bandits would have swayed under this state? Would he have the fortitude to walk the forest aisles? Would he not be tagged a rebel leader or collaborator? Will they say he gave a baptismal fire to bandits? Or will they call him an anointer of the men of blood? Won’t they coerce him to bare the geographical details of their hideouts. Won’t they go to their bush havens, bomb and flush them out, and put paid to the narrative of mayhem and slaughter? Why the lopsided magistracy? Why is it rage here, and softness there, when all over we need the equality of official justice?
Yet, I have no tears to shed for Kanu, or a case to make for an ethnic entrepreneur who slayed peace in his homeland he sought to save, called Yoruba clerics to be stoned to death, carried the passport of a zoo country and, by implication, making himself a zoo ambassador or a monkey or hyena in the babel of caged squealers. He consecrated cutting the ears or lopping off heads, paralysed a region for his ego for a few days. The people feared his security forces more than the official ones. He virtually committed a coup in the east, atrophied official Nigeria in the region, and installed a de facto Biafra. In spite of Operation Python Dance, the Igbo dreaded the ESN more. The snake crawled as though coy when Kanu squalled.
The centre watched like a spectator. It recalls the rebellion under the geriatric King David in the Bible when one of his sons ogled the throne. “And now, behold, Adonijah reigneth; and now, my lord the king, thou knowest not.”
For me, it makes little sense to speculate whether it was right to pick him up or not. How naïve Kanu was to allow kudi to lure him out of his lair. It shows how half-cooked a rebel or hero he is, and how he pined for the lush life of the flesh, as Lai Mohammed said. Lai Mohammed may be right, but he was wrong-headed. Is it not in the same government that we have seen men, like the attorney general, mint parties? He made financial excess into moral excrescence in the extravagance of Naira rain?
We must not forget that it was Buhari, who made Kanu into a monster. Just as Mazisi Kunene in his epic poem turned Shaka the Zulu into a monster by killing his love Noliwe, Buhari made Kanu into a gradual descent into a hate machine. In the Jonathan years, he was an outlier, an irritant and, at best, an entertainer. The Jonathan administration made the Igbo the centre. His middle name was Azikiwe. He gave appointments and contracts to their elites. When oil was over $100 dollars per barrel, he did not see the bad roads in the region, or do any consequential project for the folks. But they were happy with him. Sentiment upended welfare.
Enter Buhari. The opposite is the story. Buhari has done more work in infrastructure for the east with his trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) than any leader since Gowon. But Buhari stirred the eastern fury. He alienated them in appointments, and tars them as pariah in his rhetoric. He has up till today not learned how to speak with them. He speaks at them.
Even if he paves the eastern infrastructure in gold, they will not hug him. It is a lesson in leadership sanctified in the words of Oscar Wilde: sentiment is more important than reason. We may recall that Soyinka hails Amaechi for the western train and would not acknowledge Buhari. History will however restore that credit. Not now.
History is repeating itself in the north. Buhari is doing to the north what Jonathan did to the east. He is plying the elite with appointments while neglecting the streets. Especially in security. His northern elite may like him, but their people are suffering. They are dying on the streets, their blood mixing with their farm millets and corns. Their daughters are losing their virginal flow to goons. Their wives are widowed in their teens. The talakawa politician has suddenly lost the ability to look down over his high shoulders.
There was an obsession with Kanu, and it might have accounted for why he put off his trip for medical check-up. That can wake up his biological clock. Finding Kanu might have refuelled his haemoglobin and reengineered his heartbeat. What a health boost.
The obsession was funny when a northern group gave a 100 million Naira bounty on Kanu’s head, not Dogo Gide or any of the forest tormentors. They were more interested in body count in the east where less than hundreds have fallen than under their very nose where thousands are falling like precious sparrows.
The Kaduna State governor was at it again with false equivalences, saying that Kanu was worse than bandits. Was that equivalence necessary? He has withdrawn his kids from public school, but others’ kids can remain there. He just doesn’t know how to talk. He was right though about carpet bombing the bandits.
If the security forces put as much diligence to go after the forest renegades as they did to Kanu, maybe things will be different. EL Rufai says they don’t have centralised authority as though that minimises their carnage.
It is fear that made them lionise Kanu and Igboho. It is fear that keeps making them enlarge the duo in the people’s minds.
Kanu has grown so big that he has bifurcated the Igbo mind. They don’t like him but they accept him. That is the dilemma. They don’t want to leave Nigeria but they are not happy inside it. It is like an estranged lover who loves the partner but is waiting and praying for the halcyon day while another rascal hovers around the window with the seduction of libido and lies. That is more exciting than the gilded oppressor at home. Kanu is not Ojukwu, who responded to pogrom and the spontaneous bonfire of nationalist separatism. Ojukwu knew that even if he relented, the market women could burn him in the street. Biafra was in the mind before the war. Kanu is mining it from the recesses of the Igbo soul and memory. He laid the firewood. Buhari is helping him light it.
As for Igboho, he is being lionised, too. Why attack his residence? Why not charge him to court? The man has said and done enough for a clever court case? Why resort to attack. Why remove the CCTV when you want to accuse him of gathering weapons? Who will believe their story that they met charms and guns there? So, do they think those arms paraded are enough to raise an army? Can they defeat the Nigerian army from an apartment? The herdsmen have more than that. Why not go after them with the same zeal. We don’t have an equity of official indignation, and that makes the case of this government all the more baffling. Who is advising these guys? Do they really think that an enlightened race like the Yoruba can line up behind a country bumpkin who cannot weave a holy sentence and throw up a nuanced idea?
The Yoruba are too clever for an insular mind, and Buhari and his men should know better than to make a bad case worse by doing bad things.
When the Americans were in a ferment for revolution, Benjamin Franklin said, “the revolution was in the hearts and minds of the American people.”
What the people want is justice, not revolution. A gangster act has a danger of turning a home cat into a bobcat. Hence we should follow the pace of peace. “The more you sweat in peace,” said Norman Schwarzkopf, “the less you bleed in war.”
But let us sweat wisely.