Nigeria Must Look In Maazi Nnamdi Kanu’s Mirror And Own What She Sees

By Aniedobe

I was, I am, and always will be a Biafran who also believes that wasting 100 plus years of the colonial contraption called Nigeria would be a terrible act against humanity.

I belong to the vast band of Igbo moderates who understand exactly where Maazi Kanu is coming from but do not agree on all fours with him.

In the spectrum of Igbo political space are a rightist band of Igbo nationalists, a leftist band of Nigerianists, and a long band of proud Biafrans who are vested in the idea of Nigeria as a promise that Africans must rise above petty clanishness and snatch back their dignity from neocolonialists.

Biafrans are better as Nigerians but the idea that the history and experiences of Biafra must be reposed for Nigeria to exist is one that we vehemently reject and on that we proudly stand with MNK as our brother and fellow Biafran.

If Biafra must die, Nigeria should die. If Nigeria must rise, it cannot rise without Biafra. Biafra is the mitochondria of the cell called Nigeria, complete with its own DNA and microbattery that in aggregate gives eminent life to Nigeria as a 110 year old being in world’s history.

We resent anyone who dares us to choose between Biafra and Nigeria, but we do not resent fellow Nigerians and we see Maazi Nnamdi Kanu as a proposition that Biafra must not just exist, but must thrive, as a proud colony of Israelites in Africa, a priestly caste, a people whose customs and practices have been indelibly written in the Old Testament of the Bible as people in circumsitional covenant with the God of Abraham.

Nigeria cannot scrub Biafra out of the Igbos and we see Kanu’s unjust incarceration as yet another sterile attempt to pour concrete on the history of Nigerian semites.

We see beyond Kanu’s wafting hyperbole. His grasping impetuousity is not our preferred mode of self expression but he is entitled to it and his fulminations as a media moralist does not bother us any more than a brightly clad Iman preaching about the exclusivity of Islam as the only true religion in the Universe.

Let MNK express himself in any manner that does not abridge the rights of others. His biggest crime, as all reasonable people must admit, is that he held a mirror in front of the lumbering colonial contraption called Nigeria and forced her to contemplate her reflection.

Nigeria refused to look because Nigeria is ashamed of her reflection and rather than confront her appearance, it chose to slay Maazi Nnamdi Kanu.

Nigeria must look. We insist. It is the poverty capital of the world. It has the lowest life expectancy in the world. And yet, it is one of the richest countries in the world.

Let’s get Nigerian colorful: Nigeria is a chronically sick homeless billionaire who is ashamed of the contradictions of her existence and is mad that Kanu calls her mad.

Before she became Nigeria, the human capital of that region of the world was stolen into slavery. Post slavery, they descended on same region to colonize it and steal her resources. Post colonialism, her vast natural resources are still being stolen by both internal and external agents.

In that nearly 700 years of exploitation spanning slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism, the West African Israelites now known as the Igbos, stood in the guard. No African tribe fought slavery like the Igbos, starting with the Igbo Haitians. No African tribe fought colonialism like the Igbos, led by the great Zik of Africa and no African tribe is fighting neocolonialism like the Igbos of Nigeria. That fight to end neocolonialism led to the Biafran genocide. And after the blood of Nigerians, mostly Igbos, have been shaken and pressed, the resources of Nigeria are being controlled by neocolonialists and their proxies.

The Biafran war was a fight for indirect control of Nigeria’s wealth engineered by the British as a fight for unity of a country destined to be milked by her.

For confronting Nigeria with the well known fact that tribal hostilities were artificially sown into her sinews so that Nigeria will forever be too weak to challenge her colonial overlords, Kanu became an object of intense hate.

How do you hate Kanu when Tinubu is running a hypernepotic Federal Executive in a country as diverse as Nigeria.

How does one not see that nepotism is unlawful and inherently hate engendering and an insidious security threat?

How does one not see that tribalism is the reason why terrorists from one section of the country are free while Kanu is misbranded and jailed.

How does one not see that tribalism is the reason why well known sponsors of terrorism have infiltrated the government and are untouched while Kanu is jailed.

The litany of injustices and corruption in Nigeria fills many volumes and how anyone expects such a place to not breed radicals and prophets beats the imagination.

Moralists like Nnamdi Kanu are made relevant by tribalistic disdain for social justice and his surmise is that Nigeria must be restructured before it can rise from neocolonial exploitation.

Engineered by neocolonial agents, Kanu’s movement, the Indigenous People of Biafra, was branded a terrorist group and proscribed. But to their credit and the eternal shame of repressors, Ipob opted for economic self mutilation in the form of weekly sit at home protests as a compelling demonstration of its preference for nonviolence in her mode of operation. Despite that, neocolonial agents still insist that Ipob prefers instruments of terror.

Reasonable people see beyond the charade. Security forces in Nigeria responded to Ipob’s call for peaceful referendum with hostile kinetics and triggered a just right to self defense on the part of the more militant wing of Ipob.

Let justice reign. Let Nigerians speak. Let our political arrangements be organic. Nigerians had a highly commended national conference in 2014. The same neocolonial agents who are after Kanu made sure that the resolutions of that Confab never saw the light of day.

Nigeria is lucky to be suffering from a treatable form of cancer. The treatment is restructuring to ease tribal pressure sores and grant more regional autonomies to constituent entities. This is all that Maazi Kanu asks in his rather colorful mode of self expression. Nigeria must take that medicine to cure the brain cancer that has made her a street dwelling billionaire and a laughing stock to the world.