‘Igbo have so much investment in the north. You don’t expect us to leave ‘

Okechukwu Ugo has been left in a predicament
after an ultimatum was issued for all southern
Christians of Igbo heritage to leave Nigeria’s
Muslim-majority north.
“I was born in Kano,” the building materials
salesman told AFP in Sabon Gari, a Christian
enclave on the edge of the country’s biggest
northern city.
“My father relocated to Kano from the east more
than 60 years ago. I don’t have any other place
to call home apart from Kano.”
Since the call was made by a Muslim group, the
Arewa Youth Consultative Forum (AYCF), on
June 8, the federal government in Abuja has
repeatedly called for calm.
But the notice to Igbo to leave the north by
October 1 has brought to the fore barely-
concealed ethnic and religious tensions across
Africa’s most-populous nation.
In the Igbo-dominated southeast, the Indigenous
People of Biafra (IPOB) movement, led by the
charismatic Nnamdi Kanu, has been increasingly
saying it wants to go its own way.
Ugo, however, wants nothing to do with any of
it.
“The government should end all these calls for
secession in the east and quit notice to Igbo in
the north for national cohesion,” he said.
– Biafra blamed –
Rising communalism and anti-Igbo sentiment
has been blamed on IPOB, stoked by memories
of 1967 when their predecessors declared an
independent republic of Biafra in the southeast.
The declaration led to a brutal 30-month civil
war and more than one million deaths, most of
them Igbos, from starvation and disease.
Stanley Obiora, a 40-year-old Igbo trader in
Kano, has like Ugo lived all his life in Sabon Gari
and said Kanu and his ilk don’t speak for him.
“The northern youth said they issued the
ultimatum in reaction to the Biafra agitation
which we, the Igbos in the north, are not party
to,” he added.
“We call on our elders on the east to caution
our youth from making reckless utterances that
put their kinsmen in the north at the receiving
end.
“The Igbo have so much investment in the
north. You don’t expect us to leave and
abandon all that we worked to build overnight.”
– North-south divide –
Nigeria is roughly evenly split between the
Muslim-majority north and the largely Christian
south, but the country is made up of more than
250 ethnic groups.
The biggest is the Hausa-speaking Fulani in the
north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo
in the southeast. Many have relocated for
economic reasons over the years.
The veteran Nigeria specialist Dmitri-Georges
Lavroff has described the north as “quasi-feudal
and under-developed”.
Northerners feel “alien to the urbanised,
commercial and industrial south, inhabited by a
willingly expansionary people.”.
They “have the impression they were
economically ‘colonised’ by the Igbo traders
from the south”, he wrote in a research paper
“On the path of national unity”.
Fifty years ago, there was a massacre of Igbos
in the north in retaliation for a January 1966
military coup d’etat seen as orchestrated
predominantly by Igbo army officers.
That led to the Igbo declaration of secession.
Obiora pointed out there had been previous quit
notices in the north, adding: “I hope it all comes
to pass, as previous quit notices.”
With memories long and the history of what
happened next not forgotten, the authorities are
also keen to avoid a repetition at all costs.
– Unity at stake –
This week, Nigeria’s Vice-President Yemi
Osinbajo met state governors and appealed to
them to calm tensions, warning that “careless
expressions… may degenerate into crisis”.
Osinbajo, deputising for President Muhammadu
Buhari who has been on sick leave since early
May, said there was a need to “speak up… and
ensure that we protect our democracy”.
He added: “From all of the consultations… we
agreed that Nigeria’s unity should not be taken
for granted, no-one wants to see us go down
the path of bloodshed or war.”
The AYCF made its statement in Kaduna, a
powder keg of simmering ethnic and religious
tensions that has previously erupted in deadly
violence.
The state’s governor, Nasir El-Rufai, was not at
the meeting.
For Nigerian security specialist Don Ekereke the
issue demonstrated an increasing disconnect
between politicians and the people.
“They (the politicians) seem to only care about
winning elections and their personal
aggrandisements,” he told AFP.
“Now that the president is sick and not running
the show, his northern constituency is agitated
and not happy.
“I think this somehow contributes to the rising
tensions and explains the political brinkmanship
by untouchable Arewa youths.”