By Femi Kusa/
johnolufemikusa@gmail.com
EVERY nation has its share of “good, bad, and ugly” persons. So do Nigeria’s nationalities. Sometimes we do not know who is what until the wind has blown, and the feathers have flown, revealing the anus of the hen.
Godwin Emefiele, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), wanted to be President of Nigeria on 29 May 2023. But he was told he could not run in the Presidential Primary poll of his Party, the APC, because the CBN Governor couldn’t be a politician. He became aggrieved, and fought his party and its Presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as the election approached, to make the voters hate them and vote Labour Party and its candidate, fellow Igbo Peter Obi.
The project would seem to be part of an Igbo strategy to make Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour LP Governor of Lagos State. Ordinarily, there ought to be nothing wrong with Gbadebo becoming Governor of Lagos State, except for the misgivings of Yorubas strategists who investigated his antecedents and parenthood. They came up with the following findings which neither Gbadebo nor LP has denied.
a. His father is Yoruba, mother an Igbo from Anambra State. They did not marry. He is estranged from his father. He attended Christland Primary School in Lagos, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Lagos. His wife, Ifeyinwa, is from Abia State.
b. Personally, Peter Obi chose him as LP candidate over four full-blooded Yoruba contestants from Lagos Island.
3. He is said to have been an IPOB Commander in Onitsha and an article of trade between IPOB and Peter Obi: If Obi choose Gbadebo Rhodes, IPOB would ceasefire in the Southeast during the election and give him massive votes. It is also alleged that IPOB members are among his personal security and that he once twitted:
FEAR THAT WHAT? IPOB WILL COME AND SHOOT UP THEIR SHOP…EVEN WHEN OBA OF LAGOS THREATEN TO DROWN OR NURTW AND THUGS US CLOSE MARKET IGBO PEOPLE RESIST… BIAFRA DAY TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED AND RESPECTED.
That day is unimaginable to traditionalists and moderates in Lagos when the government and the civil service could become ethnicised, the chieftaincy law amended to officially make an IGWE to head Ibo communities in each of the five divisions (IBILE) of Lagos State… Ikorodu, Badagry, Ikeja, Lagos Island and Epe. At present, the IGWE is not a legal traditional ruler in Lagos.
It is in this scenario that suspicions of Emefiele’s support for Peter Obi make some sense. He hatched a grand plan to fight banditry and demonetize the elections. President Muhammadu Buhari fell for the plan, which might have suited his own game plans and, together, they put Nigerians under a cash squeeze never seen in the history of their country. Nigerians who had money in the banks could not withdraw it. As of 02 March 2023, when the Supreme Court freed Nigeria from Emefiele’s cash squeeze or stranglehold or suffocation, it took an average of eight hours every day for poor ordinary folks to draw N3,000 for daily upkeep and business income. Businesses slowed down. Many poor citizens depended on whatever income they made in the morning for lunch and from lunch for dinner. But how much income could they make in one day when much of the day is spent on long bank queues? Many children ate once daily. Many children missed school or walked down to find no teacher.
Some people died in hospitals because doctors would not attend to patients who did not prepay for treatment. One man’s pregnant wife was bleeding. The POS operators Emefiele referred everyone to were charging about N1,500 on every N5000 withdrawn. They, too, were buying money! This harassed husband bought money to pay for the treatment of his bleeding wife. But the hospital said he had to make another payment for a blood transfusion. By the time he bought money for that, his wife was gone! Imagine what Emefiele’s election period cash suffocation turned Nigerian doctors into… ugly cash-sucking doctors!
As for me, I sent my small business on holiday and had one meal daily. I refused to buy money with my hard-earned money. So, I couldn’t buy pharmaceutical eye drops to lower my eye pressure. I am lucky to not need drugs for blood pressure, prostate gland, or bone joint challenges. I had no bath soap. I borrowed N4,500 from a young man for a small radio to follow the news. The networks are not transferring money well and if your transfer gets stuck and your money is hanging in the air somewhere, you would need about 10 working days to recover it.
Emefiele’s Game
I struggled to deduce if deliberately, he was working for PETER OBI, or if it was a coincidence that Obi’s supporters saw him as doing so since he and OBI are IGBOS and since the majority of OBI’s followers are IGBOS and have ethnicised LP. Ibos gave the world the impression of this synergy all over the internet. As businesses suffered, including Igbo businesses, Igbos kept advising themselves on the internet to ignore the pain and joyfully weather the season because “it is going to be in our favour”.
I wondered how the pains would be in their favour if it would not make the electorate despise the APC and its Presidential candidate, TINUBU. Everyone heard Tinubu loud and clear at his Abeokuta campaign rally when he said the cash squeeze, like the petrol shortage and price hike, amid a large stock of petrol supply in the country, was a stud stacked on his path to impede his success.
SUPREME COURT
There are two ways I see the Supreme Court judgement of 02/3/2023. It rejected Emefiele’s cash squeeze. The CBN was established to fight neither banditry nor vote buying. These were jobs of other government agencies. This was a disgrace for Emefiele, the CBN and political actors, including Peter Obi and the LP, who did not criticize Emefiele and failed, thereby, to support Nigerian people against their tormentors. We do not know yet when Emefiele will implement the unanimous judgement of their Lordships. I suspect he would wait for the Supreme Court to give him a certified true copy of the judgement. Thereafter, he will send it to President Buhari for further instructions. This way, he would transfer the blame for their iniquitous blunder to Buhari.
Meanwhile, the Attorney-General and Justice Minister, Abubakar Malami, said, after the Supreme Court judgement, that he knew nothing about this project. At the start of the mayhem, Finance Minister Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed said Buhari and Emefiele did not consult her. Even the National Council of States distanced itself from the plot, telling Buhari what the Supreme Court has just told him and the CBN. The Court noted in particular that they did not obey its earlier judgement before the presidential election that all parties to the dispute maintain the status quo ante.
Emefiele would boastfully tell the nation the CBN had destroyed the old notes in its custody! Why the hurry, or is it treachery if there were no game plan, and if this plan was not to favour a fellow Igbo man, Peter Obi? It is noteworthy that Peter Obi neither criticised nor condemned the cash squeeze while Nigerians were suffering since public anger was directed at the APC and Tinubu whose electoral fortunes he wished to inherit.
Emotion tilted, favourably, towards Obi, in Emefiele’s game plan. Igbos must have been diligently discussing this game plan at their village meetings nationwide because their internet messages kept saying something like “it is GOING TO BE IN OUR FAVOUR”. The long and short of it is that Emefiele may have abused his office. Had their Lordships acted earlier than the 25 February Presidential polls, Emefiele and Obi’s followers may have said they took sides with APC and Tinubu. All Igbo election literature on the internet soiled the personality of Tinubu as a vote buyer. Igbos never saw Atiku as a vote buyer. They never saw Abacha’s son in Kano as a vote buyer. They saw only Obi as a Saint! Yet, Adams Oshiomhole posted on the Tik Tok video of an LP agent caught buying votes!
Thankfully, Tinubu won the election while Atiku and Obi lost. My elementary understanding of Nigerian politics taught me what happened.
OBI’S STRATEGIES
The LP had no tested structure. Obi relied on the herd instinct of the Igbos in the South-east and of the Igbos in the diaspora. Since the end of the 1967 – 70 Biafran war, the Igbos had been seeking Igbo Presidency. If an election didn’t bring it, they considered themselves marginalized. It didn’t matter to them that they flowered under President Shehu Shagari when Dr Alex Ekwueme was Vice-President; under President Olusegun Obasanjo, President Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan and under incumbent President Buhari who gave them the long-desired second Niger Bridge. They turn their hate for Buhari to love, believing the cash squeeze will give Peter Obi the Presidency. Thus, a Peter Obi Presidency became an Igbo movement.
Losing the Presidency to Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it didn’t matter to Igbos that Obi defeated Tinubu, a Yoruba, by 16,000 votes in his Yoruba home base, while Tinubu did not pick up to 10,000 votes in each of the five Igbo states against about 400,000 for Obi in some.
In Delta State, with a visible Igbo population, Igbo rejected PDP Vice-Presidential candidate Ifeanyi Okowa, an Igbo, for Peter Obi, who dealt Edo State an unexpected blow. The PDP and his Governor Godwin Obaseki, supported Emefiele at the Supreme Court, forgetting the Igbo population back home and that, during the Biafran war, Igbos overran Mid-west Region in only a few days to declare it the REPUBLIC OF BENIN, on their way to Lagos. The Mid-West Region was created out of Western Region and comprises today’s Delta State, Edo State and part of Bayelsa State. In the Presidential election, Igbos again ran over the “Mid-West Region”. But they have made a grave mistake by ethnicism of LP and, thereby, placing other nationalities on their toes.
Peter Obi also counted on the cash squeeze bitterness and on young persons who were too immature to recognise that, at 61, Obi was not one of them. They were also too immature to ask about which opportunities he created in Anambra for young persons to keep them busy at home and not hunt for opportunities in Port Harcourt, Lagos and several places in South-Western Nigeria which were greener pastures for them. Finally, Obi did not reckon with the fact that Northern Nigeria had not forgiven the Igbos for the killing of the Sardauna of Sokoto in 1966 and denigrating remarks about his elimination by some irresponsible Igbos which, unfortunately, led to the unpardonable and unacceptable killing of Igbos in the North and in the civil war which followed.
Unlike Yorubas who are careless with history, Igbo and Hausa/Fulani tell their children their versions of Nigerian history. Personally, I believe that to resolve these disputes, the Igbos need to apologise to the nation for the selective killings in 1966 while the Hausa/ Fulani need to apologise as well to the Igbos for their overreaction. Yoruba political leaders and military officers were killed in 1966 but Yorubas did not kill Igbos in retaliation. When Col. Banjo refused Lt. Col. Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s order to march Biafran troops from the conquered “Mid-West Region” to Lagos to capture the South-West for him and to post an Igbo military governor over the Yoruba nation, (Republic of Oduduwa) did he not execute Banjo for treason against Biafra?
Did Yorubas fight Igbos? Even when Biafra bombed Lagos, during the Biafran war, killing, maiming, and damaging property did Yoruba people kill a single Igbo? Did Yoruba people not, instead, protect Igbo property in their region and hand them over with accrued rent when the Igbo landlords re-appeared? What could be greater affection, love, and accommodation beyond this? Were Igbo property in Rivers, Calabar, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa and in the north not confiscated by the aborigines (the natives) from the Igbos as “ABANDONED PROPERTY” without compensation?
QUESTIONS
There are many unanswered questions …
1. Many people advised against completely relying on machines, but the noisemakers had their way and President Buhari incorporated it into a new electoral law. If he failed to, he would be misunderstood. Now, machines have shown that machines are no more than machines. The braking system of a brand-new car may fail. On 25th February 2023, many of them failed to work. Could electoral officers have sent home voters not captured in the machines? There had to be a fallback position to avoid chaos. I thought I heard the INEC chairman meticulously explain this fall-back position at one of his press briefings. So, why all the fuss now?
2. When Peter Obi and the LP swept through Lagos, gladdening the egos of his supporters, was the foregoing not the mode of voting? Did they complain about other states in which LP won?
3. In the Southeastern states, there were videos of the voting which showed clear breaches of the electoral law. Many people did not vote in the booths for privacy, but right on the desks of the electoral officers where party agents held their hands to thumbprint LP. For me, even if the electoral law criminalizes this mode of voting, I would say the law is made for man and not man for the law. This is because those voters were old people. Peter Obi won the biggest landslide victories in those states.
If those votes are thrown away, would there be peace in the South-east?
4. During one of his press briefings, the INEC chairman acknowledged the possibility that INEC servers might be hacked but said they were taking precautions. Long before then, the video of a dinner some of his supporters in Canada gave him showed some of them appealing to him to hire their services to hack into INEC servers, should the need arise. I expected Peter Obi, as a future President of Nigeria, to politely reject the offer, even if it was no more than an emotional outburst. He did not.
5. I knew in 2019 Peter Obi couldn’t penetrate the North. That region has not forgotten about Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, and the manner in which a soldier from the South-east killed him. In 2019 and by late last year, a radio clip of an interview he gave before the January 1966 coup was circulated. What he said about Igbos I cannot repeat here. The bottom line is: Northerners, Protect the NORTH. The North has added to that speech messages on the circulation of Tramadol, Codeine and similar drugs in its environment. I have been wondering why the North and the Southeast have not forgotten the events of old. It is true Sardauna died. But didn’t hundreds of thousands of Igbos die on that account in the North and in the aftermath civil war? Both regions and other Nigerian regions need to talk things over. It is not, in my view, the machines which caused Obi’s failure in the north but old wounds which have not healed and, the assumption by Obi that he could snatch the young northerners and join them to the Igbos Northerner population.
6. Atiku Abubakar thought he could secure the North, snatch South-south and scrape some grounds in the South-West. He miscalculated.
7. Bola Tinubu probably didn’t expect Lagos could yield more ground to LP as it did, through protest Yoruba votes. He did not bank too much on the Igbos of the South East. He counted on neutralizing their votes with South-West votes and securing a lead over Atiku in the North Central Region while both alone would slug it out in the North-East and the North-West, after critically confining Peter Obi to the South-East and remnant Igbo population elsewhere. So, what are all the fuss and ethnic hate all about?
GOVERNORS
The Governorship and state Houses of Assembly Elections on Saturday 11/3/2023 will probably be hotter than the Presidential election of two weeks ago. Emboldened by its 16,000 votes win in Lagos, LP will make a bolder attempt on this state and others. Some Igbos have pledged their vote for Governor Sanwo-Olu. The Governor has been warned by his party men to beware of a Trojan Horse and a Greek gift. President Buhari has rushed to Kaduna State to campaign for the APC. In Kaduna State, LP candidate Donatus Mathew Kuzalio, 34, an “Okada” rider, surprisingly won a House of Representatives seat by a margin of fewer than 400 votes against the incumbent PDP candidate.
The Presidential election has been won and lost in an overheated polity. For the sake of peace, it is better for disputants to go to court rather than further overheating the system. So far, President-elect Tinubu, the Governor of Lagos State, the Oba of Lagos, and the Igbo leader of an Igbo trader group in Lagos have ably put out the fire of OBI’s supporters that Yoruba people have something against IGBOS because of LP 16,000 votes victory in Lagos. We cannot afford a blowout. Nationwide, it may lead us back to 1966.
FEMI KUSA was at various times Editor; Director of Publication/ Editor-in-Chief of THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER; Editorial Director/ Editor-in-Chief of THE COMET NEWSPAPER. Currently, he keeps a Thursday Column on Alternative Medicine in the NATION NEWSPAPER.
Some of his health columns may be found on www.olufemikusa.com and in MIDIUM a digital platform for writers. He is active also on Facebook @ John OLUFEMI KUSA.
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