If there is one thing the events of the last few weeks should teach us, it is that Ala-Igbo and Ndigbo are actually more susceptible to being doomed from within than from any external factors.
I mean, regardless of who was behind the killings, destruction, arson and brigandage as well as the Boko-Haramic assault on education the East was visited with in the past few days and weeks, what is not in doubt is the fact that there are Igbos, well educated Igbos who OPENLY and PUBLICLY supported the carnage and made excuses to justify same. They are everywhere all over social media. And some of these people are medical doctors (one Mr Zubby who read medicine from the prestigious UNN and is now a medical doctor spent the past 2 days defending the fact that WAEC students from that Nkume secondary school were chased out of their exam hall by the sit-at-home enforcers. Remember, this is not some uneducated guy. He is a medical doctor who certainly wrote WEAC himself and knows you can’t get into any Nigerian University without that particular exam (English language) taken that day. Yet, he believes that jeorpadizing the academic future of innocent kids by truncating their chances of acquiring university education is a reasonable way of liberating Ndigbo from whatever bondage they are in. And there are thousands of educated Igbos who think like Zuby. So many of them are on that my video post of the Nkume incident. Very educated people.
To me, this is the most shockingly petrifying of the whole thing. That an Igbo person would not only think the destruction of the economy, lives, property as well as the academic future of his own people is acceptable under any guise but that such is the right way to get back at the govt (state or federal) for any act of injustice against Ndigbo.
I am not just appalled at the sheer mental barrenness behind this illogical logic, I’m ashamed that a human being with a functioning brain would think himself worthless enough as to defend those unconscionable acts.
Remember, I’m not talking of who is behind the killings, arson, destruction and WAEC disruption. Whether it is Lord Lugard, Buhari himself or even the DSS (like some have suggested) that is behind the mayhem is not the issue here. I’m not even discussing the rightness or wrongness of the sit-at-home or whether or not it has been suspended. What I am discussing which I believe should worry every Igbo person just as it is worrying me is the fact that there are Igbos, educated Igbos who publicly defend and justify these things and are currently doing that even as I type.
This is heartbreaking.
We need to stop pretending that the level of mental degradation that produced people who reason this way can be cured by a mere suspension of sit-at-home or even the release of one of our own currently being held in Abuja.
Beyond the calamitous leadership in the East (some of our politicians are a walking disappointment), we have a far bigger and more lethal problem in our hands and that is the proliferation of “mental orphans” in our region (apologies to my friend, Temi Dayo). This is a problem that requires urgent attention if we intend to salvage our noble ancestry from the savagery of her numberless Savages.
Charles Ogbu
