BABATUNDE RAJI FASHOLA (SAN) AND THE HYPOCRISY OF NDIGBO! By C. Don Adinuba The Abia State government last year came up with an ingenious policy. All non-indigenous employees in the state public service, including teachers, were to be relieved of their duties because the government’s resources were meant for the indigenes. Over80% of the people affected are from Imo, Ebonyi, Anambra and Enugu states. Most leaders maintained a conspiracy of silence on this policy which for long will remain one of the greatest impediments to Igbo unity. Abia State was actually treading the path of the Enugu State government which had in the late1990s decided to sack all non-indigenes in the state’s public service in order to “save resources”. Almost every casualty is Igbo. But a number of Igbo social activists have now suddenly found their voice. The overnight activists have created an unmistakable mass hysteria in both the social media and the traditional media over the bogey that Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State has been “deporting” Igbo people from the state. Some politicians who are determined to make political capital out ofthe so-called repatriations have been busy simulating the hysteria. But perhaps, unbeknownst to these people, they are hurting in a most profound manner strategic Igbo interests. No people can survive—let alone—progress on a diet of lies and emotions, or by allowing politicians to create and sustain a culture of paranoia or siege mentality, otherwise called persecution complex. The Lagos State government launched a few year ago an ambitious project to turn Lagos, Nigeria’s economic nerve centre with a population of some 16million, into a true mega city. This entailed, among other things, the enthronement of a new social order and adifferent aesthetic regime. Consequently, the state began to clear thousands of homeless people, beggars and urchins from the streets. Thus, a large number of “area boys” who are mostly Lagos Island indigenes, like the governor, are to this day still arrested and hounded into “Black Baria” trucks by Kick Against Indiscipline (KIA) officials. Borrowing a leaf from such places as New York and Hawaii, Lagos initiated a programme of returning many destitute individuals to their home states. Over 3,000 of such people have been relocated back to northern states wherethey have now been reintegrated with their families. When about 80 were sent to Oyo State in November, 2009, the governor screamed to the high heavens that “they were dumped on Molete “Bridge” in Ibadan. About 14 destitute people from Anambra State were sent to Onitsha last week because of the failure of the State’s Ministry of Social Welfare to arrange for the arrival of these people , unlike those of Akwa Ibom and Katsina states which made proper logistic arrangements for their own people. A section of the media has since gone to town with theextremely dangerous propaganda that the Lagos State governor is driving Igbo people out of Lagos through “brazen deportations and repatriations”.Even professionals and scholars expected to be more thoughtful and strategic in their actions have capitulated so easily to the mind poisoning reports and havebeen responding exuberantly. A man who introduced himself as a professor from Nnewicalled me on the phone on Thursday morningto assert with so much authority that “only Anambra indigenes are being targeted for expulsion from Lagos because all Nigerians know that Anambra is the leader of the Igbo nation”. A lawyer in Maryland, United States, wrote that Fashola dare not relocate beggars of northern extraction, alleging that the Igbo are the whipping boy of Nigerian politics. He is blissfully ignorant of the thousands of northern beggars taken away from Borno Street in Ebute Metta and environs.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 19:48:21 +0000
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