ALAIGBO WILL BECOME LIKE SOMALIA...... UNLESS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji



This piece is in response to the high incidence of criminal activity in Alaigbo; it says that civilization is skin deep in Alaigbo and that if left alone Igbos would behave like lawless folk; it calls for a period where Igbos are subjected to iron fisted rule of law and forced to  respect human dignity and care for one another.


       I have followed the discussion on Abia state becoming a lawless haven, a place where thieves do their thing in broad day light, kidnappers picking up whoever they want and holding them hostage until ransom money is paid them, and how possibly the government at Umuahia is in cohort with what is going on in that state.  The more I read about what is going on at Abia and other parts of Alaigbo and think about it the more I shake my head in despair. The future does not bode well for Alaigbo. Unless drastic action is taken to arrest the deteriorating situation, I believe that Alaigbo will, sooner or later, degenerate to the like of Somalia: a lawless heaven; in fact, I believe that Alaigbo could be worse than Somalia!  Why so? Put on your thinking hat, if you have any, and let us see why. Please desist from imanjakara; stop the Igbo tendency to talk for the sake of making noise without reflecting on what is really going on in their world.

     Alaigbo did not develop Alaigbo wide governmental structure. Each Igbo town, usually a few square miles and a few hundred persons, more or less, governed itself.  It is actually giving them too much credit to say that they governed themselves for they did not have well defined structures for governance; they did not have legislative, executive, and judicial structures for governance.

       Alaigbo was a stateless society; governance was performed by the entire adults of a village coming together as Umuamala, Umudiala. The gathered adults tried to solve their social-political problems.

      To understand how such primitive societies governed themselves anthropologists devised what is called functionalist methodology whereby instead of going to study the structures for legislation, execution and adjudication in them observers inferred who performed such functions in those primitive societies. In primitive societies that did not develop well defined mechanisms for governing themselves, Levi Straus (the anthropologist most associated with functionalist analysis), urged observers to infer who does what in them by observing their behaviors, not by studying the structures that perform known governmental functions.

      Why is it important to know that Alaigbo did not develop beyond primitive levels of governance?

       Because they did not have Igbo wide political structure they did not socialize their people to know how laws are made in large polities and device mechanisms for implementing laws. Igbos did not have more than primitive mechanism for getting people to obey the law, and for punishing those who disobeyed the law. There were no police, judges, courts, jails, prisons etc in Alaigbo. In so far that criminals were punished it inhered in selling them into slavery. For many centuries Igbos used selling their people into slavery as the only means of removing criminals from their society!

       Igbos also relied on religion, ostracizing and or shaming folk to get them to eschew antisocial behaviors.

      More critically, Igbos were not socialized to obey Igbo wide laws made by Igbo wide political structures that were respected by all Igbos. An Igbo can, more or less, obey the laws made in his village for he understands that his village is Umu-Nnwanna (his fathers children) and he has some sort of affiliation to them and cares for their welfare, but he does not generalize such filial feeling towards persons from other parts of Alaigbo. Thus, whereas an Igbo could desist from stealing from members of his village he does not see anything wrong stealing from other Igbos who are not from his village.

      It was European colonialism that gave Igbos their current shallow sense of oneness. In 1906 the British colonized Alaigbo. The British conjoined Alaigbo with other parts of Nigeria. Igbos, therefore, were forced by the need to make a living in British Nigeria to go to other parts of Nigeria. While in non-Igbo parts of Nigeria those Non-Igbos saw them speaking what appeared to be the same language, Igbo, and grouped them as one people and treated them as one people. But in actual fact Igbos did not see themselves as one people. They saw themselves according to where they came from. Igbo identification at best is clan wide.

      The Igbo from Owerri certainly did not see himself as having anything in common with the Igbo from Umuahia, Onitsha etc.  In fact, the Igbo from Owerri may feel more related to, say, Yoruba and Ijaw people than his fellow Igbos!

      Nevertheless, other Nigerians treated all Igbo speaking people as the same thus a sense of being members of a nation began to take hold. Gradually, Igbos in Hausa speaking parts of Nigeria and Yoruba speaking parts of Nigeria etc began to identify themselves as one people (and formed their Igbo state unions).

       The relevant point is that it was colonialism and the exigencies of living in British Nigeria that gave a disparate people a feeling that they are one people; prior to the advent of the British Igbos did not develop to a point where they had a sense of being one people (which a unified polity gives a people).

      Igbos have a unique character structure: they are very verbally abusive of other persons.  They revel in putting other persons down. In Northern Nigeria they insulted Hausas; in Western Nigeria they insulted Yorubas.

      Igbos tend to have supercilious sense of superiority towards other Nigerians. This sense of superiority is particularly surprising considering that some other Nigerian groups attained higher levels of political development. Arguably, Hausas, Edos and Yorubs attained feudal state (in Karl Marx developmental categories societies go from where Igbos are, primitive communalism, to slave, to feudal, to bourgeois and finally to industrialized society). Given that they are at the lowest step in political development Igbos ought to feel inferior to their neighbors! Perhaps, they feel inferior and compensate with fictional superiority; they mask their inferiority with false sense of superiority to others? (It does not matter how they feel; what is germane is what is true; in truth all human beings: Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, and Ijaw, white, black, man, woman etc are the same and coequal; superiority and inferiority feeling is delusional.)

      Because of their tendency to degrade other Nigerians and their tendency to feel falsely superior to other Nigerians, other Nigerian hated them. Because they are hated every once in a while they are attacked and even killed. Hausas have on a number of occasions descended on Igbos living in their lands and killed some of them.

      These hatred and killings cumulatively gave Igbos a sense of being separate from other Nigerians and thus contributed to their incipient sense of nationhood.

      Between 1966 and 1970 Igbos underwent a military struggle with Nigeria (Biafra war) and that common struggle contributed to their sense of being a unified group.

     All said, Igbos are beginning to develop a sense of being one people but that sense of nationhood is skin deep; it is not yet burned into their psyche. It takes a long historical process for a people to burn into their unconscious minds a feeling that they are one people. The English, for example, have had over a thousand years of common struggles and now have in their minds a feeling that they are one people. Germans have had over two thousand years of common struggles and now know themselves as one people.

        Igbos have had about one hundred years of living in one polity (the British unified Nigeria in 1914). Igbos have not undertaken many historical struggles that normally give a people a sense of oneness.

      Though they glibly talk about being one people, when they relate to each other they actually do not treat each other as one people. I found this phenomenon out when I stated a business and recruited some Igbo professionals to work with me, trusting them. Unknown to me they were working behind my back not only to take over the business but to clean me out (go to the bank and take the several thousand dollars I deposited as required by state authorities as  bond money for my business). These people treated me as an alien and did not see anything wrong stealing from me and destroying my business. And when I complained about their antisocial behavior, like amoral and shameless criminals they went to the Internet to desecrate my name; they said loads of lies about me hoping to shame me and out of shame I would keep quiet and allow them to continue behaving like criminals while presenting an image of being law abiding persons to the rest of the world.

      I learned that what these wild men did to me is what they do to each other! In effect, they do not really have a sense of being a people hence do not work together.

     Compare and contrast how white men work together. If a white man, say, Bill Gates, has a business idea other white men gather around him and work with him in a cooperative manner to make his business venture succeed.

      Igbos work to destroy each other’s business. They work for white men (and, hopefully, the white men they work for do not give them managerial authority otherwise they would rob them and destroy their business).

     The salient point is that Igbos, as I know them to be, not as they pretend to be, are not yet identified with other Igbos; their professed sense of nationhood is superficial.  They do not have psychological sense of being one people.

      Because they do not have a sense of being one people they find it easy to steal from each other. Hence the current spade of stealing, kidnapping etc going on in Alaigbo.

       It should be noted that Igbos are one of the world’s most self-centered, narcissistic, proud and vain people. These people are incredibly selfish. They work only for their self interests and to the extent that their egos are a bit expanded it is to include members of their immediate families.  They may provide for their wives and children and, perhaps, their siblings (brothers and sisters) but beyond that they have no interest in other people’s welfare.

      So-called Igbo big men masquerade around Alaigbo as very important men but do not feel any urge to put their money to creating economic opportunities that provide jobs for the mass of unemployed Igbos.

      Igbo youth go to school (increasingly to universities) and have no jobs. Unemployment in Alaigbo is over 80% and the so-called Igbo leaders do not care.

      The criminals who call themselves Igbo leaders go to Abuja and collect the moneys that the thieves of Abuja steal from the Niger Delta (oil revenue) and share them among themselves. These criminal governors, chair persons of local governments etc redirect moneys given to them to improve Alaigbo into their pockets and leave other Igbos starving.

      When ordinary Igbos complain about their poverty the criminal Machiavellians ruling them  point accusing fingers at Hausas and Yorubas; they make those two groups scapegoats and blame them for the plight of Igbos; they tell Igbos that Hausas and Yorubas rule Nigeria and are responsible for the poverty in Alaigbo. Igbos then feel angry at other Nigerians rather than at the criminal leaders who are stealing their moneys.

      Igbos refusal to see all Igbos as parts of them; Igbos refusal to work for all Igbos; Igbos permitting Igbo youth to be unemployed and so on contribute to the youths resorting to criminal behaviors.

      Igbo unemployed youth will, sooner or later, start killing the so-called Igbo big men (and should kill them, what are they living for if they do not work for the general welfare of all Igbos?).  It is only a matter of time before Alaigbo becomes a criminal’s heaven where unemployed youth run rampage stealing and killing people. The whole place would revert to Thomas Hobbes state of nature where every man is for himself and no one is for others; people will be at war with each other and life would become insecure for all; folk’s lives would be nasty, brutish and short.

      With the coming breakdown of law and order Alaigbo would become like Somalia and even worse. Folks would live like wild animals; Igbos would revert to jungle living.

      In fact, if care is not taken Igbos would revert to kidnapping their people and selling them into slavery, as they were doing until the British stopped them only in 1902 (the destruction of Aro-Chukwu slavery centered on their juju).

      These people can easily revert to primitive behaviors. If you listened to them talk you would think that they are civilized until you deal with them on one on one and you come to know that they are essentially lawless (they are currently ripping off Americans, stealing from them in a massive manner; I am talking about their 419 scams, bank scams, credit card scams and other scams; if given the opportunity they would destroy the well ordered American society, transform it to the lawless jungle they are apparently comfortable in).

      Given the lack of political development of Igbos; given Igbos lack of unified history; given Igbos tendency to be wildly individualistic; given Igbos tendency not to care for each other, they would soon degenerate to Somalia like lawless place.

      We do not have to wait for this to happen. We can do something to prevent it. We can recognize that we are dealing with wild men and stop listening to their infantile boastings and corral them into modern polities and use iron fisted discipline to get them to obey the law.

      We need to socialize these people into obeying the law. As of now their tendency is to not live by the rule of law; an iron hand must force them to live by the law. If they steal you mercilessly clamp them into jail; if they kill you line them up against a wall and shoot them to death.

       These people are wild men and need to be treated with iron fists until they internalize some sort of law and order. At present they talk about law but are wild men. We can prevent what is looming in the horizon for these people, lawlessness, by eschewing our sentimentalism and becoming draconian in treating them. They are like children who resent rules; their unruliness must be mercilessly stamped out with the whip.

     Ignore their idiot talk and treat them as if they are wild men if you want to help them; this is how I approach to them.

    Every thing in me is itching to punish Igbos; I want to punish them because they sold Africans to Arabs and white men, and, as if that disgraceful behavior was not bad enough, deny responsibility for it and, instead, only blame their partners in that heinous crime against humanity.

      How can people change their bad habits unless they take ownership of them? As long as a people deny responsibility for their anti-social behaviors and blame others for them they cannot change and become pro-social in their behaviors.

       Until these people are punished for their criminal behaviors, past and present, I doubt that they would give up their tendency to easily engage in antisocial behaviors and rationalize them.

       I hate people who live with themselves despite engaging in criminal behaviors. How dare folks be evil and still seem happy? Africans needs a Von Bismarck type leader to discipline them and get them to quake before the law. We must figure out a way to stamp out Africans penchant for criminal behavior, even if it means executing millions of African criminals.

       Criminality is not in Africans genes, as some now suspect, but in their lax societies that condone criminality. Imagine Igbos making folks their chiefs because they stole as much money as is possible from the state or businesses!  I say let us put our boots on some folks heads and force them to fall in line with civilization. The alternative is reversion to the jungle!



PS: The Federal Government should declare state of emergency in the Igbo speaking parts of Nigeria (Imo, Abia, Ebonyi, Enugu, Anambra, and parts of Rivers and Delta states), appoint a military governor with rootless, draconian character to shape Igbo people into desired form. We must make these people fear taking a penny that does not belong to them (off goes the heads of those who steal even a penny).