How not to make a hero

Sam Omatseye

In demeanour, he does not stoke a crowd. His rhetoric, even when on fire, does not burn down a leaf. He walks even with dignity, like one accustomed to the deference of crowds. He calls himself a Jew, in the pious not in the symbolic terms that accommodates modern Christians. Bespectacled, and sometimes with a walking stick and a fan, he conveys the carriage of an elder even though he is in his middle years.

When he addresses a crowd, Nnamdi Kanu comes away more as a balm than an argument.

Maybe that is why he is dangerous. Men do not have to carry the fierce visage and towering diction of an Odumegwu Ojukwu to send shudder to a ruling elite. After all, Awo had no gift of the garb in the 1960’s when he soared in the courts and in rallies. The soft-spoken swagger of the Ikenne denizen piqued the men of power enough to consign him to the confines of solitude. The power of suggestion sometimes comes in the conviction of kings than in the laws of the monarchy. De Gaulle was no orator. Neither was Washington. Pol Pot had a silky voice.

Whether we like it or not, we have made Nnamdi Kanu into a substance, from being a mere agitator in the shadows. He no longer is a poison-free serpent lurking in the hedges of Nigerian unity. His neck sprouts out, his tongue forked, venom drips. He has become more than a shadow of a titan, if a budding one.

It was not his doing. During the Goodluck Jonathan years, we could have called him a thing without a sting. If you thought so, you no longer think so after what happened in the southeast about a week ago. IPOB called the indigenous people of Biafra to stay home. Not since June 12, when a certain Ubani skulked the government of the day, had a people shrunken out of daylight. Some say it was out of the fear of punishment. Others counter that it was an act of conscientious solidarity. Whatever it was, Igbos abandoned profits for cause. The last time they started it, 30 months of gunshots, and bombs, and fratricidal dislocations turned Nigeria into a hump of a nation. About a week ago, the verve of Onitsha market, the cacophony of Owerri streets, the hum of Umuahia offices paid homage with their silences to the subversion of a former nonstarter.

He might have been nothing, if the Igbo elite were not compelled, including the erudite Pat Utomi, to ask the federal government to release the man. He was a subvert, an anarchist even, a lawless, demoniac spirit in the federation. But the nation had no right to subvert his rights in the pursuit of the purity of right in the country. We made him a hero by undermining a straightforward adherence to our own law. If we wanted to prosecute him, it meant we had the law on our side. But if we overturned that law, we had no superior moral fibre or constitutional claim. We made Kanu our equal in impunity.

So, while he was in detention, we lionised him. We made him a rebel with a cause, and he became caustic by the hour. His people cried for him, wielded sticks and machetes for him, died for him. If that is not how a cause grows into myth, how else?

Even a certain story gained momentum when his handshake reportedly healed somebody of stomach ache. Is that not how legends are made? In historical tales, we read of men who die as gods. In our age of celebrity, we are like the stories of the Greek myths where stalwarts live as gods. If Ogun, Oya, Sango, all died into deity, we are not so patient. In our lifetime, some Nigerians saw Awo in the moon. Black Scorpion, who stung Biafra many a time vanished in the battlefield. In the slavery era, a black man equated Abraham Lincoln with Jesus, saying “he walk the earth like de Lord.” French philosopher Montaigne mused in one of his seminal essays why the greatest general of all time had a reputation of giving off a scent while he sprinkled no oil on his body. He was, by nature, a scented genius. So lofty was Alexander the Great that he did not need a “cologne” to please the nostrils.

Little anoints Kanu as a force more than the court’s decision to grant him bail. Why is Sambo Dasuki still sulking behind bars? Why is the Shiite leader Ibrahim El Zakzaky not out on Zaria alleys? They were three whom the federal government have locked up against their rights. Forget the farce of conditions that the judge gave Kanu. It was an act to save the faces of a besieged judiciary. It was also to bow to the pressure of the streets and turbulence of media onslaughts. Kanu has become a hot piece of yam we must either eat or leave on the plate.

He might not have been a gentleman. He might not have been one of the men to stand up to the creme-de-la-creme of the Nigerian society. But we have, by our own fear of him, made him an icon of sorts. When Buhari won the election and became president, he looked at the man with contempt. It was naïve, and he must take responsibility for alienating a people he should have clasped into his bosom, the same way the DSS has given his Katsina home the divine right to gulp the lion’s share of recruits into the intelligence agency. Nothing but limp logic has tried to explain away that lopsided extravaganza.

Rebels are not always for good causes even when they ride populist support. U.S. confederate general Robert Lee was described as “legend incarnate” and a gentleman. He led forces to support what he and his cohorts called state’s rights. But it was a right to uphold slavery in a society that described blacks as a fraction of the human soul. Some top southern politicians still echo that toxic euphemism. Even Reagan roared his support for state’s rights. Trump is the modern-day champion.

The rebirth of Biafran anger must be traced to our habitual contempt to solve our crisis. We keep hopping from crisis to another, hoping they will just go away. Yakubu Gowon said there were no winners or losers. The Igbo believe they have been treated as losers, a cry that was almost non-existent when Jonathan, who called himself Ebele, garlanded them with choice positions. The Igbo caulked voices of dissent. They felt part of the governing elite. A Kanu would have been anathema then. He is an item today because Buhari made him.

How Buhari handled Kanu and the Biafran uproar is an example of how not to make a hero, especially in the aftermath of the relative quieting of Niger Delta militancy.