A Disunited Nation: State Creation and the Balkanization of the Igbo.

By Obi Nwakanma

A Keynote delivered at the Quarterly Board of Directors Meeting of the World Igbo Congress,
Wyndham Garden Hotel, Harrisburg/Hershey
Harrisburg, PA, June 28, 2008.

Balkanization: the origin and circumstance of the word has a very intriguing and loaded history. It comes from war and conquest. It has come to describe acts of deliberate dismemberment aimed fundamentally at the control of a political entity. That word today best describes the Igbo nation. The Igbo has suffered from the balkanization of its political entity, and is today tottering from catalepsies occasioned by its fundamental incoherence. This incoherence manifests at all levels of the Igbo experience: at the economic, cultural, and ideological levels, and it impacts profoundly on Igbo capacity to fully engage the slippery terrain of Nigeria’s uniquely complex politics in its current formation. This, gentlemen, is the thrust of my address. I submit it therefore as a point of departure, to aid the following descriptions and analysis of the contemporary condition of the Igbo in Nigeria. Let me at this stage remind us all that one of the central causes of the Nigerian civil war, that led to the declaration of Biafra as a separate entity from the old federation, was the preemptive creation of states by Yakubu Gowon out of the Eastern region of Nigeria. It was a provocative act of balkanization. More so, indeed, because the act of creation did not take the full plebiscitory recourse necessary for that course of action to acquire the legitimacy of vox populi. The Gowon government in other words chose to play the role of the Semitic God. The dismemberment of the Eastern region through Gowon’s policy of balkanization was the first process of weakening its capacity to resist external acts of violent intrusions or organize a coherent national front in the moves towards new nationhood. Here again, the irony should not be lost on us, on the roots of the term “balkanization” itself, and its origins in war, at the heart of another conflict, one of the most defining wars of the 20th century, that began in the Balkans, and led to the dismantling and dismemberment of the Balkans as a consequence of World War 1. The Biafra war was fought essentially as a war of resistance against both the onslaught and the deliberate liquidation of the East, which was then broken into three areas of administration or states. As we know, the war was fought and lost. The Igbo had to live and do the most they could with its outcomes. One of the states created out of the Eastern Region was of course, the East Central State, shaped to contain, isolate and squelch the Igbo majority of the former Eastern Region into an in-land region. Thus from 1967; let us in fact say, between 1970 and 1976, the East Central State remained organic, until it was further broken into two states – the old Imo and Anambra States.
There were some justifications for this: in the first place, Nigeria was flush with petrodollar and apparently felt capable of absorbing the cost of expansion in the state system with its corporatist infrastructure in the 1970s. But secondly, and perhaps even more fundamentally, the structure of the state became increasingly centralized, and thus became the basis for distributing revenues, rewards, contracts, and other opportunities. The increasing power of the central government, running under the centralized authority of the military, made state initiative increasingly redundant if not impossible. It also operated, and still indeed continues to operate, on a very byzantine system of quotas, preferment, and patronage. Now, let me be clear: quotas are not necessarily bad things. It was right and proper in Nigeria to give opportunities to the then under represented people from the Nigerian north, who also needed to be part of the nation building process. But it did seem that the Nigerian quota system was specifically directed at critically undermining and containing competitive Igbo energy in a new nation in which competition for the control of the power of the state was ipso facto considered or transformed into the imperative of fundamentalists and regionalists. This was why the Igbo felt increasingly isolated and targeted by the lack of opportunity in the public sector, because of a skewered quota system that fully and finally confined them to a single state unit, and subjected its population therefore to the condition of attrition by 1970: the Igbo became crabs in a bucket, and acquired the survivalist instincts of social Darwinism – what the Igbo call ike kete orie. The implications are therefore quite self-evident: in that search for a stable personhood, Igbo lost the higher notions of obligations to the protective umbrella of community. It was at this point that Igbo attitude to state creation changed: there was thus, even behind the justification in the Igbo agitation for new states to be created in the Igbo area to relieve the Igbo of the pressures of the quota system, a backdrop of the incremental pathology of psychic separation and moral fragmentation. Thus in the East Central State, an additional state was initially welcome, given the increasing injustice of the revenue system, the quota system, and the entire state system that began to exclude and marginalize the Igbo, in one of the most brilliant systems of containment ever devised in the postcolonial state, that found perfidious use of the “state of origin” clause in the Nigerian constitution. This process of exclusion increasingly fuelled the demand for more new states, and putatively, the demands for the creation of more new local governments, and “autonomous communities” and other atomized epicenters of political and economic action. Today in all, we have five states we call “core” Igbo states, in the unconscious lingo of separation and diminution that has come with the rhetoric of state creation and its disuniting logic. Two other states – Rivers and Delta states – exist now with substantial Igbo population, and are now confined in the dubious geographical invention we call the Nigerian “South-South.”
The sum effect of this should be clear in a moment: but contemplate this – that today, the Igbo do not have a coherent economic, cultural, and political program. The disintegration of the Igbo national will, is alas not yet discerned by many Igbo as a radical pre-emptive strike by forces within and outside Nigeria, to render the most vital ethnic nationality in Eastern Nigeria prostrate, divert its attention with internal incoherence, while the egregious exploitation of its natural resources -oil and gas – and the rape of its natural environment continue to take place. Today the Igbo are fragmented, and balkanized into the “core” Igbo “South-East” and the “minority” Igbo of the “South-South,” and with so much at stake they have remained prolix with agitation for even newer, and increasingly inconsequential or “noyau” states within a disunited Igbo nation. The very notion of the “core” and the “outer” has indeed also borrowed, and perpetuates the notion of the Igbo “insider” and “outsider” in the definition or context of Igbo national belonging. The “core” Igbo states presumes three disconcerting principles: (a) Igbo now exists in gradations (b) This system of gradations privileges as it indeed marginalizes/disempowers the “core” Igbo and the “outer” Igbo respectively, and (c) the outer/core binary produces its own irreconcilable dialectic of opposites within the Igbo world which continues to refract on the nature of Igbo concordance or discordance.
These binaries that we have inherited as a direct consequence of the creation of states in Igbo land is at the fundamental roots of the current problem of disunity and political incoherence in the contemporary Igbo world. Needless to say, its implications are dire. That the Igbo today are dispersed and disparate, and are now fundamentally clustered in five “core” and two “minority” states that cannot contain the radical energy and singularity necessary to create a coherent and strategic Igbo force within a multi-ethnic Nigeria, constitutes the very crisis, even tragedy of the contemporary Igbo. This is dangerous. Let me note a number of things, just to give a little more direction to the conceptual problems, as I navigate the issue of Igbo unity, its relationship with Igbo political and economic rights and even aspirations, and this entire construct of the Igbo search for leadership. I tie all these together with the new quests for autonomy: autonomous communities, autonomous local governments, autonomous states, and even for the autonomous and distinct state of Biafra. It does seem to me that the Igbo have given that word “autonomy” a bad rap, because indeed, the very term circumscribes current Igbo agitations, it does not suggest any search for freedom, but a desire for fragmentation, for separation from an organic unit of shared identities and shared energies that could convoke Igbo risorgimento. The new Igbo is not seeking the freedom to enact the risorgimento, it seeks autonomy towards sharing “nku ukwa.” It is not autonomy to enact a new ferment of Igbo ideas, or its cultural renaissance; it is autonomy to enact new boundaries of difference, to create domains and fiefdoms, and domestic areas of authority that sustain the de-energizing balkanization of the Igbo, and the subduing of an Igbo national spirit of the volk. The Igbo search for autonomy places before us therefore an enormous challenge of interpretation. But there is a point at which all these meet: they meet at that juncture in the formation of the modern Igbo nation in the twentieth century.
The formation of the Igbo States Union in the first half of the 20th century in my view, marked the first coherent political movement of the modern Igbo towards political autonomy. But the distinct difference is all too clear: it is the difference that marks the challenge and the apprehension of the challenge by one generation from the other. It is the difference that marks one generation of the Igbo as builders, as visionary organizers, and as perceptive and self-conscious readers of time and event: those clerks, artisans, and small entrepreneurs, who first began to move out of Igboland in great numbers at the very turn of the last century, and began to create the first Igbo diaspora, and the first modern movement of the Igbo, which brought the scattered Igbo into a union of itself, by unifying once disparate entities, with all kinds of potentially fissiparous tendencies, into an organic union of “imagined communities.” Here is precisely where the WIC and the Ohaneze has failed to constitute the clear principles that could refine and redefine Igbo search for economic and political autonomy. Here is, of course, not the occasion to criticize the WIC and its leadership, although they deserve to be told in no uncertain terms, that some of its failures reflect profoundly on the centripetal pulls that currently characterize the Igbo diasporic communities in North America – a situation that has led equally to the search for new forms of autonomies within the Igbo diasporic community. We must bear this in mind, and reflect deeply on the failures of leadership that continually to isolate, marginalize, silence, disregard, and often attempt to delegitimize and hold in contempt, serious critical voices within. This inability to accommodate and unify interests has set the tone within Igbo land and its diasporas for new independent centers of social action, all of which weaken Igbo capacity for group action. What a later generation of the Igbo generally failed to do is to closely study the aims, the organization, and the strategies of the old Igbo Union, and the governments of the old Igbo land, based on the 1954 County government model adopted by the NCNC government, and bring it all to bear on current Igbo reality. The Igbo did not agitate for he dismemberment of the old Eastern region, even when it was generally known, that its had a preponderance of people from the old Onitsha and Owerri Provinces in its public life; nor did the premier of the Eastern region from Umuahia, fill the entire government and bureaucracy of the region with his cronies, kinsmen, and fronts in the organization of his government; nor did he have to do that before his Umuahia people could experience the “dividends of democracy.” Today, these are the factors that drive the agitation towards increasing autonomy: the perception of a lack of opportunity by an elite, who find no use of government other than in its creation for elite lootocracy to prevail in the booty culture that now define the public space, perhaps not in Igbo land alone, but in the rest of Nigeria.
But I speak specifically about the Igbo in this regard, because the Igbo do not have to be like the rest of Nigeria. The Igbo led he way before, and could lead the way again, in the evolution of the Nigerian enterprise by modeling new, renascent moments; by taking back the leadership of the public space, as it once did in the golden years of its involvement with Nigeria. In those years, the Igbo did not seek to balkanize the Eastern region. Indeed it sought to expand the frontiers of the Igbo union and its strategic presence by enclosing the Igbo who had been excised from the Eastern region; by creating a bigger, more perfect union that ensured that the Igbo played central roles wherever they were included either in the Western or the Midwestern region. It was why Denis Osadebe could lead the opposition in the Western House in Ibadan, and when the Midwest was created, assumed the premiership of that region unequivocally. It was why the Igbo could organize and run the Lagos City Council, putatively, the bulk of what we know as Lagos state today. Again we must remember that the Igbo fought a war over Yakubu Gowon’s attempts to fragment the Eastern region, because the Igbo fully understood the implication of atomizing the Igbo union into “banana republics” – provincial zones of interests so narrow, that they are without real autonomy, or with scant power to act in the fullest interest of the people. The Yoruba understood this very clearly which was why, as a result of Awolowo’s closeness to the Gowon government, the Western region was the only of the old regions to remain intact until the Murtala Coup in 1975. It was a period in which the Yoruba consolidated itself in the affairs of Nigeria with the kind of cohesive energy that became increasingly absent in other parts of the old federation. The part of the West that became “autonomous,” was Lagos, the federal capital, which was granted full status as a state, according to the wishes of the Yoruba, and more importantly as a compromise with the NCNC faction of the Yoruba leadership. These developments ought to be instructive, for Lagos has remained a single unit since 1967, and has not only become the oldest surviving of the states created in 1967, but also the epicenter and symbol of the economic, cultural, and political transcendence of the Yoruba, a part of its organic geography from which a complex economic life is forming, spreading into the Otta and Agbara business districts, towards the Ondo industrial loop, all of which are fed by a matrix of economic and political forces emanating from the Lagos-Ibadan axis of power. The Igbo on the other hand abandoned the Enugu- Onitsha-Aba-Port-Harcourt axis of power; or let us put it this way: the Igbo allowed themselves to be closed off from Port-Harcourt, through the state creation logic, in which they allowed themselves to be made strangers in the cultural, economic and political life of Port-Harcourt, and have thus far failed to secure the economic, political and cultural influence necessary to fuse this strategic Igbo city, back to the symbolic order of Igbo political life, and back to the matrix that would bring back Aba, Owerri, Umuahia, Onitsha, down to the Cross River towns of Abakiliki and Afikpo, into an original Igbo matrix or domain of power.
The point I’m making in general is that since the war ended, and since the military coup of 1983 especially, the incremental sense of exclusion that the Igbo have suffered has made the Igbo desperate for inclusion into domains of authority by all means. Some of the ways they seek to enter these domains have been to carve up the map of Igbo land; just like the Berlin laceration of the cartography of Africa in order to impose administrative colonialism over it. These Igbo ironically seek these processes of dismemberment of the Igbo by actively seeking the legitimizing authority for such dismemberment from powers that exist outside of Igbo land, and who then manipulate the internal schisms that naturally result from these aspirations, towards establishing firmer control of the internal affairs of the Igbo, so much so that only those that they legitimize, with whom they partner, and who owe their authority by the grace of these external alliances and factors, now govern Igbo land, and exclude other Igbo from these “noyau” entities. The irony is now so profound: Igbo are now “foreigners” in Igbo land, excluded by the “state of origin” impediments, and thus making Igbo land a classic site of Machiavellian politics. The tragedy is also that an entire generation of Igbo who could supply the leadership necessary to create a powerful and autonomous Igbo nation has failed to construct a radical, forward looking strategy to retrieve Igbo land from the consequences of its radical diminution. Many are comfortable with breaking down and further atomizing the Igbo union into even smaller fiefdoms that are neither competitive nor viable, nor vital. That is the state of affairs today in Igbo land: states that are not viable, and thus lacking the capacity for regenerative energy. The impact is absolutely frightening: a disunited nation slipping further into inconsequence, as the recent dynamic of power in contemporary Nigeria has shown of an incoherent, and politically destabilized Igbo world.
Let me again attempt to highlight a few general possibilities or alternatives in understanding and correctly rectifying this situation of incoherence in Igbo land. But first, let me suggest unequivocally, that the current agitation for new states in Igbo land is not in the strategic, long-term interest of the Igbo. It may serve short-term palliative measures in affecting the federation accounts in relation to the Igbo but it will not in the long run, balance the accounts of the Igbo in Nigerian affairs. I suggest therefore that we close the artificial boundaries that currently mark the Igbo in Abia, Imo, Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, Rivers, and Delta. We must indeed seek active and strategic processes of political, economic, and cultural re-unifications and affiliations with Igbo scattered and contained in the marginal communities of the Edo, Cross Rivers, Kogi, Benue, and Akwa-Ibom states through strategic, symbolic process of inclusion. We must seek to involve them in the affairs of the wider Igbo world. I will give just two examples: Mathias Ofoboche was former Deputy governor of Cross Rivers State from 1979-1983, but I do not recall that anybody ever found the symbolic and strategic reasons to reach out to him, and not only call him by his proper names, but also remind him of his responsibilities which circumstances of history may have made more fraught for him. The same goes for Kanu Agabi, former minister for Justice under Obasanjo, an Aro from Cross Rivers State. Some people within the Igbo community would ask “why do you wish to call people who do not accept that they are Igbo?” This question naturally presumes that they do not know or accept. The question also fundamentally precludes the more important question: “what do they gain from being Igbo?” That is the question at the crucial basis of the Igbo crisis, and the reason for the Igbo ethnic movements towards internal autonomy, separation, and atomization: what has anyone gained from being Igbo since 1970? Perhaps it would be best to stay on one’s own turf; create your own domain, be king in your “autonomous community” rather minister of an entire, if not impossible Igbo entity; and make independent alliances inside and outside of a general Igbo consensus.
These are tempting considerations, but ultimately dangerous and deleterious choices given the situation facing he Igbo today: the danger that in its moves towards atomization, there would be nothing of a coherent Igbo consensus or front, in society such as Nigeria with its endgame politics. Indeed, we have arrived at a crucial moment of that endgame: and we have an incoherent Igbo intellectual, political, and economic elite, faced with a political situation of disparities and internal ruptures manifesting in its current politics, which cannot provide a political leadership in Nigeria. The Igbo will continue to slide into obscurity, and maintain itself as the new underdog – visible yet invisible – in Nigerian economic and political affairs. If the Igbo do not reorganize, stop the current agitation for a new state, build towards organizing a more coherent organic union, the Igbo potential will be destroyed, and this may mark the ironic end of one of he leading lights of the African renaissance of the 20th century. In summary, my prediction is quite dire: the eclipse of the Igbo under the current situation of incoherence – what we sense to be its situation of disunity – will continue apace, if nothing is done to strategically stop its further demobilization, both self-inflicted, and influenced by factors and elements outside of it. Our option it seems to me lies in one thing: the creation o a more perfect Igbo union through integration; through the creation of an Igbo joint services Commission; through strategic exchanges, and though other methods of economic, political, and cultural unification. State creation – the balkanization of the Igbo political entity - has never solved the Igbo problem, and is unlikely to solve it in the future. Igbo problem will b solved, it seems to me, by the adoption of an Igbo alternative path or framework of development, through its insistence on a full national autonomy within the federalism principle. That is what the Igbo should work towards: the creation of a full federal union in which the Igbo would establish its own autonomous oversights. The skeleton of that demand already lies within the Aburi documents. I salute you all.
 

Obi Nwakanma

Poet, Journalist, and scholar, Obi Nwakanma was educated at the Government College Umuahia, and earned a BA in English at the University of Jos, Nigeria, and graduate degrees at the Washington University in Saint Louis, and the Saint Louis University, where he completed his doctoral work. He has worked in Nigeria as a Political journalist, Theatre critic, Literary Critic, Foreign Correspondent for the Newsweek Magazine (New York) and the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, of Zurich; and columnist for the Sunday Vanguard, where he continues to write his column, the Orbit on Sunday. Nwakanma has been reporter at the Guardian newspapers in Lagos, Staff Writer at The Sunday Magazine (TSM), Editorial consultant at the West African Pilot in its brief re-incarnation in 1993, and was Group Literary editor of the Vanguard, and Deputy Editor of the Sunday Vanguard. Considered “one of the most important voices among a new generation of contemporary African Poetry” (Daily Times, 1998), Obi Nwakanma won the prestigious ANA/CADBURY prize, Nigeria’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for his collection of poems, The Roped Urn (1996). His latest collection, The Horsemen & Other Poems (2007), has been published by the Africa World Press, New Jersey. He has been Writer/Scholar-in-residence at the Leon Hansberry Institute of African Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; Resident Poet at ArtOmi, New York, and guest Poet of the International Poetry Festival, Rotterdam. Obi Nwakanma has also completed the first full length biography of the poet, Christopher Okigbo which will be published by James Currey Press, Oxford UK in 2009. Obi Nwakanma has also taught poetry, Creative Writing, and Literature of the Black Diaspora, variously at Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis University, Harris Stowe State University, and is currently Assistant Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri.