Igwe Aneke in this interview with NOAH EBIJE said it is only
the Federal Government that has the constitutional power to split the country.
Following the insistence by Arewa youths that Igbo should
leave the North, are your people going to abandon their investments in the
North by succumbing to the threat?
Naturally we are in shock that such threat message will come
from people we have been staying with for years and living peacefully with. We
don’t have any problem with them.
As for whether we will leave is not as easy as that. We have
spent years working very hard in this country, developing the state, the
country in our own way; and of course, we have investments. You don’t leave
because of a message that says you should leave. This is still a country that
we call our own. If the country tells us to leave, we will leave but if it’s
individuals, then it’s a question of the government addressing the issues why
they are saying we should leave. What is the problem? Why the agitation? And
agitation is not just from one quarter, but in this country, there are
agitations from different quarters.
So the government cannot continue to pretend that there’s
nothing wrong when there are issues. So my advice is not to the Arewa youths,
my advice is to the authorities, the people that are leading this country; they
should address the issues that are provoking these agitations – equity,
fairness and justice.
The Arewa youths are insisting that Igbo should leave
because your people are calling for Biafra Republic, what’s your reaction to
this?
The question, is it all the Igbo that are calling for it?
It’s a few young men who did not witness the war, that are calling for it. You
see, it’s just like a child who wants to put his hands into the fire, the elder
knows that if he puts his hands into the fire, it will burn him. So, the elders
of the Igbo are not really supporting the IPOB, we identify with the problem.
Just like I told you, the issues, what’s provoking the agitation? The agitation
is their own reaction. Their way of reacting and that’s not what the elders of
the Igbo want. What we want is to address injustice, to have fairness, fair
share of whatever. To have that sense of belonging in the country.
There are reasons every day of how the Igbo are being
discriminated against. No group can be happy with that. The youths are
exploring this way because they feel that we the elders are comfortable with
the situation. We’re not comfortable with the situation, but we know that
calling for separation or division of this country will not be the solution but
unity of Nigeria. We fought a war before and at the end, we accepted that
Nigeria should be one. And they say to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be
done.
We’ve accepted that many years ago, so why should we now be
asking for that again? If we say Nigeria is one, let it be one. If Nigeria is
one, then every person should have fair share of whatever the country has.
That’s all.
As the October 1 deadline is fast approaching, do you put
any mechanism in place to dissuade your people who are trying to move out of
panic?
We are not thinking of doing that. There is freedom of
movement but we know that our people are not planning to move. We cannot tell
whoever wants to move not to move; but we know because we’re being assured, we
listened to Arewa youths, we also listened to responsible Arewa citizens and
elders. They’re not saying the same thing. So why must it be that of the youths
we should take? We were with the governor of Kaduna State, we know the
assurances he gave us. We were with the Kaduna State Commissioner of Police, we
know the assurances they gave us. Do you think we should gnore all these ones
and then obey the command of the Arewa youths? We cannot say nobody should move
but we know that unless the Lord watches over a city, the watchmen watch but in
vain. Our lives are in the hands of God not in the hands of any man. So people
are free to take their decision but as a group, we feel that we have enough
assurance from other members of Arewa colleagues who we’ve been living with for
years.
How satisfied are you with the way some elders of the North
are handling the situation?
Well, you see everybody has his own freedom. We know some
elders are behind them. When a bird is dancing on the road, there must be
someone drumming, we know that. Of course we cannot be happy that elders who
know the consequences of war, who were there, and saw what even Nigeria had to
pay to keep Nigeria one are part of the plot. If we wanted the Igbo to go when
they went, why do we have to lose lives to bring them back? So if Nigerians lost
lives on both sides to be one, it’s so unfortunate for any adult who knew the
time to still wish that there’ll be a second war in Nigeria.
Since the event of that quit notice, how frequent does your
phone ring?
Oh, that one I cannot just say -the phones are ringing every
minute, not just the threat, the threat triggered chains of reaction. I think
the worst threat is even the social media. The type of things in the social
media which our people read at home, so the pressure is that every five minutes
I receive calls, ‘what are you people still doing there in the North?’ This is
terrible but fortunately we are here, so we know the situation more than them
that are there. So when they’re telling us they’ve killed someone, they post
photographs of people that are killed, and they mentioned the place and these
are places where we’re moving freely. So we tell them it is not as bad as they
think; but the pressure is there.
The Igbo delegates from the 19 Northern states met here in
Kaduna, what were the core issues discussed at the meeting?
To share ideas and experiences. You want to know; when we
hear something happened , we may not know. If they said they killed 10 persons
in Sokoto, you can’t be in Kaduna and be sure that is not true. So the Eze Igbo
Sokoto was here, the leaders in Sokoto came, Taraba, Adamawa from all parts of
the North, both Bauchi and Yobe were all here. So, we now shared our
experiences and the assurances. These are the things we came together to know
what is really happening. And of course we all went enmass to the governor. So,
they were all there and the governor of Kaduna State assured them of safety.
Was there any bitter experience from any of the States?
No! None at all. All the representatives that came from
different states debunked all the stories we’ve been getting from the Facebook,
that nothing like that happened.
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