|
Recent journalism out of
chance encounter with
Major-General Law-rence Onoja (rtd) recently in his column brought back to my memory a story told me in1987 by the late Justice Acheme.Paul Anyebe. I had gone to interview that mightily misappreciated leading light of the first generation of Idoma elite in ‘post’-colonial Nigeria determined that the title of my encounter with him, irrespective of how it went, would be “Justice A.P. Anyebe and the Burden of Dissent”. At the end of the formal and informal sessions of the encounter, I told him that I actually came with a pre-interview headline in which Iam even more pleased. When, on his command, he was shown the title, he smiled and said I was behaving like a typical Idoma man, a remark that inaugurated another round of interview about the concept of a typical Idoma man.
According to the late Judge who said I should go and cross check him from colonial profiling of the Idomas, the typical Idoma man is the right honorable gentleman personified. In fact, the Idoma man, he said, is a chameleon. But contrary to the chameleon of deviousness and demonic mystery in English literature, the chameleon in his cosmography is the epitome of order, peace and nobility, a personification of the impeccable, urbane and the dignified.
Before anyone rises in revolt against the late jurist in a war of adjectives for this analogy, let me finish reporting him as faithfully as I can recall. His evidence is that whenever the chameleon arrives at a new place, it changes its color to correspond with the dominant one in that environment purely in the interest of harmony and the avoidance of discord. If fire were raging on, the chameleon, in order not to be seen to be opposed to the rage of fire, would jump to the peak of the tallest grass there and land safely on the other side where fire has already passed. The chameleon, continued the late Judge, lives on the dogma that on no account should any emergency make it abandon the footsteps of its forefathers. So, hurry is not part of its consciousness, no matter what. Without the culture of haste, it has no chance of injuring any interest, consciously or otherwise.
Even though I wrote a full page feature article out of the encounter under the original title, I am not sure now if I included his fascinating perspective on the chameleon in the piece, basically because no subsequent education has countered the communal instructions I received as a toddler that the fear of the chameleon is the beginning of wisdom.
I must, however, confess that I carried that analogy of the Idoma man since 1987 in my head, trying to see if the construction is capable of validity, empirically and otherwise and if that, in any ways, explain the Idoma dile-mma in Nigeria. The Idoma dilemma in Nigeria is the fact that although an ethnic minority even within the Middle Belt, it has historically been well represented in every regime since independence but with nothing to show by way of development, thereby ques-tioning representation in democratic theory generally and ethnic representation in particular.
In the first republic, the Idomas had two ministers. Between 1966, they had a service chief and the head of the Prisons, among others. In 1979-1983, they had a minister. Under the Babangida/Abacha regime, they had no less than seven military governors excluding the senate presidency of Ameh Ebute in the brief interim regime. In the current run of democracy, they have turned out the first poet National Chairman of a major political party in Nigeria. The question is why has this pervasive representation, much stronger than its numerical strength would ordinarily allow in the murky ethnic politics in Nigeria not translated to material prosperity for the Idoma people since these political leaders were supposed to be representatives of the ethnic group and since they do not, individually and collectively, have anything against the logic of primitive accumulation that under-girds power at the federal level. The question is how this reality is to be explained.
Following the story so far, this reality is then to be explained in terms of the chameleonic theory of Idoma personality built on the abho-rrence of wildness, pragmatism, cleverness and wanton violation of established consensus, and thus the failure of pervasive presence in power to translate to anything for the people within the context of buccaneer capitalism. Can this be falsified methodologically?
Before Justice Anyebe died, he made his own contribution on this. At the same interview, he told me that most colonial officers believed that an Idoma man was above dishonesty and that they actually wrote this down in their colonial records. From the way he spoke, he obviously believed the colonialists in spite of his level of radicalism because he also said at our encounter that all Idoma bureaucrats, military officers, politicians, profe-ssionals and so on who made money through corrupt means strive a lot to pose as having made money through industry and sweat, a submission that anybody who has been in the Idoma areas of Benue would readily attest to. First of all, there is a big effort to deny a wealthy status by a typical Idoma elite even if it is common knowledge that he or she successfully broke into a bank last night.
I have no problem believing these manifest character traits since I experience them now and then and since I can explain them in terms of remnants of peasant consciousness in a late colonial Nigerian community coming into conflict with new acquisitive mentality since the oil boom period. In which case Idoma politicians, profess-ionals, bureaucrats and retired military officers such as General Lawrence Onoja who find themselves out in the cold and wasting away after retirement are victims of the stranglehold of the chameleonic impulse which abhors wild self assertion, pragmatism, cleverness, abr-asive lobbying and wanton vio-lation of established consensus.
Otherwise, why is Ameh Ebute, for example, not throwing his weight all over the place today as a former senate President? It is simply that ‘hustling’ is not part of his consciousness and so he retires to the quiet of his chambers. Chief Andrew Agom who was killed recently in a car attack on Makurdi-Abuja road remains one of the most objective, fair minded and magnanimous human beings around, yet he never made political capital from those attributes. It is not true that he operated low profile because of corrupt enrichment baggage at the Nigerian Airways because if that were so, then one would be inclined to ask of when corruption has stopped Nigerian elite from self-propulsion. Same for late Colonel Anthony Ochefu or Dan Agbese and, before them all, the late JC. Obande whom I was told recently was so trusted by Tafawa Balewa as for every recommendation he made to be automatically approved. Even General Lawrence Onoja has to his credit a fine trajectory of personal excellence in comparative terms. This is a point I would not want to elaborate at a time of intense struggle in Idomaland for governorship of Benue State which moves to the Idoma’s zone C in 2007 lest my intellectual effort on Idoma identity philosophy is denied its scientific status in favour of the quackery of politics, notwi-thstanding the imperative to link identity investigation to democratic possibilities if the effort is to serve any social purpose.
Given the primacy of the quality of mind of person of the leader in Nigeria’s political reality, how does the issue of the chameleonic impulse help or retard Idoma politics in the years ahead? More so if Idoma exercise of power in Benue is to be a fundamental critique of Nigerian politics in all its rottenness and with particular reference to the peasant economy that the Benue area basically is, would Audu Ogbe want to call a national seminar on this?
My fear is that he may think, chameleonically, that it is chauvinism to do so. That was what I thought about this research topic initially until a senior academic told me it is very important for students and academics to study their own people thereby feeling their pains at the unit of analysis-class or ethnic so that such students and academics will learn to respect other people, appreciate that others have identity pains and crosses to carry. Such, he said, will make for a better national community. I took that as my marching orders. Over now to the Ochagwu of Idomaland and the national chairman of the PDP, Chief Audu Ogbe for this seminar, the highest Idoma political leader at the moment.
*Adagbo Onoja is no relation of General Onoja but both are Idomas.
NEXT... |
|
