Thread by @RealOlaudah

Fuss over “Igboland" in Kano:

My subject today is about a news item carried by a provincial publication, Emergency Digest.
It had an interesting interview with one “scholar”, Dr. Abdullah Gadon Kaya, who expressed deep concern over what he termed the exclusive occupation...

of a “highbrow” residential area at Zungeru Road behind Kano Airport by “Igbos”.
The paper quoted Kaya as saying: “They have their massive gates, security and other facilities that prevent other people, especially the indigenes, from accessing.

Government should not allow such to be happening when we can’t go to Onitsha, Aba or Enugu and create an exclusive place for Northerners or Muslims like that…We should not have such exclusive places; the government should ensure that there are mosques, and Kano indigenes should

be given access to build in such highbrow area”. Now, let’s discuss that.
How did the Igbo people get the land on which they built this so-called “highbrow” estate? Did they just go there and started building, ensuring that indigenes never also built? That is highly unlikely.

Did they drive away the native people, the landowners, from the place as armed herdsmen have been doing throughout the Middle Belt and South with the tacit support of most Arewa people? Highly unlikely; they are not known for conquest expansionism.

That is exclusive Fulani hobby, even till date. Did the government of Kano State allocate that parcel of land to them? I am not sure of this possibility, but if ever it happened, the government should be blamed.

What probably happened is what usually happens everywhere Igbo live in good numbers. As highly successful business people, the typical Igbo wants to provide himself and his family with comfort in his place of abode. He sees an empty portion of land & approaches the owners to buy.

They haggle & money exchange hands. He builds.The landowner wants to sell, Igbo man wants to buy. It is not only in Kano, Lagos, or Abuja. It is the same everywhere, including abroad. What is wrong with that?
In the same vein, Northerners are everywhere in Igbo land & the East.

I started seeing “Hausa” people in my vicinities from childhood. Nobody harasses them. They live peacefully, doing the cow businesses (mainly) and carrying out menial jobs to make a living. They also bring in food items to sell. No doubt, the Igbo make money in the North.

Northerners also scoop billions of naira every year from their transactions in the East. It is a two-way traffic, blackmailers take note!
Whereas the Igbo man makes his money and invests some of it in his place of residence, the “Hausa” man who thrives in his businesses in the...

East does not believe in comfortable living. They squeeze together in chicken coops, mangers, kiosks and makeshift mosques in their “Ama Awusa” shanty quarters. From generation to generation, they leave no trace of their affluence in their places of abode.

Kaya is complaining that Arewa people have not been given similar opportunities in any part of the East to develop highbrow estates as in Kano.
This is laughable. My question for Kaya and those who support his fulminations over Igbo highbrow estate in Kano is this:

In what part of Nigeria outside Arewa North are Arewa people known to live in highbrow estates developed by them with their hard-earned money? If anyone can point to such in the South West, South-South and the Middle Belt, then I will agree with them that it is only in the...

South East that they have been “prevented” from replicating the same feat.
The only place outside Kano, Kaduna and the major cities of the inner North where the Arewa people now live in super highbrow estates is Abuja.

Even in the case of Abuja, Northerners were latecomers compared to the Igbo who started investing in Abuja the moment the territory was declared as the future Federal Capital. The Igbo started buying land, building houses and hotels way back in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was not until Nasir el-Rufai became the Minister of the FCT in 2003 that Arewa people started owning land in Abuja.
El-Rufai also went on a spree of demolitions of mostly Igbo-owned entire estates, ostensibly to restore the Abuja masterplan, only to reallocate them to...

accommodate more Northerners. Since El-Rufai, no one else but Arewa Northerners have been appointed FCT Ministers. And there has been this gradual transformation of Abuja into a Muslim city due to monopolisation of the city’s management positions by Sharia-minded administrators.

If you come to Lagos where Northerners live in large numbers, the only place they live in highbrow estates are government-owned estates, particularly in Apapa. They are everywhere in Apapa, but how many mansions can you point to as belonging to the multibillionaire Arewa...

businessmen who feed fat on their lucrative links to people in power at the Federal Government?
Going back South, Orji Kalu allocated a place in Lokpanta along Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway in Abia State to Arewa people to safeguard them from the Bakassi Boys about 20 years ago.

The Arewa community there has expanded with impunity into native community lands despite the outcries of the landowners. In fact, they harbour and conceal their criminal elements and terrorist herders who kidnap for ransom and seek to occupy people’s ancestral land if not for the

activities of the Eastern Security network, ESN. They cart billions of naira away every year, yet you cannot see ONE decent house there; absolutely no value added by their presence except the mutually-beneficial business transactions.

We will continue this discussion next week. It is time we had this out once and for all.

© Ochereome Nnanna
Vanguard Newspapers
30-06-2021

Fuss over Igboland in Kano (2)

A local newspaper, Emergency Digest, recently carried an interview with one Dr. Abdullah Gadon Kaya, who raised the alarm over the emergence of an exclusive Igbo “highbrow” area in Zungeru Road behind the Kano Airport.

I am taking Kaya to task over his assertion: “Government should not allow such to be happening when we cannot go to Onitsha, Aba or Enugu and create an exclusive place for Northerners like that".

In the first part of this article published last week, I analysed how Northerners are not known to build much outside their core Arewa cities.
They were given a place in Lokpanta, Abia State by former Abia Governor, Orji Kalu in 2001.

To the absolute chagrin of their host community, they have taken with impunity more than ten times the size of land that Orji had initially given them, trading in livestock and food stuff. There is no decent building in that sprawling commune, only makeshift shacks.

There're places in Enugu & Umuahia called “Gariki”, which is Hausa word for “cattle colony”.The natives even allowed the Hausa name the visitors gave to stand. But, in the North, areas allocated to strangers to keep them away from the inner Islamic cities are called “Sabon Gari”.

Even in places like Owerri, Aba and Iguocha (Port Harcourt) Northerners live in communes called “Ama Awusa”. This torpedoes Kaya’s claim (which is regularly bruited around by Northerners) that there are no places given to Northerners in the East.

Since I was born I have always seen “Hausa people” in the East, doing what they do best – dealing in animal-related merchandise, selling foodstuff, working as butchers, mobile cobblers, Suya sellers, menial labourers and of course, beggars.

Nobody disturbs or has any reason whatsoever to envy them.
To a much lesser extent, the same can be said of our Southern neighbours, the Yoruba. For some reasons unknown to me, they have also refrained from investing their enormous wealth in areas outside the Western Region as...

the Igbo have done. Long before I was born, the Yoruba had a huge presence in the Port Harcourt area. In the middle 1970s they also had noticeable presence in Aba and Onitsha peddling their speciality in the lace fabric trade.

Late highlife legend, Victor Olaiya’s dad, was a tailor in Owerri. He spoke Igbo like an elder.
Also, in Enugu, the Yoruba professional class still maintains a tangible presence. But in all these cities, you can hardly point at much in terms of their physical contributions.

The situation is a little better in the North, but you cannot compare what they have there with what the Igbo have. I do not think the Yoruba have enough in the far North to be blackmailed by the self-styled defenders of “Northern interests”.

But they have overwhelming presence in their home region, the South West, which is traditionally the most massively urbanised region of Nigeria. In Lagos, they are the landlords not just in ethnic ownership but also in political and economic dominance.

The impression we get from the attitudes of the North and West is that if you find yourself outside your place of ethnic origin, never forget that you are a visitor. Exploit and send home like the Lebanese and Indians.

“No matter where you go, remember the code that will take you home”, as popular South African singer, Master KG, warns. It is only the Igbo that do not heed this warning. Once they feel at home and have the money, they start building like lunatics.

Meanwhile, back home in the East, they also build mansions that are of no use to anyone for most of the year but mere ego trips and painted sepulchres that create jobs only for village burglars.

Meanwhile, the people you are helping their economies, paying taxes to and giving employment to their people have nothing but contempt, envy and hostility for you. They blackmail you and wait for the slightest opportunity to strike you down.

If it is not disenfranchisement and regular market fires as in Lagos, it will be “blasphemy” murders, pogroms, destruction of goods by Muslim Sharia law enforcers and “quit notices” as in the North.
Igbo people do not learn from their own painful history, so they repeat it.

In spite of undisguised hostility stoked by the Buhari regime against them, some comedians only the other day announced themselves as a “new tribe” called “Igbos of Arewa”! Yoruba people have lived far longer than Igbo in the North.

Kwara and Kogi, which are parts of the old Northern Region have substantial Yoruba populations. Up to 50 per cent of Yoruba people are Muslims compared to the Igbo which have a population of less than one per cent Muslims.

Yet, Yoruba people in Kogi and Kwara see themselves as South Westerners, which they are.
Igbo people never want to understand the kind of people they are sharing a country with.

Out of over 300 ethnic groups, you are the only one building in other people’s lands in a manner as to alarm them and constantly put your life at risk. Is that wisdom? Is that even common sense?

Igbo people think Nigeria is like America where anybody from any part of the world can come and live the American dream whereby a second generation African, Barack Obama, can become president.

Those self-styled “Igbos of the North” better be warned that the march to freedom has gathered pace. Freedom within a restructured equitable Nigeria in which all of us will have a sense of belonging, or freedom in Biafra.

The Igbo youth of today will no longer look back because of “our brothers in the North”. If you see fire and you put your hand in it, it will burn you. It is your hand, and your pain. Termites, keep on building.

© Ochereome Nnanna
Vanguard News Nigeria
July 7, 2021

Concluded.