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1/ My friend, @tegasupreme, is in my view, one of Nigeria's best sports journalists, if not the very best.
2/ Okay, @AlakaJide will have a thing or two to say about that, and no, @biolakazeem is not a journalist, he's a hustler.
3/ Recently, Tega started writing a column for @DailyTimesNGR, and I wish her the best in that endeavour.
4/ Her most recent column - goo.gl/7yHpur, delved into politics. She attempted to link the Catalonia thing to BarcelonaCF.
5/ One thing she said caught my attention - "The best way to prepare for 'freedom' is to consider the worst-case scenario."
6/ This brings me straight to my country Nigeria, and the calls for secession among sections of my my people, the Igbo.
7/ This is not an exercise in telling horror stories, the complete, unedited is here - goo.gl/v2hQYB
8/ Rather, this is cold and hard - have we considered the worst case scenario in this secession thing?
9/ Consider what was said six days ago by @hartng, an assistant to the Abia state governor.
10/ Hart talked about who would suffer the most losses in a meltdown of Nigeria.
11/ "Total investments of Northerners in Abia may not exceed ₦10m, but the investments of Abians in the North easily nears ₦100b."
12/ That may be hyperbole, but it does bring out an important point.
13/ Igbo people are more integrated into Nigeria than many will like to admit, and the reasons are not too far from the surface.
14/ My family genealogy goes thus - I am the son of Chukwuedo, whose father was Chukwudebe, whose father was Nwanze,
15/ whose father was Obodechine, whose father was Onwordi.
16/ Onwordi's father, Obikeme, was, to my knowledge, the last full-time farmer in this line. The question then, is why?
17/ Shortages of land forced many Igbos of old to move.
18/ "As a society plagued even in pre-colonial times by severe land shortage, the socio-economic organisation of Igbo communities,
19/ has been characterised by high levels of mobility and institutions of inter-communal cooperation,
20/ fostering dynamic regional trading systems."
21/ This is a direct quote from Kate Meagher's research work.
22/ Meagher leaned heavily on the works of Kenneth Dike and Elizabeth Isichei, two of the greatest ever scholars of Igbo history.
23/ For me, it brings one great realisation, which, unfortunately, in being sentimental, many of my people are yet to understand.
24/ In absolute terms, Igboland is a smallish, inverted triangle which cannot support all of us.
25/ What has supported us as a people for at least two centuries now is trade. Trade, and resettlement.
26/ These two things, are usually best done, for reasons of geography, in your immediate abroad.
27/ Will we listen?
