Sit-At-Home And Igbos’ Journey To Nowhere

I did not intend to write about the now seemingly irrepressible culture of sit-at-home in the southeast if not that I overheard a colleague of mine last Thursday telling someone that there would be no work the following day (Friday) due to sit-at-home. By now every well-meaning south-easterner should be deeply worried by the fact that this highly dysfunctional culture has become persistent, defying all measures, forceful or diplomatic, applied to end it.

Its socio-economic damage has been incalculable not to talk of its role in worsening insecurity in the region. In some areas of Imo and Anambra state where criminal elements have held communities hostage in the aftermath of Nnamdi Kanu’s belligerent ethnic nationalism, Mondays have been effectively rendered redundant for working, trading and schooling. People are too afraid to venture outside their homes causing the streets to remain deserted.

The implication of this is that people are needlessly being impoverished. The petty traders in rural areas as well as artisans who rely on daily earnings to feed are feeling the cruel impact of this self-inflicted damage.

At this point, it should have been obvious to all and sundry that Nnamdi Kanu’s Biafra activism has resulted in an unmitigated disaster for the people of the southeast. It has turned out to be a movement rich in emotions and poor in strategy. That movement has thrived on wild populism and clannish hysteria as against any ideological or tactical sophistication.

For one, its choice of sit-at-home as a tool for applying pressure on the authorities has proven to be a strategic blunder which unfortunate impact will remain with us for a long time to come. Sit-at-home, it will be recalled, was first used by the Ralph Uwazuruike-led Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in 2004. It worked excellently the first time but subsequent attempts kept recording lower compliance until it fizzled out.

But why has that of Kanu-led IPOB persisted despite all the attempts to end it? The answer lies in Kanu’s strategy of threat of doom to defaulters of his order in the midst of the complementary activities of criminal elements who are ever ready to cash in. Surely, many of these criminal elements cannot be linked to Kanu or IPOB, but his utterances and activities have certainly created the platform for their activities. Kanu’s broadcast in which he praised the hoodlums who killed soldiers and dumped their bodies in a well at Okporo in Orsu LGA of Imo state in 2020 speaks so much about his complicity in the insecurity that has since engulfed the Orlu, Orsu and Oru axis of Imo state as well as its neighbouring Ihiala and Nnewi South LGAs of Anambra state.

Compare his approach to that of Uwazuruike who introduced sit-at-home as an agitation strategy. Even though we witnessed hoodlums at Upper Iweka and Aba – who nonetheless are unarmed – harassing people in the name of enforcing the directive, Uwazuruike never openly endorsed this. He consistently distanced himself and his organisation from such hooliganism. Following a not-too-successful sit-at-home in October 2008, my editor at a national daily newspaper I was working for asked me to do a news analysis on “MASSOB: The Intrigues That Nailed The Sit-At-Home Order.” In the course of doing this, I reached out to Uwazuruike on phone to get his perspective. Responding to my charge that his men were trying to force people to comply with the order, the MASSOB leader totally denied this while disowning anyone trying to use force to achieve compliance to what he termed a voluntary gesture of protest by the southeast people. Four years later, in 2012, I had a cause to speak with Uwazuruike again, this time regarding the crimes being perpetrated at Onitsha by some hoodlums who identified as MASSOB members. As usual, he disowned the people, insisting that his activism was civil and non-violent.

Whether Uwazuruike was being completely honest or not is a different thing. But the point is that, unlike Kanu, he never spoke violence or otherwise sounded belligerent in his communication. Kanu was always spitting fire and brimstone. He called people names and threatened to kill them. He boasted that 2, 000 heads would roll in retaliation for the killing of “Ikonso”, the ESN commander by the military. Instructively, after some time, gunmen killed a middle-aged man alleged to be the informant that gave away the dead militant. Kanu once asked easterners to kill soldiers and collect their guns. I heard him say this on his Radio Biafra! Whenever he declared his sit-at-home, he accompanied this with threats. He would warn that no cockroach should crawl from one compound to another. He once called Unizik Vice Chancellor a monkey for allegedly fixing examinations on a sit-at-home day while threatening to deal with any lecturer that violated his order. It was all about force, violence and confrontation. And of course, Kanu’s threats were invariably followed by murder, arson and other forms of property destruction by hoodlums who acted in his name.

This reign of terror explains why his and Simon Ekpa’s sit-at-home orders have persisted especially in those areas of Imo, Anambra and Abia where criminal activities were strongest in the height of that 2020/2021 madness. The hoodlums at Upper Iweka who attempted to stop people from going about their business during Uwazuruike’s sit-at-home were unarmed and we didn’t hear of murder and kidnapping being committed.

Against this backdrop, the criminology of the violence, killings and kidnappings that have unsettled the hitherto relatively calm southeast since 2020 cannot be reasonably understood outside Kanu’s communications and actions, including in the context his sit-at-home strategy. His communication created the ideological sentiment and/or cover for the perpetrators of the violence. Secondly, he admitted to have created an armed group, the ESN, whose faceless and clandestine nature alone is bound to constitute a security risk. Arming non-state actors is itself risk enough let alone when this is done in veiled circumstances. Thus, it is no surprise that several armed groups have risen claiming affiliation with Kanu and IPOB. The division in IPOB further worsened the situation as the likes of Simon Ekpa are said to be in control of some armed groups. And make no mistake about that, Kanu gave us Simon Ekpa. He used to be his guest on Radio Biafra and was described by Kanu as a dependable comrade in the Biafra struggle whose voice we should all listen to.

In view of the foregoing, it would be surprising if anyone is still in doubt about the complete impotency of sit-at-home as an agitation strategy for Ndi Igbo. I am still scandalized by how a lot of our people did not see the futility of that exercise from the beginning. The painful experience our people have gone through and the fact that the federal government apparently is yet to lose even a second sleep over this matter is an indisputable testimony to the poverty of that strategy. Now ponder about this: the Monday sit-at-home, declared to protest the rendition and incarceration of Kanu and to pressure the government to release him, has lasted for over two years, yet the federal government has seemed unmoved. Secondly, no progress has been made towards realising the Biafra being fought for.

I must point out that I was particularly appalled by how a good number of well educated individuals that I know argued in favour of this sit-at-home especially in its early days. Some of them hailed this move as an act of civil disobedience, an argument that is clearly a misrepresentation of what civil disobedience entails. Civil disobedience is the act of refusing to do something one is obliged to do by law or order of the state authority as a form of resistance. Closing one’s shop or any other place of private business is completely a personal affair that does not violate any law, and no government order can force one to keep such business open as it is within the right of the private owner to open or shut it. In civil disobedience, there must be an act of DISOBEDIENCE; one who does what’s within his private right to do cannot be disobeying any authority.

More annoyingly, many people who supported enforced sit-at-home were government salary earners who would collect their full pay even after enjoying the every Monday holiday. They entertained no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of petty traders, labourers and artisans whose daily bread comes from their daily work. Ironically, it’s these government workers that actually were in a position to observe genuine civil disobedience by daring the authorities and absenting themselves from work on sit-at-home days. But they did not do this as those of them who are not going to work on these days aren’t telling the authorities that they’re doing this in solidarity with Kanu, but are merely hiding under the excuse of lack of vehicular movement and insecurity. They should come out boldly and dare the government and bravely pay the price for Kanu and Biafra!

Civil disobedience is not a frivolous engagement; it’s a profound ideology and practice that requires deep reflections and solemn sacrificial disposition. It’s a splendid weapon of liberation having its root in the naturalist political, moral and legal philosophy of the great scholastic thinkers (especially of the medieval era) notably St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. It’s not to be mistaken for the overzealousness of amoral hoodlums harassing and forcing people to stay at home or for the lilly-livered opportunism of enjoying a weekly holiday and collecting one’s full monthly pay while hypocritically urging poor petty traders, labourers and artisans to sacrifice their daily bread. In civil disobedience, the activist chooses the course of defiance to a constituted authority, putting everything on the line (including his life) in anticipation of backlash. (For some great insights on the philosophy and practice of civil disobedience, one may refer to Mahatma Gandhi’s works; SATYAGRAHA IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1968, Ahmedabad, Navajivan Trust, and THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENT WITH TRUTH, 1948, Washington DC, Public Affairs Press. A Nigerian author, Rev. Fr. Dr. John Odey has equally done an excellent job in his MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: HIS LIFE AND MESSAGE, 2nd edition, 1995, Enugu, Snaap Press LTD).

At this juncture, may it be stated clearly that the path which Kanu and his IPOB associates have charted for Ndi Igbo leads to nowhere. Neither the sit-at-home nor the combative ranting on Radio Biafra has so far proved any effective. Worse, these ill-conceived strategies of agitation have continued to spread poverty and insecurity across our land. For this reason, it has always been my opinion that Nnamdi Kanu deserves whatever fate that has befallen him in the hands of the Nigerian state. Even the southeast leaders who have been appealing for his release aren’t doing it on the basis of his innocence but in the belief that such will help solve the problem of insecurity in the region. This belief is evident in Governor Chukwuma Soludo’s reaction following Friday’s Supreme Court decision that Kanu must face trial for the crimes he is accused of. If this belief is correct, then I would also be glad to see Kanu walk free from detention.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.