The House That Cannot Stand

There is a particular kind of tragedy that does not arrive from outside. It does not come with foreign boots on familiar soil or with the weapons of an external enemy who has decided that what belongs to you should belong to him instead. This tragedy is quieter and more devastating than that. It is the tragedy of a people who possess every ingredient of greatness the intelligence, the industry, the land, the resources, the cultural richness, the historical depth and who have chosen, with a consistency that would be impressive if it were not so ruinous, to spend those gifts fighting each other rather than building together. It is the tragedy of the East of Nigeria, a region of extraordinary human potential sitting inside a architecture of division so old and so carefully maintained that many of its inhabitants have begun to mistake the division for nature, as if it were geological rather than chosen, as if the suspicion and the superiority and the resentment were features of the landscape rather than decisions that are being renewed, consciously or unconsciously, every single day.

A people who are not united amongst themselves cannot preside over a disunited country. This is not an opinion. It is a law, as reliable as gravity, as indifferent to argument as arithmetic. You cannot export what you do not possess. You cannot offer the rest of a nation the example of unity when your own house is a collection of rooms whose occupants will not acknowledge each other's doors.

Begin in Anambra, that state of commercial energy and intellectual confidence, a place that has produced in disproportionate abundance the lawyers and the professors and the businessmen and the writers who have decorated Nigerian public life for generations. There is in Anambra a self-awareness that is not entirely unjustified the state has genuine achievements, genuine contributions, genuine reasons for a certain pride in what its people have built and what they have produced across the decades. The difficulty is that this self-awareness has curdled, in too many hearts and too many conversations, from pride into condescension. From the legitimate recognition of achievement into the illegitimate dismissal of those who have achieved differently, or more slowly, or along paths that Anambra does not recognize as worthy of recognition.

The Anambra man at a gathering of southeastern states carries himself sometimes with the air of a man who has arrived at a meeting he did not particularly need to attend. He knows or believes he knows, which in its effects amounts to the same thing that his state is more developed, his people more educated, his cities more commercial, his culture more refined. And so when the man from Ebonyi speaks, something shifts in the Anambra man's attention. It does not fully depart, but it reorients itself toward the patience one extends to someone who is saying something that is unlikely to be useful. The Ebonyi man is from the poor state, the rural state, the state that was carved from the bottom of other states and has not yet, in the Anambra estimation, produced sufficient evidence that it deserves equal standing at the table of southeastern conversation.

This is a catastrophic error of understanding, and it is producing catastrophic consequences.

Ebonyi knows how it is regarded. Do not make the mistake of believing that the people who are looked down upon do not feel the direction of the looking. They feel it with a precision that the people doing the looking would be surprised and uncomfortable to know. 

The farmers of Ebonyi, the salt lake communities, the people who have built lives in a state that has fewer of the visible markers of development but who possess in full measure the dignity and the intelligence and the historical depth that belong to every people  they feel the condescension of their Anambra neighbors, and they have responded to it in the way that people who are made to feel inferior almost always respond: with a wounded withdrawal that looks like disinterest but is actually self-protection, and with an occasional bitterness that makes cooperation, when cooperation is needed, feel like a concession rather than a mutual benefit.

A region in which one state looks at another state and sees inferiority has already begun to fail. Not because the assessment is morally wrong, though it is. But because unity cannot be built on a foundation of hierarchy among supposed equals. You cannot ask a man you have publicly regarded as beneath you to stand beside you as a brother when the difficulty arrives and the brother is needed. He will remember every moment of the condescension. He will remember it at the precise moment when you need him to forget it.

Move to Abia and Imo, two states that share a border and a cultural proximity that should, by any reasonable logic, produce a natural alliance a cooperative relationship built on shared heritage, shared challenges, and the shared interest of two neighboring peoples in the development of the region they both inhabit. Instead, what exists between them is a relationship of such spectacular non-cooperation that outside observers with no prior knowledge of the region could be forgiven for concluding that these are two peoples with a long history of warfare rather than two halves of a common civilization.

The politicians of Abia and Imo have modelled for their people, across decades of conduct, a politics in which the neighboring state is not a partner but a competitor  not a fellow beneficiary of regional development but a rival for the limited resources that a federal system distributes among states that know how to position themselves for the distribution. And in making that competition their primary relationship, they have ensured that neither state receives the benefits that only cooperation can produce. A port that would serve both states remains underdeveloped because the two states cannot agree on who gets to claim it. 

A road that would connect their economies remains unbuilt because its construction requires the kind of cross-state coordination that the political class of both states has never found it expedient to practise. An industrial cluster that would attract investment at a scale neither state can attract individually remains unconceived because the conception would require sitting in the same room with a common purpose, and common purpose has not been the operating mode of the relationship.

The people of Abia and Imo the traders and the farmers and the young people trying to build something from the available material  are paying the price of a competition whose only winners are the politicians who use the division to secure constituencies and the outside interests who understand that divided peoples negotiate badly and accept, out of the weakness that division produces, what a united people would never have tolerated.

Now come to the matter of the Ibibio and the long, complex, unresolved history that sits between them and the Igbo  and specifically, the shadow of Arochukwu that falls across that history in ways that contemporary political language has not found adequate means to address.

The Aro people of Arochukwu were, in the centuries before colonial disruption, the dominant commercial and spiritual network across a vast area of what is now southeastern Nigeria. They moved through Igbo and Ibibio and Efik and Ijaw territories with a freedom and a commercial dominance that was sustained by their control of the Ibini Ukpabi oracle  the Long Juju  and by the slave trade that ran through their networks and whose victims included, in significant numbers, people from the communities that those networks penetrated. 

The Ibibio know this. The memory of it is not academic for them. It is not a footnote in a history book. It is a living inheritance of suspicion toward Igbo dominance a suspicion that does not always distinguish carefully between the Aro specifically and the Igbo generally, and that has been available, across the generations since, to be activated by any political entrepreneur who needed an explanation for why Ibibio interests and Igbo interests could not be accommodated in the same political project.

This is the open wound that nobody in the southeastern political conversation is willing to clean and dress properly. Instead it is left to fester not quite acknowledged, not quite addressed, occasionally prodded by those who find the infection useful producing in the Ibibio community a reflexive resistance to any arrangement that looks like it might result in Igbo political or economic dominance over their affairs. It produces in Akwa Ibom and Cross River a political orientation that frequently looks away from the southeast and toward other alliances, other configurations, other identities not because those identities are more natural but because the historical wound has made the most natural alliance feel dangerous.

A wound that is not treated does not heal on its own. It deepens. And a political community built on an unaddressed historical injury is a community that will sabotage its own best interests repeatedly rather than risk the vulnerability of the healing.

And then there are the Ikwerre of Rivers State, and this is perhaps the most painful chapter in the entire narrative of eastern disunity, because the Ikwerre question carries within it the particular bitterness of a people who have been claimed without being consulted, absorbed without being asked, and then resented for refusing the absorption.

The Ikwerre are, by language and by cultural proximity, closely related to the Igbo. Linguists who have studied the relationship between Ikwerre and various Igbo dialects have produced evidence of a common ancestry so clear that in an earlier era, and in many popular assumptions, the Ikwerre were classified simply as Igbo. This classification  made by others, imposed without the formal consent of the people being classified is the source of a grievance that has shaped Rivers State politics for fifty years and is shaping it still.

The Biafran War is the furnace in which this grievance was heated to its current temperature. When the Igbo political leadership declared Biafra and drew its boundaries, the Ikwerre found themselves inside a republic they had not voted for, fighting a war that had been decided for them, under a leadership that did not always distinguish carefully between Igbo identity and the broader southeastern identity that the Biafran project claimed to represent. And when the war ended in the catastrophic defeat that it ended in, the Ikwerre were left to negotiate their relationship with a Nigerian federal structure that had its own complicated feelings about the entire region, while simultaneously processing the experience of having been, from their perspective, used by an Igbo political project that did not adequately represent their interests.

The result is an Ikwerre political identity that has been constructed, with great deliberateness and great emotional investment, in opposition to Igbo identity. Not merely distinct from it opposition to it. The insistence that the Ikwerre are not Igbo has become so central to the political culture of a significant portion of Rivers State that it functions less like a statement of cultural specificity and more like a fortress wall  a structure built not to celebrate what is inside but to keep out what is feared from outside.

The consequence for regional unity is devastating. Rivers State, with its oil wealth and its Port Harcourt commercial hub and its extraordinary geographic and economic strategic importance, sits at the edge of the southeast in a posture of deliberate non-alignment with the region that surrounds it. Its political class has found, across successive administrations, that the most reliable route to federal patronage and political safety runs not through southeastern solidarity but through the construction of an identity distinct from the Igbo an identity that can be presented to Abuja as proof that the southeast is not monolithic, that its component peoples have competing interests, that whatever the Igbo are asking for should not be assumed to represent the interest of all who live among them.

This is not unity's absence. This is unity's active dismantling, conducted by people who profit from the dismantling.

And what is the cost of all this? What has the division actually produced, measured not in the language of identity politics but in the concrete, material terms of what a united southeast might have built and what the divided southeast has instead?

Measure it in the infrastructure that was never built because the states could not coordinate their requests to Abuja into a single, powerful, impossible-to-ignore demand. Measure it in the investments that went to other regions because investors who looked at the southeast saw not a unified market and a coherent development vision but a collection of competing small entities each trying to attract what the region as a whole could have commanded if it spoke with a single voice. Measure it in the political appointments that went elsewhere because the southeastern political class arrived at the negotiating table divided against itself, its representatives undermining each other in the competition for individual advantage while the collective leverage that unity would have provided was left unused on the floor. Measure it in the young people who left  who are still leaving  because the region could not organise itself sufficiently to create the conditions in which their talent could be used and rewarded at home.

Measure it in the blood that has been spilled inside the region the communal conflicts, the boundary disputes, the violence between communities that should have been too busy building together to have energy left for destroying each other. Every life lost in intra-eastern conflict is a life that was subtracted not only from the family that mourned it but from the collective human capital of a region that needed every capable person it could find.

The cost is incalculable. And it continues to accumulate, every day that the division is maintained, every day that Anambra looks at Ebonyi with condescension, every day that Abia and Imo refuse the cooperation that geography and history and simple self-interest recommend, every day that the Ibibio wound goes untreated, every day that the Ikwerre identity is constructed in opposition rather than in addition.

There is something that must be said clearly, because clarity is what the situation demands and what the comfortable language of diplomatic sensitivity has too long withheld from it.

The Igbo, who are numerically and historically the dominant group in the southeast, carry a particular responsibility in this conversation  not the responsibility of guilt, because the dynamics of regional division are never the product of one group alone, but the responsibility of initiative. Dominant groups in any regional configuration have a choice: they can use their dominance to consolidate the hierarchy that makes others feel small, or they can use it to demonstrate the generosity and the genuine respect for difference that makes others feel safe. The Igbo political and intellectual class has, with notable exceptions, not consistently made the second choice. It has too often pursued a vision of southeastern or Biafran solidarity that was, in its actual architecture, a vision of Igbo leadership over other peoples who were expected to follow because the Igbo project was presented as the regional project without sufficient negotiation of whether the other peoples agreed.

You cannot lead people who do not trust you. You cannot build a coalition with communities whose historical injuries at your hands or at the hands of your ancestors you have not acknowledged with the seriousness those injuries deserve. You cannot ask the Ibibio to forget Arochukwu. You cannot ask the Ikwerre to feel safe inside an Igbo-led political project that has not demonstrated, in concrete institutional terms, that Ikwerre interests will be genuinely protected and not merely accommodated when convenient. These things take work slow, patient, uncomfortable work that requires the dominant party to listen more than it speaks and to give more than it initially believes is necessary

That work has not been done. It must be done. And it must be done now, because the window in which the southeast can reorganise itself into the force it has the potential to be is not permanently open.

The other peoples of the east carry their own responsibilities in this accounting. The Ibibio grievance is legitimate, but a legitimate grievance that is never brought to the table for resolution is a grievance that has been chosen over progress and the people who make that choice must own its consequences. The Ikwerre identity is real and deserves genuine respect, but an identity whose primary definition is what it is not rather than what it is will eventually hollow itself out, because negation is not a foundation, it is an excavation. Ebonyi's response to Anambra's condescension is understandable, but if that response takes the form of permanent withdrawal rather than the demand for the respect that is owed, then Ebonyi has allowed Anambra's opinion to become its destiny.

Every community in this conversation has a choice. The choice is between the story of division, which is comfortable and familiar and requires nothing to be risked, and the story of unity, which is uncomfortable and unfamiliar and requires that old wounds be reopened before they can be properly closed.

The story of division has a known ending. It has been playing out for decades and its ending is visible in every underdeveloped road and every unused port and every young person on a flight out of the region and every negotiation in Abuja in which the southeast arrived divided and left with less than it came for.

The story of unity has a different ending. But it requires a different beginning.

The beginning is this: a gathering. Not of politicians, who have demonstrated across generations that their interest in the division exceeds their interest in the unity, but of the peoples themselves. The traders and the farmers and the teachers and the young people and the elders who still carry in their bodies the memory of what the east was before it turned so fully against itself. A gathering in which the Anambra man is required to sit and listen to what the Ebonyi man has experienced, and to sit with that experience without the defensive superiority that has been his first response for too long. 

A gathering in which the Ibibio elder can speak the full history of Arochukwu into a room of Igbo listeners who receive it not as an accusation requiring deflection but as a truth requiring acknowledgment. A gathering in which the Ikwerre speaks freely about the Biafran experience and is heard without the anxiety of those who feel that the hearing threatens the project.

Acknowledgment is not weakness. It is the only material from which trust can be made. And trust the deep, structural, tested trust of peoples who have looked at each other's injuries and chosen solidarity anyway is the only foundation on which a united east can stand.

A house whose rooms are at war with each other does not need an external enemy to fall. It falls from within, room by room, wall by wall, until what remains is not a house but a collection of rubble in which each piece insists, even in the falling, that it was the most important piece of all.

The east of Nigeria is not rubble. Not yet. It is a house that is cracking  beautifully, stubbornly, expensively cracking and whose occupants are watching the cracks spread and arguing about whose fault the architecture is while the structure continues its slow subsidence into a future none of them chose and all of them are building by their choices.

The cracks can be filled. The house can be made to stand. But only if the people inside it decide deliberately, collectively, at the cost of whatever pride must be surrendered and whatever wound must be reopened  that a standing house is worth more than the luxury of being right about why it is falling.

A people who cannot look their brother in the eye have already lost the argument they are making to the world about what they deserve. The east of Nigeria deserves more than it has. But deserving is not enough. You must also be willing to build it  together, or not at all.

The choice, as it has always been, belongs entirely to the people who must live with it.