The furore raised by Dr Abati’s commentary has unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, led to the usual ethnic finger pointing, with very few commentators making any effort to go beyond the emotionalism that beclouded the issue.  What T.O.S Benson was reported to have said is a common accusation or stereotype against the Igbos.

I am, of course, assuming that he did not deliberately present ‘alternative facts’ or  misspoke  and that Dr Abati did not mishear. Based on these assumptions, I would argue that Dr Abati did not really say anything new to warrant some of the personal attacks he received and some of the counter-ethnic insults by his defenders. 

Though some commentators have variously claimed that T.O.S Benson’s in-laws actually gifted him a parcel of land contrary to his purported claim, or that he probably harboured some malice, those refutations, on their own, are insufficient to douse the lingering perception that the Igbos do not sell land to foreigners. In the same vein, even a validation of that story would still not be sufficient to conclude that it is a general practice among the Igbos.

One needs a study which would show the number of applications for land allotment from non-Igbos in Igboland and the number that were denied based on the applicant’s ethnicity or ‘otherness’ before one can generalise one way or the other. Such a study, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist. The only pieces of evidence we have in this conversations seem to be isolated examples, hearsays and anecdotal evidence which belong to the realm of grapevine talks.   

The truth is that there is in every culture and even subcultures, elements of fear of the foreigner, especially when their population is substantial enough to affect a town’s demography or when such migrants constitute what Amy Chua, the Chinese-American Professor of Law at Yale University, would call “market dominant minorities”. These are a set of migrants who would move into an area and within a short time try to exert disproportionate influence in the local political economy. If some “migrants” are tolerated or spared profiling, it is often because their number and influence in the area are not seen as threats. Have we not all heard of landlords who would not rent to Ijebus, Igbos, Hausas or Muslims? 

If I were in a place where T.O.S Benson was said to have made the remark, I would have asked him why he wanted to go to his wife’s state and village to build a house for her and her daughter. This is different from a son-in-law offering to build a family home for his in-laws if he has the means or feels that his parents-in-laws deserve better than what they have. In most patriarchal societies, once a woman is married, she changes her maiden name to that of her husband, and becomes part of her husband’s family and community. This means that in most Igbo communities, a request by T.O.S Benson to buy land to build a house for his wife and daughter would be seen as an anomaly and would be viewed with utmost suspicion, including on whether it was a ploy to cunningly divorce their daughter. 

 I noticed the same anomaly in 2022 when Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu, wife of the then governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu (now late),  who, with the support of her husband, wanted to contest for a senatorial seat in the 2023 elections in her parents’ Imo East Senatorial district rather than in her husband’s senatorial district in Ondo State. In most parts of Igboland, once a woman is married and changed her surname to that of her husband’s, she has become virtually a visitor in her father’s home and community – unless she is divorced. 

As we interrogate stereotypes we should also interrogate glorious attributions. These are ego-massaging statements that have been repeated so often that they are now taken as self-evident truths. For instance, during the said night of tributes for Senator Ifeanyi Ubah, Senate President Akpabio repeated one of such glorious attributions about Igbos: they are very entrepreneurial or ‘mercantile’; if you go to any place and do not see an Igboman, pack your things and go home because “there is nothing there”, and wherever the Igbos go, they build homes and help to “develop” the place.

The main problem with the above glorious attributions is that they are often framed in a manner that wrongly suggests that other ethnic groups are less industrious than the Igbos. While it is true that the Igbos are very visible in commerce and are literally to be found in every nook and crevice of this country (and even outside the country), the narrations are often denuded of the historical and cultural explanations for  these tendencies.  The truth is that with one of the highest population densities in West Africa, many in traditional Igbo society could not survive on farming and therefore took to a number of non-farming vocations such as trading, which naturally took them to other parts of the country. For instance while  Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was born in 1904 in Zungeru, in the present day Niger State,  most of his contemporaries   in the struggle for independence were born in their ethnic homelands. With time, commerce and living in other parts of the country became part of the Igbos’ ‘achievement-oriented’ culture. This was reinforced by a certain belief that an Igbo person who lives ‘abroad’ (outside the town or community), would be accorded higher respect than the person who lives within the community. Following from this, the Igbos tend to have two homes – one tied to their ancestral communities, and the other tied to where they earn their livelihood. However, since this is not a shared norm among other ethnic groups, we cannot conclude that being visible or dominant in commerce or in living outside one’s ethnic homeland makes the Igbos superior or more industrious than others. In cultural studies, no culture is superior to others, hence we do not talk of hierarchy of cultures but of cultural relativity- each culture serves its members, and there are always elements that are appealing and others that repel in every culture. 

The above explains Senator Akpabio’s quip that while the Igbos who come to his state build homes and houses, members of other ethnic groups generally do not. Unlike the Igbos, the traditional Yoruba and many people from the North, with their abundant fertile land, had no need to take to commerce in the same magnitude as the Igbos did and still do, and therefore were less inclined to move outside their enclaves to look for economic opportunities. In addition to land surplus, the Yoruba had very early contact with the Europeans: Lagos was a Crown colony as early as March 1862, meaning that it was governed directly by the government of England at the time. Partly because of this, by 1872, Lagos had already become a cosmopolitan trading centre with a population of over 60,000 as it attracted all and sundry looking for greener pastures, including a number of the freed slaves from America, Caribbean and Britain who were settled in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Many of these were professionals who assimilated into the Yoruba culture of the 18th and 19th centuries and in turn influenced the cultures of the Yoruba not just in Lagos but also in the contiguous areas. Since people are influenced and socialised into the vocation of their forebears, this again partly explains the dominance of the Yoruba in the professions. Similarly, the people from the North, which has abundant fertile land, became dominant in agriculture, and therefore were on average less likely to settle outside their enclaves in the North. 

Another glorious attribution that is worth interrogating is that the Yoruba are the most accommodating of all the ethnic groups in the country. I do not know the metrics used for measuring this. If it is because you have more non- Yoruba living in Lagos and its environs, then this cannot be a valid metric because all major cities, including the state capitals, pull people towards them because of the enhanced opportunities they offer. In fact, in almost all the state capitals in this country, non-indigenes outnumber the indigenes without this being an issue. In fact, if the Yoruba are called the most hospitable because they “allow” people to live in Yorubaland, what do we call the original indigenes of Abuja and the indigenes of all the state capitals in the country?  

It is important to emphasize that just as talents are not evenly distributed in any federation, there is also ‘ethnic socialisation’’ by people who operate from the other side of the moral divide. For instance when we mention drug dealing, credit card fraud, ‘Yahoo Yahoo’, religious fundamentalism, prostitution abroad or militancy, accusing fingers would be pointing in different ethnic directions. This means that despite what the Internet Warriors would want us to believe, no ethnic group should pretend to occupy the moral high-ground or feel better or worse than others.

Seven, while living in Europe I saw myself as an Africanist, and used my publishing firm and my writings to challenge theories or innuendos that maligned Africa or ruled out development and democratic possibilities for the continent. However, as I get older, I tell people that I am no longer an Africanist but a humanist. This is because with age and experience one realises that every race, ethnic group, community and even kindred, is an embodiment of the good, the bad and the really horrible.  As the American writer and historian, James Tuslow Adams, would put it:  “There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behoves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”

*Jideofor Adibe is Professor of Political Science at Nasarawa State University, Keffi.