“You would think that a people who went through all that experience of horror would learn. No. If the wise taunts you to a fight, respond with tact and wisdom and patience. If you don’t, he will send his fox to ensnare you. The Igbo believe that Nigeria regularly trims the stems of their Iroko. Why? Everyone suffered Buhari but the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria believe that it was not just Buhari but Nigeria itself that has not been fair to them. They call what they suffer from the rest of us marginalization. But I soon learnt that even among themselves, they discriminate; they marginalize. I had thought they were one until the news of the appointment of new service chiefs broke last week. Given what they suffered while Muhammadu Buhari was in power, the question on every sensible lip was whether an Igbo person made the list. The initial answer to that question was negative. From their names, it was not difficult to determine the ethnicity of the heads of the army, the air force, the police and the Chief of Defence Staff. The internet soon caught fire that there was no one from the South-East on the list. That was not good enough after eight years of Buhari’s exclusive government of northern Nigeria. But a certain Rear Admiral E.I. Ogalla was announced as the Chief of Naval Staff. Who is he? Where is he from? It turned out that he is Igbo, from Enugu State. His full name is Rear Admiral Emmanuel Ikechukwu Ogalla. But while Nigerians from other parts of the country rejoiced with the East, Igbos were loud on the social media; they said Ogalla is not an Igbo name. I told an Igbo man online to stop following the monkeys of that narrative to plunder the farm of reason. I told him that the man’s middle name is Ikechukwu. He politely told me to stay off the discussion. The appointee, he said, is from Enugu-Ezike, the northernmost part of Igboland, and therefore was not of the stock of his super race. I felt utterly disappointed. I called another Igbo friend who hails from that Enugu-Ezike but currently lives in Enugu town: “Jude, is it true you are not Igbo?” My friend answered in anger that I should not mind them. “We are more Igbo than them.” He told me he had been tackling the narrative and those pushing it “since the CNS appointment was announced.” A Tribune reporter from Ebonyi State told me that “even me, they say I am not Igbo enough. They call us Wawa.”

There was a time in Nigeria’s media history when a certain Ebenezer Williams was arguably one of the country’s best newspaper columnists. But that popular name was a pseudonym, a fictitious identity. The masquerade donning that beautiful costume was Abiodun Aloba, colonial and post-colonial Nigeria media genius. He died in 2001. In the Daily Express of April 18, 1970, three months after the Nigerian civil war ended, and thirty-one years before the man died, he did a post-mortem of the Nigerian civil war and a character portrait of the Ibo (now called Igbo). Read him slowly, carefully: “They are too ebullient in victory, too sullen in defeat. They are too mechanical in a technology world …They are too bookish; they are too much of crowd, jumping just where the leader had jumped…”

Ebenezer Williams believed that if the Igbo had won the civil war, all, and that included their friends and foes, “would have all had it.” Three weeks after Ebenezer Williams wrote the above, the quote was deemed too instructive that it found its way into Tai Solarin’s Nigerian Tribune column of Monday, May 11, 1970. Solarin, whose piece carried the title, ‘I’ll speak for the Ibos’, declared that Ebenezer “was dead on” in his assessment of the Ibo and that thousands of non-Ibo Nigerians shared Ebenezer Williams’ belief of how the Ibo would have behaved if they had won the civil war. Solarin noted that when other non-Ibo Nigerians “do not have the courage of Ebenezer Williams to write it down, they sip their beer or palm wine over it as they rub their hands together prayerfully and in self-congratulation.”

Solarin was a friend of the Ibos; he wrote several articles on the Biafran war, its aftermath and the imperative of a proper re-integration of the Ibos if Nigeria would progress in peace. In February 1970, a month after the war officially ended, Solarin went to the then East Central State. He came back to his base in the West and wrote in his column in the Nigerian Tribune of March 2, 1970: “I saw a lot of things, but it seems I remember more the things I did not see. A single lizard, I did not see. A single rat, mouse, our bush rat, I did not see. I did not see a single snake. I did not see a single goat or sheep…” Where did they all go? A proverb should explain it: When what one eats is not available, one shifts to that which one does not eat. Solarin, however, saw many other things. He saw bicycles without tyres: “Half of the bicycles in the town of Owerri had no tyres on. When I saw a man pushing a heavily loaded bicycle that moved on the bare metal wheels, I was sure he would not go on top of it. I was wrong. He sprang on it as soon as the hill tapered off…” (see Nigerian Tribune, March 2, 1970, page 5). That was war. May we not see it again. But we should stop scratching our nose with the adder’s head. Those who think the Nigerian question must be answered with war should examine the ramifications of their project. History is there to guide every road taker.

You would think that a people who went through all that experience of horror would learn. No. If the wise taunts you to a fight, respond with tact and wisdom and patience. If you don’t, he will send his fox to ensnare you. The Igbo believe that Nigeria regularly trims the stems of their Iroko. Why? Everyone suffered Buhari but the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria believe that it was not just Buhari but Nigeria itself that has not been fair to them. They call what they suffer from the rest of us marginalization. But I soon learnt that even among themselves, they discriminate; they marginalize. I had thought they were one until the news of the appointment of new service chiefs broke last week. Given what they suffered while Muhammadu Buhari was in power, the question on every sensible lip was whether an Igbo person made the list. The initial answer to that question was negative. From their names, it was not difficult to determine the ethnicity of the heads of the army, the air force, the police and the Chief of Defence Staff. The internet soon caught fire that there was no one from the South-East on the list. That was not good enough after eight years of Buhari’s exclusive government of northern Nigeria. But a certain Rear Admiral E.I. Ogalla was announced as the Chief of Naval Staff. Who is he? Where is he from? It turned out that he is Igbo, from Enugu State. His full name is Rear Admiral Emmanuel Ikechukwu Ogalla. But while Nigerians from other parts of the country rejoiced with the East, Igbos were loud on the social media; they said Ogalla is not an Igbo name. I told an Igbo man online to stop following the monkeys of that narrative to plunder the farm of reason. I told him that the man’s middle name is Ikechukwu. He politely told me to stay off the discussion. The appointee, he said, is from Enugu-Ezike, the northernmost part of Igboland, and therefore was not of the stock of his super race. I felt utterly disappointed. I called another Igbo friend who hails from that Enugu-Ezike but currently lives in Enugu town: “Jude, is it true you are not Igbo?” My friend answered in anger that I should not mind them. “We are more Igbo than them.” He told me he had been tackling the narrative and those pushing it “since the CNS appointment was announced.” A Tribune reporter from Ebonyi State told me that “even me, they say I am not Igbo enough. They call us Wawa.”

Chinua Achebe is the Igbo greatest of all time. His daughter, Nwando, did her doctoral work on the people of northern Igboland. She later published ‘The female king of colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe.’ That king was of Enugu-Ezike; she was not a man, she was a female but history speaks of her as king, not queen; Nwando Achebe describes her as a female man. Her recorded exploits enrich Igbo history and culture; scholars say materials written on Ahebi and her people have helped grow the field of Igbo studies. That is the community that produced the new naval chief whom the ethnic purists are rejecting. It is interesting.

When Bola Tinubu announced his security appointments, the first narrative was ‘he did not give us anything’, but when an Igbo was identified among the chosen, the tale became ‘the person he gave us is not one of us.’ No matter how good you are, you cannot satisfactorily sweep the home of the witch. The Igbo, in this instance, is that witch. Where I come from, dialectical differences do not put the knife in alájobí, our common Yoruba identity. Even circumstances of birth don’t. From the northernmost part of Yorubaland in Kogi State to the coasts of Lagos, there are variants of Yoruba language that I do not understand but that would not make the speakers of those dialects less Yoruba. What binds a family together should be enough armour against base divisive tendencies. We do what Toyin Falola described as “cooperation for integration” and I will add integration for strength and survival.

When a man is more sinned against than sinning, let that man reexamine himself. First, the blame was colonialism. The Igbo man said he could no longer act like one because the white man has “put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (see Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, page 166). The same Achebe would, in later works, acknowledge what he described as his people’s “hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness which invite envy and hatred…” Yet, he would accuse other Nigerians of harbouring deep-seated hatred for his people and that they would “probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo,” because of Igbo’s “unquestioned advantage” over other Nigerians “in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society.” Today, the Igbo accuse Nigeria of treating them as a peripheral group in national affairs but the greatest cause of their organ failure is the sepsis of the self-hate that defines their in-group interactions. Within their walls, they choose original and fake; the significant and the insignificant among the various clans. That is what we’ve just seen in the appointment of the new Chief of Naval Staff. They say the man’s Igbo is too close to the borders with the Igalla. It would appear that it didn’t start today. Indeed, 14 years ago, Achebe railed against it. As the guest lecturer at the 2009 edition of the annual Ahiajoku Lecture series, Achebe spoke forcefully against any form of division among his people. He spoke particularly against discrimination along the lines of tongue and dialect: “Igbo is Igbo,” Achebe cried out and added that “that is what unites the Igbo anywhere they are. We are not allowed to tell anybody who is speaking in a different dialect that they are not Igbo. Igbo people have spoken their languages for centuries and millennium without going to war. It is these languages, though the same meaning but different dialects, that keep the people together among the Igbo speaking people of Nigeria.” I do not think anyone listened to the giant from Ogidi. There was a disconnect between the hunter’s flute and the hunter’s dog.

It is true that there is no one who does not like soup with meat in it but a child of the house does not crave that soup at the expense of the family’s health. The senate presidency was zoned to the Igbo in 1999. That opportunity soon became a crabs-in-a-bucket struggle; a war of depletion. Occupiers of the post got changed in per-second soil like baby diapers. Fish must eat fish to get fat. That was the philosophy. The other parts of the country watched with interest and horror. A number of concepts come to mind here: Cultural anthropologists would say it is self-marginalization; social psychologists would say it is self-sabotage; they would also say it is self-denigration and self-destruction. You appreciate the appropriateness of these tags when you remember that for about two years now, the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria have been staying off work every Monday. You remember what the Wagner gunmen did in Russia at the weekend and the mayor of Moscow’s no-work-on-Monday declaration. Imagine that disruption as the permanent feature of a people’s life. That has been happening in Igbo land month after month and there is no end in sight. They call it sit-at-home; a ruinous daylight curfew imposed on them by their homegrown Wagner group. They are softly killing themselves while claiming that they are protesting the detention of their Mazi Nnamdi Kanu by the Nigerian state. I look at the situation and see that these people are addicted to being the victim of the self. Good people among them are helpless; even the governors and their governments are powerless in the face of the regional acquiescence to arrogant evil. The new governor of Enugu State, Peter Mba, recently took some steps to unlock their Mondays. The consequence was a reported fire attack on his petrol station last week.

Fifty-three years after the civil war, the Igbo have remained what Ebenezer Williams said they were in 1970: “too ebullient in victory, too sullen in defeat.” Buhari ran a regime that saw and pronounced the Igbo an insignificant dot in a circle; a mere five percent. Then it set up and took off with a war cabinet. If we were not going to fight a war, why would the heads of the army, air force, police, SSS, NIA, Customs, Immigration, Prisons, etc and etc, and the NSA be chosen from the Commander-in-Chief’s backyard? That era has happily ended with the belligerent regime worsted. Tinubu’s appointment of security chiefs was fair enough. He is a Yoruba man. There is a Yoruba lineage with an oríkì that emphasizes equity and fairness in the sharing and distribution of communal goods and privileges: pín in re, làá a re; ìkan ò gbodò jù kan… (share it well; divide it equitably; one must not be bigger than the other).

There was a government in Nigeria between 2010 and 2015, the Igbo elite enjoyed it. While the axe of that regime unjustly did injustice to the Yoruba tree, the victim did not spend eternity remembering, sulking and whining. If I were the Igbo, I would see the very exit of the Buhari regime and its tendency as my victory over disease and death. I would doff my gab of “hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness.” I would celebrate my elevated sons and daughters in today’s fresh air. I would then draw a line, get properly united as a people and reappraise my engagement with the Nigerian state in a decisively strategic way.

It is no longer news that the just concluded national bi-annual convention of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, NGE, which held in Owerri, Imo State capital, produced Eze Anaba, editor of the Vanguard newspaper as the new president. In the next two years, he and 15 other officers will run the affairs of the elite club of Nigerian editors. It is not going to be an easy task but editors are confident that the Anaba-led team will deliver.

It turned out to be a Guild election like no other, with difficulties more fundamental than the normal schism that characterises every struggle for power. Since the NGE was founded on May 20, 1961, at the old National Press Club in Lagos by Alhaji Lateef Jakande, who also emerged as its first president, the 2023 election was perhaps the most toxic.

To be sure, the NGE is not immune to crisis. Though the Jakande-led executive that included other veterans such as Babatunde Jose(vice president), Abiodun Aloba (secretary) and Nelson Ottah (assistant secretary), had the vision of advancing the interests of the media profession and deepening editors’ relationships with their various publics, including the government, the political crises of the 1960s became a clog in the wheel of progress. The 1966 coup and the 30-month civil war led to the sacrificing of the journalistic principles of objectivity, credibility and accuracy on the altar war propaganda.

But even in the heady era of sundry military juntas after the war, Nigerian editors jealously guarded the independence of the media, so much so that when General Olusegun Obasanjo’s junta promulgated a Press Council Decree to muscle the media in 1977, the NGE rejected it. The NGE also pushed back against civilian governments that wanted to skyjack its leadership.

Anaba being congratulated by Gov Hope Uzodimma

Thus, at the 1982 convention in Minna, Niger State, when the Alhaji Shehu Shagari-led National Party of Nigeria, NPN, government through Alhaji Umaru Dikko, the Minister of Transportation, tried to take control of the Guild by sponsoring the campaign of Alhaji Ibrahim, the Director General of the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, who only became a registered member at that conference, members revolted and thwarted the move.

Such push-backs were possible because the founding fathers designed an exclusive club of professional news managers where editors as the ultimate gatekeepers on media content could interrogate issues of professionalism. Since then, it has remained true to its calling, working in collaboration with other journalistic bodies across the world to preserve the standards of journalism practice, strict adherence to ethics and advocacy for press freedom and democracy.

Nigerian editors under the NGE aegis have played their watchdog role conscious of the clear provisions of Chapter 2 Section 22 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), that: “The press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in this Chapter and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people.”

How then can the media hold the government accountable if the practitioners become subservient to the government like the Ninth National Assembly headed by Senator Ahmad Lawan?

Sadly, 62 years after those great journalists founded the NGE, some editors wanted to ride on the back of the asinine 2023 politics of ethnicity to win the Guild presidency. They insisted that it would augur well if the NGE was embedded in the presidency, perhaps as a parastatal rather than the Fourth Estate of the Realm as envisaged by the Constitution. That was a fallacy. And fortunately, Nigerian editors saw through the heresy.

Never in the history of the NGE was ethnicity considered a relevant factor in the election of its leadership. Competence and character always trumped such primordial considerations.

Since its revival in 1992 by Chief Onyema Ugochukwu, the NGE has had presidents – Biodun Oduwole, Garba Shehu, Oluremi Oyo, Baba Dantiye, Gbenga Adefaye, Femi Adesina, Garba-deen Muhammad, Funke Egbemode, and Isa Mustapha – who nobody cared where they came from. The only consideration was that they were editors with track records of achievements.

So, what changed? Nothing other than the fact that those who profiteered from the ethnic profiling of fellow Nigerians in the 2023 general elections thought they could export the same condemnable template to the Guild. So, rather than selling their policies to fellow editors, they were busy promising guaranteed access to Aso Rock if elected. In running this nefarious and harebrained campaign, they were backed to the hilt by those who made incendiary comments against fellow Nigerians for no crime other than their electoral preferences which did not agree with theirs.

For daring to contest the presidency of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, Eze Anaba was branded an Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, member simply because he is Igbo. These characters, without qualms, called to threaten and abuse fellow editors for going around with an Igbo to campaign in an election a Yoruba was vying for the same position.

Yet, if the expression “true Nigerian” means anything, Eze Anaba embodies that truth. The only thing Igbo about him is his name. Son of the late Mr. Josiah Anaba, who hailed from Umuota, Obingwa, Abia State and mother, late Mrs. Rosaline, an Ishan (Esan) from Ubiaja in Edo State, Eze and his siblings were born and raised in Lagos. Over 70 per cent of his friends are non-Igbo, including those who suddenly realised that he is Igbo and not qualified to aspire to lead a professional body like the NGE. His wife, Itoro, one of the most hardworking women in Nigeria today, hails from Akwa Ibom State.

Eze speaks Yoruba better than he speaks Igbo. He has worked and thrived in an organisation owned by one of the doyens of journalism in Nigeria today, Uncle Sam Amuka, who is not Igbo. In his capacity as Editor of the high-flying Vanguard newspaper, he manages colleagues from all the nooks and crannies of this vast country without any complaints from any quarters.

But why did they try that nonsense? Didn’t they know they were dealing with members of an elite club who know what the real issues were and what was at stake? Impunity is the answer. It has a way of beclouding people’s senses. But what was at stake was the very soul of the Guild. And when it mattered most Nigerian editors, just as they did in 1982 in Minna, made a resounding statement in Owerri on June 16 by rejecting tendencies that divide rather than unite us. When the votes were counted, Eze Anaba polled 250 to defeat those who labelled him IPOB. They only managed to garner 81 votes. It was real shellacking.

In repudiating the idiocy of ethnic and religious politics, Nigerian Editors have once again demonstrated to politicians that politics could do with some decency and elections can be transparent, free, fair and credible.

The Maimuna Garba-led election/screening committee that had Isaac Ighure, a Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, Yusuf Abdulssalam, Mary Atolagbe and Felix Nwadioha as members did a job that INEC Chairman Mahmoud Yakubu proved incapable of doing.

It is not about numbers. It is all about political will to do the right thing and fidelity to the Constitution and country. Indeed, Nigerians have something to learn from the Nigerian Guild of Editors who made a loud and unambiguous statement in Owerri on June 16 that their conscience can never be purloined.

Ikechukwu Amaechi, former Editor of Daily Indepepndent, is Publisher of The Niche, an online newspaper. 

On July 17, 2012, Peter Obi, then governor of Anambra State, swore in five new commissioners. One of them was Chike Okoli, whom he assigned to the Ministry of Science and Technology where he would serve as commissioner until the expiration of Mr. Obi’s governorship tenure in March 2014. Two months later, around May 21, 2014, Chike set out from the state capital in Awka to Nanka, his village in Orumba South Local Government Area, LGA, of the state. He never got there.

Somewhere in Agulu, not far from Nanka, Chike’s car was reportedly intercepted by men in a sports utility vehicle, SUV, who abducted him. Despite having much of their ransom demand of N16 million met, Chike has not been seen or heard from since then. It was widely reported at the time that Chike was “abducted by unknown gunmen”.

Forty-one days before Chike Okoli’s abduction, then Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, went to Awka, where he declared that the state was the safest it had been in five years. Five years before this revelation by the Inspector-General, in April 2009, a campaign of violent crime leading to the death of over 30 persons in lethal fortnight, forced the House of Representatives to hold an urgent debate at the end of which it adopted a resolution expressing alarm at and asking for urgent measures to address the activities of “the men of the underworld in Anambra State”.

In the first six months of 2009, violent crime killed over 60 people in Anambra State alone. Abia, Anambra and Imo states in the South-East were among the top five in the kidnapping league table compiled by Nigeria’s security agencies in 2009. A report by the Voice of America in December 2009 attributed these trends in the South-East to “criminality and violence from the proliferation of armed gangs”. One year later, in the last quarter of 2010, Aba, the commercial centre in Abia State, was reported to be “in the firm grip of kidnap militia”.

Transnational crime gangs were the suspects when unknown gunmen attacked St. Phillip’s Catholic Church in Ozubulu, in Ekwusigo LGA in Anambra State, shooting indiscriminately at worshippers in an incident that killed at least 13 persons and injured many more in the early hours of August 6, 2017.

These instances do not by any means pretend to scratch the surface of the patterns of atrocity violence in South-East Nigeria. But they illustrate some features that have been lost as the situation has become the stuff of a bifurcated, single narrative. Internally in the region, one prong to this narrative claims that the sources of insecurity in the South-East are external, caused mostly by armed herders. Externally, outside the South-East, much of the country perceives insecurity in south-east as the handiwork of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB. Both claims are blinkered.

The latter prong of this single narrative has much of its origins in two developments and one tendency. One was the designation of the group as a terrorist organisation by an ex parte court order at the instance of the former Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, in 2017. The tactical objective, it seemed, was to isolate the group. The actual consequence was a strategic metastasis.

A second was the decision by National Security Adviser in his inaugural Annual Security Threat Assessment in 2017 to take a federal character approach to security threat analyses and boil down a resilient problem of insecurity in the South-East into an IPOB problem, putting the group on the same footing as Boko Haram.

These two developments derive from the tendency to turn every problem of insecurity in Nigeria into a revenue source for those supposed to manage them. The result is that no theatre of insecurity in Nigeria ever gets better. The Joint Task Force, JTF, in the Niger Delta, for instance, has been in existence since 1994. It was meant to be temporary.

These developments were foreseably wrong-headed. Contrary to urban legend, atrocity violence in the South-East had been on the rise since the return to elective governance in 1999. In his 2007 book on Political Assassinations in Nigeria, Shehu Sani, the former Senator from Kaduna State, details over 50 crimes and victims of political murder which occurred in Nigeria in the first eight years following the return to elective government in Nigeria in 1999. The South-East and South-South easily out-ranked the other geo-political zones of the country with the highest number of assassinations.

As the disappearance of Chike Okoli in 2014 shows, the “unknown gunman” is not a recent moniker. When unknown assassins set upon the then chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, in Onitsha, Barnabas Igwe and his wife, Abigail, brutally killing both around September 1, 2002, IPOB was not in existence. Three years later, the former Governor of Anambra State, the recently deceased Chinwoke Mbadinuju, walked free on charges of having procured the double murder of Mr. and Mrs. Igwe. Their killers remain unknown.

In his 2023 Annual Security Threat Assessment, the National Security Adviser claims that IPOB attacks “led to the death of 77 civilians” in 2022, with 54% of reported incidents credited to the group being directed, however, at security agencies. Clearly, 77 persons killed is 77 too many, yet, this statistic should put perceptions of IPOB as an insecurity proposition in perspective.

By comparison, Obosi, the ancient town in Anambra State which shares part of the commercial hub widely referred to as Onitsha, has been overtaken by an orgy of cult killings which claimed the lives of nearly one hundred young men over the same period. The Obosi killings have not merited the attentions of the NSA even though they have a much longer history; are much more deadly; involve more sophisticated weapons; and are linked to organised crime. The reason is simple: Obosi killings do not fit into the single narrative of separatism.

Of course, the violence in the South-East is not exclusive to non-state actors or gangs. The month before the Ozubulu Massacre, scores of bodies of young men were found floating on the Ezu River in Anambra State in a mass liquidation that appeared to bear the hallmarks of the Special Armed Robbery Squad, SARS.

At the beginning of a pattern that would define the millennium for many in that part of Nigeria, in the early hours of February 7, 2001, over 150 armed men of the Police Mobile Force attacked what was believed to be the national headquarters of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, in Okigwe, Imo State, shooting at will at hundreds of unarmed activists. It was reported that dead “casualties of the raid littered everywhere”. In May 2008, MASSOB released a list of 2,020 of its members allegedly killed by Nigerian security agencies.

A major inflection point was the prison break in Owerri in April 2021, which freed over 1,844 prisoners, many of them violent and dangerous, from a facility not far from the office of the state governor who was reportedly not far from the vicinity of the prison as the incident occurred. Quite miraculously, no prison officers suffered any casualties in the break. The aftermath of the prison break would witness an indiscriminate escalation in the South-East on a scale suggesting the partisan weaponisation of insecurity.

The Buhari regime approached insecurity in South-East Nigeria with peculiar prejudices, which did not much bother itself with knowledge or evidence. With the region excluded from strategic leadership in the security services, much of the decision making about how to manage exposure to insecurity in that part of the country lacked the benefit of informed insights.

Far from being helpful, the interventions by the Buhari lot did much to hinder efforts to find solutions to insecurity in the region. To be fair, the South-East was not the only region mismanaged under the Buhari misadventure. Over eight years, Muhammadu Buhari left every part of Nigeria worse than he met them.

As the country turns the page on a toxic eight years, there is an opportunity to re-think the metrics and methods by which it manages insecurity. In Nigeria, those who should end insecurity seem committed instead to making it durable. That must end.

*A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Bill Gates, the American with a trophy as one of the World’s richest men, came visiting Nigeria last week. He publicly visited the Presidential Villa twice; first to meet President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the second, to meet Vice President Kashim Shettima Mustapha and our governors who came before him with begging bowls for health aid.

Despite Nigeria being one country, each governor had a separate health agenda and request, all expecting the former husband of Melinda French to grant their wishes. Although the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a $50 billion endowment, out of which $7 billion has been earmarked for polio eradication, how do the governors and the Federal Government expect Gates to grant their separate requests, more so as Nigeria is just one of 196 countries in the world? If we must beg Gates for health hand outs, why can’t it be consolidated, or should we also have lined up the 774 local government chairmen before him?

I reflected that it would have cost us a fortune to gather the governors and their entourage in Abuja given the fact that most would have flown down while those coming by road would have burnt fuel at N500 per litre. Such money, if spent on healthcare, would have helped.

A day before the meeting, Gates had indicted Nigerian political leaders for poor investment in the nation’s health sector. He said government spends only $10 (N6,900) per Nigerian on healthcare annually compared to $31 in sub-Saharan Africa. He admonished that: “Leaders need to make a much bigger financial commitment, focusing most on improving primary health systems. Making sure clinics are well-staffed and supplied, making sure children get the vaccines they need.”

What Gates was saying is that the primary challenge is not in begging for assistance, but what is Nigeria doing with the healthcare system? Part of the answer was given a day before the June 22, 2023 Gates-Nigerian Governors meeting when some 400 health practitioners met under the umbrella of the Nigeria Union of Allied Health Professionals, NUAHP. The theme, ‘Alarming Brain Drain In Nigeria’s Health Sector: Need For Emergency Rescue’, summarised the state of our healthcare.

Former Ondo State Governor Olusegun Rahman Mimiko, a medical doctor, had introduced a medical revolution ‘Abiye’ in the state; building and equipping emergency medical facilities within five weeks and striving for zero fatalities during childbirth. To achieve this, his administration had made a cost of taking care of a woman from conception to delivery and how to meet it.

In his analysis why governments are not making much of an headway in healthcare delivery, Mimiko said: ”It is not the bricks and mortar that matter; it is the delivery. We spend so much on non-functional structures.”

He posited that no nation develops until it takes the health of its citizens serious and that life expectancy reflects the development of every country.

Mimiko, a two-term Governor and former Federal Minister for Housing and Urban Development, argued that health is a major investment and any government that is not making serious investment in health, is not serious.

In arguing that subsidising the healthcare of the citizenry should be a basic commitment of any government, he said the United States which is the father of capitalism takes healthcare so serious that the sector is the biggest employer while in Britain, the National Health Service, NHS, is a second religion. He said many never realise how poor they are until they are required to produce money for healthcare.

In making a case for the urgent equipment of health facilities and treatment of health practitioners as a special cadre, Mimiko warned that if the current rate of migration is not checked in the next five years, Nigerians may be at the mercy of traditional doctors.

On the professional harvesting of Nigerian health practitioners by foreign countries, Mimiko posited that there should be bilateral agreements such that if the United Kingdom, UK wants 1,000 nurses from Nigeria, it should contribute to producing another 1,000 Nigerian nurses.

In agreeing with Mimiko, Comrade Festus Osifo, the President of the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, said if health practitioners are not provided the conducive atmosphere, any bill brought to the National Assembly to stop them from migrating, would be dead on arrival.

Dr Godswill Chikwendu Okara, the Registrar, West African College of Medical Laboratory Science, in his forensic analysis submitted that health professionals are leaving the country in droves due to mass unemployment, poor salaries and work conditions, mass poverty, religious, communal and political crises. He said between April 1, 2022 and this March, over 3,300 Nigerian nurses and midwives trained in the country, were licenced to practise in the UK, while by March 31, 2023, 10,639 of them were practising in UK alone.

Dr Okara’s solutions include a guaranteed peaceful environment, improved economy, access to competitive and fair paying jobs, better cost of living, strategic talent management, proper funding of tertiary education and allocation of more resources to education generally.

NUAHP President, Dr Obinna Ogbona, said COVID-19 was the “most traumatic, challenging and calamitous period of monumental proportion (as it) claimed the lives of some health workers and infected several others who were carrying out their duties to save lives in various hospital facilities and isolation centres in the country”. He regretted that the brain drain is depriving the country of the best talents to provide healthcare needs.

Former Minister of State for Environment and current Emir of Nasarawa, Ibrahim Usman Jibril, said most strikes, including in the health sector are due to the poor implementation of Collective Agreements, adding that in the first place, some agreements entered into by the government are not realistic. The health practitioners, he said, must develop team spirit to be able to serve the people.

Begging Gates or other donors will not fundamentally improve our health system; in any case, such funds can easily be frittered away. First, like Gates advocated, the system must be funded rather than have left over bones thrown at it. Secondly, we must return to the First Republic system of preventive medicine; the period we had active health inspectors fumigating gutters and checking the environment we lived. Back to those days when incinerators were provided in various areas rather than now when in most parts, refuse is not cleared. The country also has to return to the building and promotion of the primary healthcare system as was under Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti when he was Health Minister. Our leaders also need to discourage medical tourism by developing a health system that would be good enough to treat them as was the case in the First Republic. These are some of the gates to adequate healthcare in Nigeria.