A Warning to the Serpents of Igboland
By Moses Oludele Idowu
“Record me very well. It is time to start poisoning the Yorubas and the Benins. Put poison in all your foods at work. Put poison in all your water so that you all will start dying one-by-one.
“You people will not die one day. You people will fall sick for a long time. I will put Otapiapia (rat poison) inside your waters and foods. You people will never get well.
“This kind of hatred I have for you people will last forever. In all your foods, I will put Otapiapia,
“I will put them in all your foods. If I go to work tomorrow, I will put it (poison) in Yoruba people’s food. Go and tell the government that I’m in Canada, I’m in Ontario. Hurry up, go fast.
“I will put Otapiapia, I will put Ogbomosho inside your foods. You will start hearing that Yorubas have died, Benins have died. I’m the one saying it.
“I want Igbos to have a heart of wickedness. You people are too quiet. You are too cool. Enough is enough. If you have a means of killing them, kill them out of the way, because they are too foolish. They are of no use to society. Lots of prostitutes and everything.”
That was Amaka Patience Sunnberger, a woman presumably of Igbo extraction and parentage based in Canada in a live video released few days ago. If these were the words of a Nazi zealot or skinhead in Hitler’s Germany of the 1930’s and 40’s we should have understood or at least be able to understand. But they are not. Even Nazis were far too clever, more noble and less audacious than this sociopath.
The sad thing however, the frightful thing that should worry us all is that there are now many people of Igbo descent who share and believe what that woman posted and, given the right opportunity, will be too ready to carry out exactly what that woman proposed. Did you notice there were other people in the background recording her and suggesting other poisons to her? Who could those be?
We have a big trouble on our hands. We are living in the midst of deceit pretending that all is well.
There are now potential genocidists, mass- murderers walking on the streets waiting for opportunity. Children of Hate, sociopaths, serpents and scorpions whose model is the Serpent and who behaves like the serpent – the likes of which the star prophet, William Marrion Branham calls “the seed of the serpent.”
Think of this woman working as a chemist or hydrologist in a Water Corporation of a cosmopolitan state like Lagos with a large Yoruba population. All she needed is to increase the chlorination of the water supply and then the deed is done to interminable generations.
That is why you should worry. That is why you should be afraid. It is okay to be accommodating and be welcoming, it is even required to love everyone including your enemies. But the same Holy Scripture warns that your love should be according to knowledge and judgement. In other words, you do not for love sake ignore immediate and remote consequences and hard evidence.
A man or woman does not make this kind of video because she ate too much or because she got a raise or promotion in the place of work and was overjoyed. No, this kind comes out of the depth of the heart. It is when a vessel is full that its content flows out. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. There are no jokes, there is nothing like comedy or fiction in real life. Jokes are the truth that spills out of the mouth after the heart is full; fictions are the avenue and medium to tell the real truth that are too explosive to be told in actual language.
A person does not make this kind of video for fun, this is coming from the depth of the heart. (I actually listened to the video myself.)
You do not threaten a human being with death for fun, much less an entire race and record it.
I know the Thought Police will attack me for writing this essay; the miseducated “useful idiots” of Political Correctness among the Yorubas, the do-gooders who always want to be polite even if they must jettison the truth. But as you know I have paid my due as an intellectual and have been writing for long and can’t be intimidated by anyone or tribe or even government from expressing what I know to be the truth. Not me.
This leads me to the next stage: the root of hatred. What we see in the video is simply the outgrowth of a seed waiting for harvest. Lady Amaka did not just hate Yoruba people yesterday; she had nurtured this hatred for long and now the serpent has grown inside her that she has to voice out for relief. This is how the psychology of hate works. Like a seed it germinates and grows waiting for the right opportunity for harvest. Hitler did not just hate the Jews when he was elected by the German people in 1933, he already hated them long before then as he revealed in his book Mein Kampf. The Nazi Party only gave him the platform and Germany merely gave him the opportunity to carry out his agenda. It is the lack of a platform and needed opportunity that occasioned the frustration which led Amaka Patience to make her video. This is how genocide occurs. This is how hate develops into behaviour and behaviour to action that crystallizes into harvest leading to disaster and tragedy.
Who planted the seed inside her? Who sowed this seed of Yoruba hatred inside her in a foreign nation and in the land of the free? Someone sowed that seed inside her. She was too young to have witnessed the Civil War firsthand so someone, most likely the parents, sowed the poison inside her against the Yoruba – a poison most Igbo men still carry even in our midst although they are too polite to acknowledge it.
Here I come to the most interesting part of this essay which some won’t agree with. But as a writer I must be true to the facts and to those who read and follow me.
Pay attention.
The reality of Igbo hatred against the Yoruba is what we have to admit and which we must address. Many Igbos hate the Yorubas with passion. Not all of them to be sure and we must be thankful to God for this. Of course I know there are Yorubas who hate the Igbos too. My former landlord in Lagos would charge the Igbo tenants more than the Yoruba for the same space. But there are more haters on the Igbo side. That is the truth.
Three Igbo men and women have confessed to my hearing personally that they were actually taught to hate the Yorubas. You don’t have to believe me, but I say this on my honour and I will defend it before God on the Day of Judgement if it is a lie. If there were three women or men who taught their children so then there could have been three hundred or three thousand or three hundred thousands. And if three admitted it to me there are probably ten or twenty who won’t admit it. I am educated but I also think. I cannot accept that those people were lying against their parents or elders. No one lies against his parent when no consequence is involved.
It is such seeds that produced the likes of Amaka and the video that you see. These are the results of bad parentage and of teaching children what no noble parents should teach their children. You do not sow a seed of hatred against another race and a people group in the impressionable minds of your children. You are setting them up for disaster.
Two things are responsible for this hate. The perceived and often – repeated lie of Yoruba Betrayal during the Civil War. This is the worst lie ever told and I am even ashamed that many Igbo scholars believed this trash. I have examined most of the literature and the things written about the Civil War and I have done my own research and I have challenged any scholar to show me how the actions of the Yorubas during the Civil War could be termed betrayal. No one has accepted my challenge till today. How does self-defense becomes betrayal? How is self-love an act of treachery? You are bringing war and carnage to my doorstep and you are surprised that I join the war to stop you? And you called this betrayal? Then the English Language must have lost its meaning.
Unfortunately, this is accepted by many Igbos and scholars and, sadly too, by even some Yorubas. Too bad.
After failing in their effort after the Civil War and seeing the level of devastation wrought someone has to take responsibility. The leaders of the Igbos did not want to take responsibility for their actions and as was necessary they sought a scapegoat: Awo and the Yorubas. This has been standard practice and repeated for generations as gospel that today it has filled some Igbos with red-hot hatred against the Yorubas. As one Igbo chap confessed to me, hatred of Awo and the Yoruba is Course 101 for Igbos. I am revealing this for the first time. You now understand why many Igbo men and even leaders act the way they do. You will understand why a Vanguard newspaper Editorial Chairman used an uncomplimentary language against Yorubas and why late Iwuanyawu, leader of the Igbos called Yorubas “political rascals.” You now understand the context for the dripping invectives and hate in Nnamdi Kanu’s video and why he was so obsessed with burning down Lagos. Hate. It is deep inside and occasionally it finds an outlet visible to those who still have eyes to see.
It is real and we ignore this at our own peril.
The seed of hate will continue to grow once sown and it will bring up a harvest once the opportunity is ripe, if it is not destroyed. Every seed produces a harvest. And the harvest is always greater than the seed. That is why I fear for the Yoruba.
However, what you sow is also what you reap. You can’t sow hate against a people, an entire race and expect to reap love and affections everywhere you go. I am not surprised that Igbos are hated everywhere. Even in the foreign lands in South Africa, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Egypt etc. The jails of those nations are filled to the brim with Nigerians mostly of Igbo extraction. The Singaporean security officer said the other day in a video that “NIgeria is the curse of Africa and the Igbo is the curse of Nigeria.” He was an immigration official based on what he has seen. That is the harvest. The hatred of Yorubas has also brought a worthy harvest for the Igbos as their children are hated everywhere. Even among their own Eastern Minorities like the Ijaws, Ibibios, Efiks., etc the hatred against the Igbos is unimaginable. You heard the other day when in a speech former President Goodluck Jonathan said that the “Ijaws would rather be slaves under the Hausas than be.kings under the Igbos.” This is the harvest for several decades of sowing the seeds of hate against others.
That is why it is time to change the script. It is time to stop spreading evil seeds of hate about other people groups based on fairy tales and old woman’s fable about Civil War – tales that cannot even pass the test of the canons of national historiography. Because the harvest won’t bring something good even for Igbos too. This is a warning to the haters of Igboland.
There are extremists everywhere and in every tribe. We do not judge a people or tribes by their extremists. But we must not ignore the extremists because they are bold and they are ready to die for their convictions, hence they exercise undue influence on the rest of society. Amaka may be an extremist but there are many others like her in every tribe. It is why Nigeria should worrry.
The Nazis were a minority but they eventually took over the most sophisticated European nation and precipitated a World War. The Bolsheviks were a minority in Russia but they precipitated a Revolution. So were the Jacobins in France and the Puritans in England. Be afraid of minorities who are coordinated and who believe in their mission no matter how ugly it is.
Amaka Patience Sunnberger is not alone. There are many like her who still carry within them the seeds of hate planted inside them to different degrees.
We need not deny it. A problem is not solved by denial but by addressing it. Many Igbos think like Amaka only they won’t go to that extreme. The evidence is there. I am a Researcher.
Firstly, why did most Igbo elites in Babangida government support the annulment of June 12 election won by a Yoruba man? Even when Babangida wanted to reverse himself it was the Igbo elements in that government according to Professor Omoruyi, an insider, who insisted on the annulment revealing the deep hatred against the Yorubas. The Apamgbo, Nzeribes, Chukwumerijes, Nwabuezes, these are Igbo names, active in the annulment and sustaining the fraud.
Secondly, why did Chinua Achebe write the then President Ibrahim Babangida not to give Awo a State Burial after his death when the push was being made and the AFRC was considering it in 1987? You at least saw his hatred revealed against Awo in his seditious book There Was a Country.
Yet when Odumegwu Ojukwu died no notable Yoruba writer or elite opposed a State Burial been given to him despite the fact that he was far less deserving of that honour than Awo. Awo was a founding father of Nigeria, Ojukwu was not.
Thirdly, why was there no notable Igbo writer and elite to show a sympathetic consideration and even congratulation to Professor Wole Soyinka in 1986 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature that year but instead went on a barrage of scurrilous attacks, innuendos, brickbats not only against the laureate but also, which is worse, against the Nobel Foundation. Because, rightly or wrongly, they believed an award had been given to a Yoruba man that they felt rightly belonged to an Igbo man, Chinua Achebe. Old writers can bear witness to what I am saying here.
Even for Soyinka, the same man who spent almost three years in solitary confinement for his efforts to save the Igbos from certain carnage!
So the hate has a history and a context.
These are the climates that produced the likes of Amaka Patience Sunnberger and many still lurking in the background waiting for opportunity.
This is what is fuelling the backlash now rising among the Yorubas. With this kind of video the ”Igbo Must Go” Movement in Lagos now have another arsenal with which to fight. The extremists among the Yorubas too now have another weapon to harass their moderate kinsmen: “Didn’t we tell you?” The Amaka video has now made it difficult for those of us rebuking the anti- Igbo elements and extremists among the Yorubas. It is because of the extremists outside that you have the extremists too at home. How do you disable the extremists inside when there are many extremists too on the other side?
The young man who has been writing insidious essays and inciting polemics against the “Igbo Zionists,” who has appointed himself the Police to monitor Igbos in Yorubaland now also has an opportunity to continue and many people would now give him a sympathetic hearing. And where would this leave the Igbos?
The reality today, the fact today on ground in Nigeria is that Igbos need the Yorubas much more than the Yorubas need the Igbos. Whoever cannot see this is not smart.
Those are not the people you should fight or quarrel with. And they are not the people you should hate. It is not even elementary logic, it is simply enlightened self – interest.
Some are fixated on the falsehood that Yorubas are cowards, betrayers and cannot fight. Some are deluding themselves that they can win a race war with Yorubas. This is the kind of delusion based on asymmetric thinking and wobbly, slipshod scholarship that brought Disaster the last time. Fire does not burn a man twice. That is a man who is wise. And I know the Igbos are wise, wise as serpent which is even a sacred animal in most part of Igboland. They would need to use this wisdom and rein in the extremists in their midst for their own good. They would need to change the script by the kind of stories they tell their children about others.
The Germans are a good example. Despite the level of their suffering and the reparations levied on them they didn’t blame the Europeans or Americans or Russians for their woes. And they didn’t teach their children to hate other people. They didn’t exonerate their parents or excuse their culpability and even gullibility in colluding with Hitler and the Nazis. That is History. That is how History should be taught not by exonerating yourself and blaming others for your woes. See how God has blessed Germany today! They have recovered and even better than their enemies now. That is how it works.
Truth wins. Love conquers. Hate is the way of the losers and I love the Igbos and do not want them to lose. However, in the final analysis it is their choice. Everyone reaps what he sows.
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© Moses Oludele Idowu
August 30, 2024
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