Igbos ponder next move after quit notice by northern group

KANO, Nigeria

Okechukwu Ugo has been left in dilemma after an ultimatum was issued for southern Christians of Igbo heritage to leave Nigeria’s Muslim-majority north.

“I was born in Kano,” the building materials salesman says in Sabon Gari, an enclave on the edge of the country’s biggest northern city.

“My father moved to Kano from the east more than 60 years ago. I don’t have any other place to call home.”

Since the call was made by a Muslim group — the Arewa Youth Consultative Forum — on June 8, the federal government in Abuja has repeatedly called for calm.

But the notice to Igbos to leave the north by October 1 has brought to the fore barely-concealed ethnic and religious tensions across Nigeria.

BIAFRA MOVEMENT

In the Igbo-dominated southeast, the Indigenous People of Biafra movement, led by Nnamdi Kanu, says the region should go its own way.

Ugo, however, wants nothing to do with any of it.

“The government should end the secession calls in the east and quit notice to Igbos in the north for national cohesion,” he said.

Rising communalism and anti-Igbo sentiment has been blamed on IPOB, stoked by memories of 1967 when their predecessors declared an independent republic of Biafra in the southeast.

The declaration led to a 30-month war and almost two million deaths, most of them Igbos.

ULTIMATUM

Stanley Obiora, a 40-year-old Igbo trader in Kano, has like Ugo lived all his life in Sabon Gari and says Kanu and his ilk do not speak for him.

“The northern youth said they issued the ultimatum in reaction to the Biafra agitation which we, the Igbos in the north, are not party to,” he added.

“We call on our elders in the east to caution the youth from making utterances that put their kinsmen on the receiving end. Igbos have a lot of investment in the north.”

Nigeria is roughly evenly split between the Muslim-majority north and the largely Christian south, but the country has more than 250 ethnic groups.

ECONOMIC REASONS

The biggest is the Hausa-speaking Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo in the southeast. Many have moved over the years for economic reasons.

Veteran Nigeria specialist Dmitri-Georges Lavroff describes the north as “quasi-feudal and under-developed”.

“Northerners feel alien to the urbanised, commercial and industrial south, inhabited by a willingly expansionary people,” he said.

“They have this impression that they were economically colonised by the Igbo traders from the south.”