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September 9, 2025 by Olakunle Abimbola
The Yoruba have a quip: a child with no home training is fated to a harsh tutorial outside.
That’s the fitting fate of Simon Ekpa, the self-appointed “Prime Minister” of Biafra, set to cool his heels in a Finnish jail house for the next six years, for levying terrorism on his native South East, to hurt Nigeria. Ekpa hails from Ebonyi State.
But as we knock callow youths for rash choices, let’s not forget to cudgel elders too for wizened folly — masquerading as ancestral wisdom — pressed from ancestral feuding.
That explains the South East anarchy that birthed both Nnamdi Kanu and new jail bird, Ekpa.
It was also behind the South West anomie — read Fulani disdain — that peaked under President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB), as Yoruba “Nesan” agitation.
A Fulani was president; and Yoruba Fulani haters pushed the insecurity challenges to run PMB political associates out of town: explicitly current President Bola Tinubu. His crime? The clear spirit behind the APC grand merger, that powered PMB’s presidential triumph!
Well, thank God, the anti-Fulani hysteria is gradually ebbing; and pipers of that toxic tune, gradually fading out — by death or by political irrelevance; or even, in the case of Ekpa, bottled in a foreign slammer!
Still, for Nigeria’s collective good and political sanity, folks should always keep in mind how it all started — particularly, the present northern ensemble, spewing ethnic bile; and thundering northern arrogance, just because PBAT is sitting president.
A southern lobby once tried that nonsense — witness: the halcyon days of “Fulani herdsmen”, as the southern media boomed, committing all the heinous crimes Nigeria-wide, while local felons snoozed in blissful retirement! But see how it’s all petering out?
Ripples opposed the South’s ethnic-baiting of Arewa under PMB. It will, with equal rigour, resist the North’s ethnic-taunting of the South under PBAT.
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That mutual hate is the last Nigeria needs. On the contrary, it must harness its very best, across the board, to face down its humongous challenges.
But back to the South East IPOB crisis, and its philosopher kings, long gone; yet, leave their offspring biting the dust.
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian — nay global — literary hero. His everlasting literary accomplishments would always be with us, for us to ever cherish.
But sorry: same can’t be said of his political distemper, so glaring with — to Ripples at least — his rather forgettable swan song: There Was A Country (2012), with his rather one-sided account of the tragic Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).
Yes, Achebe was entitled to his personal and intimate account of the war. But the anarchy after shows the one-sided colouring could have been better handled.
That account provided the philosophical spur for the current neo-Biafra agitations. It threw up Kanu, and later, Ekpa and allied fixers — the post-Civil War generation that neither saw war nor felt gore, except with the fake thrills of a combat film.
These tragic romantics dreamed gung-ho agitations, until IPOB — under Kanu and Ekpa — unleashed naked terror, pain and misery, on own people; in a tragic living orgy of cutting your nose to spite your face, just to prove the Igbo can hurt Nigeria!
The nadir, even after Kanu’s caging, came with the so-called Monday sit-at-home protests, which not only harvested skulls and limbs of the ordinary Igbo seeking peaceful daily bread, but also inflicted a deep gash on the South East economy.
Emma Powerful, the bombastic IPOB spokesperson, first spun sit-at-home, as some civil force to spring Kanu from “unjust” detention. But as Ekpa progressively unleashed own Frankenstein monster, even Emma, in all his garrulous majesty, became famously powerless to rein in Ekpa, who gloried from gory mischief to mischief!
Of course, between Kanu and Ekpa, there is little to choose in extreme bad breeding. Kanu cursed and mocked every non-Igbo to push his neo-Biafra cause. During the EndSARS crisis of 2020, he levied war and arson on Lagos. Ekpa, in his Finland cocoon, openly danced at his people’s misery.
But at Ekpa’s judicial crunch, he claimed he was a content creator that meant no harm! In a parallel plea in a Nigerian court, Kanu too proclaimed his democratic right to untrammelled agitation!
The Finnish court pooh-poohed Ekpa’s claim, and threw him into the slammer. Will Kanu fare better before a Nigerian court? We’ll have to wait to find out.
But however Kanu’s case is resolved, Ekpa’s jailing has reiterated a clear — but hardly novel — precedent: every action (good or bad) has consequences. It’s a natural order codified by law, and enforced by the courts, after due process.
With Ekpa’s jailing, South East politicians, who love to brag that Kanu be released “unconditionally”, just to impress folks back home, have to invent another bluster. Both act in IPOB plots.
But the Kanu-Ekpa ensemble did not act solo. The South West too joined in the anti-Fulani rumble. It was a rich, frothy season of Fulani bogey!
Why, even former President Olusegun Obasanjo, a non-Fulani grand beneficiary of Fulani hegemony, if ever there was one, also chimed in with “Fulanization”, just to put PMB’s nose out of joint. Typical!
But for philosophical underpinnings, Prof. Banji Akintoye and his Yoruba Nation project took the cake. No less, was the late Chief Ayo Adebanjo (God bless his soul!) with his “Afenifere” progressivism, and a swagger of Yoruba supremacism! Besides, the chief’s famous turf war, with PBAT and younger Yoruba progressives, was an open secret.
Then, the battling rams: the likes of Sunday Igboho, the South West equivalents of Kanu and Ekpa, were at the ready, spewing Fulani hate, in defence of Yoruba “Nesan”! But it was a missed Golgotha. The South West dodged that bullet — but just!
No doubt, from the anti-Lagos/PBAT sight and sound, issuing from the post-PMB “North”, there is a clear proof of northern hegemonists, blind to civil power balance, for Nigeria to nurture sustained nationhood, in peace and harmony.
Still, why would PMB, whose bloc partnered PBAT to win federal power, goad the so-called “Fulani herdsmen” to raze the South West, the political space of his partner? Does that even make any sense? It’s out-and-out hysteria, stupid!
What’s more? All the ugly tags — nepotism, Fulanization, Katsina cabal, clueless, incompetent, etc — curated by the booming southern media to blight PMB, are being rebranded and hauled back at PBAT, by northern irredentists!
What goes around comes around, doesn’t it?
As we speak, there is even a Yoruba vs Igbo lunatic army on X, arrayed against each other, dubbing either ethnic as ugly descendants of gorillas and chimpanzees! How grown, reasonable adults would sign up on such brazen toxicity beats one hollow!
Then, from the North comes anti-Lagos brickbats, clearly to demonize Nigeria’s No. 1 centre of opportunities, as no more than Tinubu’s glittering trophy of Yoruba nepotism!
That’s gas, of course! But it’s what it is — too much toxicity in the political space!
Ekpa has received his harsh tutorial in Finland. But his jailing is a good juncture to apply the brakes! No nation develops by mutual hating and ethnic-baiting.
English (US)