Some years ago I read a story about a girl named Ifoghale from Delta state. Her mother, a garri seller, had been referred from a private hospital in Ughelli to the Central Hospital in Warri, on suspicions of cancer. At Central Hospital she was told that her mother needed to see an oncologist and the oil rich Delta state had none, so her mother was again referred, this time to LUTH in Lagos. She had to borrow money from her family to make the trip, when they got to LUTH they were told to come back in two weeks as the oncologists had their schedules full. Another physician told Ifoghale that her mother, in all honesty, might not be able to get a consultation in the next two months. Ifoghale was 17 years old at the time and a student of Delta State Polytechnic, Ozoro.
I’m old enough to remember the Warri crisis of 1997–1999, when a series of deadly clashes between the Itsekiri and Ijaw ethnic groups rocked the city of my birth. The reason for the violence was the situation of the headquarters of a newly created Warri South-West LGA, in Ogidigben, an Itsekiri town, a move considered by the Ijaw leaders to be an insult to their ethnic group, as they had expected the headquarters of the new LGA to be situated in Igbe-Ijoh, an Ijaw stronghold. The riots were an explosion of ethnic tensions that had been brewing in the city for decades. Deadly violence would break out in 1997, 1999 and again in 2003, for different reasons, but all with the underlying commonality of ethnic hatred.
What one can’t help but notice is that after years of turf wars, battling over resources and debates about who “owns” Warri, Urhobos like Ifoghale and her mother still had to travel all the way to Lagos to access and subsequently be denied basic healthcare. No doubt the same fate suffered by the Ijaw and Itsekiri “citizens” and many other “denizens” of Warri alike. So what was it all for then? Why did my childhood have to be punctuated by the ra-ta-ta-ta of machine gunfire while I busied myself with homework?
If you were to ask the warring parties what they were fighting for, no doubt they would have said that they were fighting for “their people,” but I fail to see how their actions were anything but detrimental to the lives of said people. I did not feel any safer in the knowledge that somewhere an Urhobo “warrior” was killing Itsekiris on my behalf, and what did all this mean for my Idoma mother, Esan teachers, Igbo friends and Yoruba classmates anyway? I never asked for this, I would have gladly settled for a Warri where no Ifoghales, Tseyis, Doubras, Seuns, Abdullahis or Ekenes had to drop out of school and travel to Lagos for their healthcare needs.
Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me what I want instead?
A few weeks ago group of Yoruba traders at Ladipo market called on Governor Sanwo-Olu, Tinubu and Obasanjo to “save” them from the Igbos, who they claimed were buying up land and displacing them in Lagos (they may as well have been brandishing tiki torches). I have no doubts many Yorubas are experiencing economic difficulties, but who in Nigeria isn’t? There has been a tendency in Lagos for Yoruba Nationalist groups to take out their “economic anxieties” on “foreigners” dating back to the 19th century.
In 1851, Oba Kosoko was deposed by the British, he then fled Lagos and took refuge in Epe, a coastal community less than a hundred kilometers away. Before the arrival of the Ekos of Lagos, Epe had been inhabited by the Ijebus, hence the society became stratified between the newly arrived “Epe Eko” who were mostly traders and the indigenous “Epe Ijebu” who were fishermen. Fast forward to 1905 the Ijaws arrived in the region and asked for permission to fish in the lagoon, the Eko Epes obliged them. This was seen as an act of insurrection by the Ijebus who viewed the lagoon as their birthright, a civil war ensued between the Ekos and the Ijebus. Over a century later deadly inter-ethnic clashes still occasionally rock Epe. The Eebi festival held in Epe even features an event called “war games” a re-enactment of the battle against the Ijaws who are portrayed as marauders and invaders because, why not?
A similar picture can be painted in the environs of Ajegunle, a multicultural neighborhood in the heart of Lagos. One that saw a crisis not unlike the one in Warri in the late 90s and early 2000s, this time between the OPC, a militant Yoruba Nationalist group, and other minority ethnic groups in the city. Ajegunle remains one of the poorest regions in Lagos today, needless to say, the OPC did not create some Yoruba nationalist utopia, in the end all it succeeded in doing was causing chaos and destruction in the lives of citizens and denizens alike.
In this destructive game, Nigeria’s political elite are the biggest winners.
I am not interested in any kind of identity that grounds itself primarily in antagonism. There has to be more to our culture and who we are as people than being different from, and opposed to “the other.” A culture of identitarian antagonism could care less if the people it claims to represent have basic freedoms and amenities, it is not as emotionally invested in building its own as it is in tearing down the other.
