Text of reflections by Dr. Sam Amadi at the Nkata Umuibe at the Enugu Sports Club on April 1, 2022
The importance of Priority:
There are innumerable things in the world. Many of these things are not important. Some of these things are important; a few are very important. It will not be wise to pay the same attention to everything in the world. We don’t have that capability or the time to observe and note everything that is in the world. Science and other knowledge systems have a process, a methodology or a rule of thumb to determine what matters most. The logic of effective action should be to seek first to know what matters and to pay more attention to those things.
Attention is a scare resource. We need to optimize its use. We cannot see and hear all that is happening in the world. Our success in life may well depend on our ability to see and hear what matters, the important things in life. We hope to be awake when an important news breaks. We hope to be ready to listen when important stories are told. We hope to know when to venture and when to hold back. This is how we survive in the world.
To survive and flourish in life, we need to prioritize. To prioritize requires that we develop a schema that helps us to detect signals and also organize the signals we receive. There are signals and there are noises. To survive on earth literally requires that we develop acute capacity to distinguish the signal from the noise. Consider our everyday life. Imagine the hunter moving through the bushes in search of his hunt. He must have trained himself to distinguish the whistle of a grasshopper from the grunt of a lion. When the leaves shake, he knows when they are responding to the caressing of the wind and when the big one is trampling the underlies. He trains himself to know all these and his success as a professional and his survival as a human depend on knowing what to take seriously and what to disregard.
Prioritizing means we have to have an idea of what our survival requires. Prioritizing is a strategic behavior. If flows from an accurate diagnosis. The diagnosis generates a directing policy. The directing policy then suggests a coherent set of actions. This is why it is strategic. It is based on narrative of what is going on and geared towards an end-state. No one commences a journey without knowing the destination. So, our destination helps us decide what to do and not to do. Priorities are ranked according to their fundamentality. An action that has the capacity to set off many other consequential events is of a higher priority than an action that does not trigger consequential outcomes. Paying attention is a strategic behavior. What we pay attention to, as individuals and society, determines whether we achieve our goals in life.
Azota Ala, Azowa Ute is a call to prioritize. It tells us that just as the things that creep under the earth are not equal, the ideas and insights we use to organize our life are not equal in their impacts and do not deserve the same level of attention. It tells that our outcomes depend on the quality of insights that determines our actions. Bad ideas have consequences. Oversight has consequences. ‘Onye gbaka a ute ya, o raru ura na ala (the one who through restlessness destroys his mat sleeps on the bare floor).
Azota Ala Azowa Ute, is first a call to heightened awareness. We have to be alert to the signals to respond to them. Until we put things in proper perspectives, we cannot take wise actions. This is why our ancestors spoke about the eyes as the most important organ. They say “Saa anya gi nmiri’. Wash your eyes or shine your eyes, in pidgin English. Vision is central to surviving. The Hebrew Bible states it clearly, “Without vision, my people perish”. The igbos would have said so themselves. We cannot survive if we don’t see clearly what is happening in the horizon. See clearly. See afar. That is the charge to the wayfarer
Next to the eyes, the igbos speak so much about the ear. ‘Nti wu nka’. To hear well, is to live long. We need to see and hear what is happening to be ready for the challenges of a chaotic world. We need to have open ears to receive information because ‘Ihe ony amaghi toro ya’ (what a man does not know is older than him). What we see and hear are facts that we need to organize into knowledge. We need to know the meaning of what we see and hear. This is where the processing of information into knowledge (nghota) is very important. We have to organize the facts of a chaotic world in an orderly manner to make sense of them. Making sense of our society is actually the fundamental pedestal for a successful life.
In this reflection, I don’t want to sound scholarly by quoting authors. I want to speak from the heart and from the mind. But let me quote the best book I know in strategy, Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. With respect to strategy, he noted that, “A great deal of strategy work is figuring out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of understanding the situation”.
This is where we start our conversation about the future of Ndi-Igbo in Ala-igbo, Ala-Nigeria and Mba-Uwa nile. (Igboland, Nigeria, and the world). there are many things urging for the attention of Igbos and the leaders. They include fighting and winning Biafra republic, fighting and winning the Nigerian presidency, fighting to recreate the great leadership of MI Okpara in eastern Nigerian in Ala-igbo, and working hard to end the reign of lawlessness and violence in Ala-igbo. What should we prioritize; what should matter to us most; what must we do to be saved; and what does salvation means for Igbos in Ala-igbo, in Ala-Nigeria and Mba uwa nile? Our ‘fundamental problem’ is comprehending the situations the Igbos find themselves in today’s world.
Understanding the Predicament of Ndi Igbo in Ala-Igbo, Ala-Nigeria, and Mba Uwa Nile:
We start from awareness, and we got to action. We open our eyes and ears, and we perceive what is happening, what has befallen us; and then we can guess what may befall us again. Apart from awareness, the other very important facility for surviving in a difficult world is memory. Ncheta. The igbos recognized the importance of memory and remembering that they call their children such names as Ichefuna, Lota, Echezona, etc. To remember is to survive. What should we remember?
First, we should remember how we succeeded and survived. Oftentimes we get lost in the bad times that we do not remember the good times. Oftentimes, we get carried away by what others say about us that we forget who we truly are and what we have achieved. Before 1960, the Igbos were a more primitive and less accomplished people, compared to their compatriots in Nigeria, the Yorubas and the Fulanis. Like the Jews, we were surrounded by societies with highly developed administrative systems. We were the least urbanized. But we had strong values, values of an agrarian and acephalous society. With these values we created an equal opportunity society and unleashed entrepreneurial energy that enabled us to close the centuries-wide gap between us and the Yoruba in less than three decades. In real sense, we leap-frogged. It looks like a miracle. But it is not a miracle. It is the predicated surprise of a convenient social values.
Because we are a people who loved freedom and recognized no superior, we were bound to be loud and boisterous. We were also bound to be less tactical and self-effacing. This grated the colonialists, and we became a people to be suppressed and distressed. We suffered persecution at the hand of the colonialists. When they handed Nigeria over to the northern leaders, they also handed over resentment and suspicion of igbo people. Still, we thrived through good social value and social capital. There have been plenty studies of the importance of social capital to economic and social development. The finding is that social capital helps in coordinating efforts that lead to transformation and development. Social capital are those values, norms, conventions, and rules of engagement that define how a people relate to one another and to others outside their communities. We hate to discuss the culture of poverty and prosperity because of how it may stigmatize some people and their ways of life, and the wrongful ways we can deploy it to harm other people. But hard evidence proves that particular cultures, defined more like operating procedures and rules of engagement, can lead to social stagnation or progress.
The igbos caught up and superseded their betters in Nigeria through a combination of efficient personal values and social systems. We built schools, send the best and brightest overseas for higher education and expanded trade and industry through the hard work that is ingrained in our social gene and the communitarian lifeworld that enabled communities to pool resources for the common good. We didn’t have the most sophisticated bureaucratic and administrative systems like the ceremonial Yoruba and the aristocratic Fulani. Our system was simple and balanced the relationship between the individual and the community in a manner that encouraged high performance but constrained hubris. We seemed to find a solution to the Greek Achilles Heels, the tendency for success to lead to hubris and tragedies.
In practical terms, our world after independence in 1960 and up to the end of the First Republic in 1967 was a world of extraordinary socio-economic and political success. We became the fastest growing economy in the world. We caught up with the more advantaged Western Nigeria in internally generated revenue and closed the gap in western education so admirably. Before the first coup and the Nigerian civil war, Ala-Igbo (the larger part of Eastern Nigeria) was a thriving democracy defined by stability, cooperation, and technocratic excellence. The best of us were in public leadership. Communities celebrated moral and intellectual excellence and gave the man of financial resources his place as an enabler of the common good. As Achebe said, we celebrated age (representing wisdom) and accomplishment (representing competence).
But things fell apart so quickly. The war altered many things. The war degraded our values. The hunger and starvation of the war and post-war period (facilitated by the ruinous economic policies of the federal government) created a disproportionate love for money, quick money. Armed robbery and all kinds of crimes flourished as young Igbo men and women struggled to eke a living from a devastated and despondent earth. I remember the number of young, beautiful ladies from my community who followed northern soldiers like the children of Hamlin and ended up in brothels, in search of ego oyibo. Of course, in the southwest, many of our young people encountered advanced fee fraud, alias 419. Soon, they invested their entrepreneurial energies to make a successful of fraudulent money business of all sorts. They became the new monied men in the Igbo land. The first monied men in Igbo were transporters, merchants and trade representatives. They chaired the Nigerian stock exchange. They owed fleets of buses and sought opportunity in cross regional trade. The monied men after the civil war were mostly men of diverse criminal and fraudulent undertakings.
We know the rest of the story. These men became political leaders. The community had been weakened by corruption and poverty that came with the devastation of the civil war. It could not resist this depravity. It could not assert the Igbo worldview built on the norms of ‘Eziokwu bu ndu, Aku udo, Eziaha kaa ego, etc. The highpoint of the transformation of the civic spaces of southeast occurred in the beginning of the 4th Republic when these rich criminals took over political leadership in most of Ala-Igbo. Some of them became first class traditional rulers, others took over high offices in politics and religious sectors. The takeover was complete, and the degradation of southeastern values was comprehensive.
The most urgent and pressing challenge for Igbo leadership is to arrest the slide into lawlessness and disorder that arises from the mismanagement of revolutionary nostalgia and the displacement of authority. We have to arrest the slide and rebuild social capita. We then utilized the igbo social capital to rebuild political institutions that will help us negotiate either a new Nigeria with other Nigerian peoples, or in the worst case scenario, exit Nigeria, together with other Nigerian peoples, in a peaceful, orderly and development-enhancing manner. We have to get the basic right.
This is where we are now: the place where violence has overrun the land; the place where there is no respect or preference for intellectual achievement; a place where quick money (ego mbute) has replaced wealth that comes from enterprise and industry (Aku udo). The southeast, the heart of Ala-igbo, is now a community under siege. In the place of young men and women who are fighting to excel in academic and professional attainment, we now have cultists and drug addicts enforcing stupid and draconian rules. The most peaceful region in Nigeria now struggles for the most violent with the northeast.
The implication of the degradation of values that afflicted the southeast after the civil war and the complete economic and social failure of democratic experiment in Nigeria is the loss of trust of igbo people in the Nigerian state. Buhari’s mindless and irrational exclusion of igbo in his administration, his acts of aggression, especially against Igbo youths, and grossly incompetent management of diversity have resurrected and misdirected the demand for the restoration of the Biafran republic. The new virulent agitation for the restoration of Biafra has the making of apocalypse and is establishing a new social disorder in Ala-igbo.
The result of all these moral and political headwinds is that Ala-Igbo has entered a period of underdevelopment characterized by the collapse of social capital and the triumph of anarchical individualism and nihilistic violence. The igbo moral and political landscape now resembles a collapsed society with drugs, cannibalism, and unregulated violence. The state of play in Ala-Igbo is disorder and disorientation.
What is the state of play in Nigeria and how does that affect the survival of the igbos in Nigeria? Since its formation, Nigeria has remained an unworking proposition, perhaps workable, but not yet made to work. Nigeria’s history does not give much hope that it will fulfill its attributed destiny as the black man’s City on the Hill. From its beginning till date, Nigeria has suffered under the weight of what I call ‘incoherence’. It pretends to be a modern democratic society whereas its cultural and institutional ordering is more of a neo-feudal, theocratic state. This fundamental incoherence reflects in three fundamental crises, namely, the crisis of nationality, the crisis of values and the crisis of productivity. When people like Charles Soludo, Peter Obi and Sanusi Lamido argue that Nigeria is not a productive economy but is a consuming society, they think it is only a functional problem. No, it is fundamentally a cultural and normative problem. Nigeria is not conceived to be a productive society because the values of feudalism and theocracy are not the values of a modern productive state. Unless you reconceive the Nigerian states away from the ingrained cultural and institutional orderings of neo-feudalism and theocracy in all their ramifications, you will not solve the productivity crisis. The nationality crisis is the same as the identity crisis. There is no Nigerian citizen in the modern understanding of citizenship as a definitive bundle of rights that supersedes any other bundle of rights, be it religious or cultural. The sufferings of the igbos in Nigeria is largely because of the deficiency of democratic citizenship as a determinative cultural and institutional ordering.
These fundamental crises have been aggravated by Buhari’s neoconservative administration. Today, Nigeria is at the verge of a collapse. There are three possible scenarios about Nigeria. First, it continues to trudge on the path of increasing incompetence and anomie until it disintegrates under the weight of its incoherence. Second, Nigerians may surprisingly find the courage to rethink and recreate the country to deliver from the weight of incoherence. Third, some parts of Nigeria may manage to make extraordinary success in social and economic terms and in the long term trigger a virtuous struggle to the top. The uncertainty about Nigeria is that we may not know with certainty which Nigeria we will be confronted with in the next decade or two.
Our survival depends on crafting a response in the midst of uncertainty. The igbos needs to have the right response to the crisis of the Nigerian state, a crisis that is made more bewildering and unmanageable by the chaos that has become the global political economy. As it were, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. We are dealing with a world where the ‘unknown unknown’, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, has become a regularity rather than a rarity. How does the Igbo nation navigate Nigeria of such profound uncertainties?
It is important to note a nation-state may have multiple nations within it. Spain is a nation-state. But by every reasonable consideration, Catalonia is different from the Baltic region of Spain. In Nigeria today, Lagos and most of western Nigeria is very different from Zamfara and northeast Nigeria. The measure of human wellbeing, measured in per capita income or in human happiness index differ in the two regions. Whilst the northeast of Nigeria is a region of poverty and chaos, southwest of Nigeria is largely a region of considerable wealth and order. One country, two different destines. This scenario may persist as Nigerian leaders struggle to find the political will to make the necessary, but perhaps undesirable changes, needed to make the country workable.
Knowing all these what should we be doing in Ala-Igbo? We need to focus on rescuing the Southeast from the crisis of values that arises from poorly led struggle for the reestablishment of the defunct Biafra republic. Revolutionary struggles are dangerous for social stability. Many examples in history show that revolution often east its children. It often leads to bloodletting and ultimately results in liberty and prosperity but in slavery and poverty. Reforms that are strategic and coordinate have often been more beneficial to human society than radical revolutions.
But the worst case is when such revolutionary moment is mismanaged. This is what is happening in Ala-igbo. The leadership of the Biafra mandate struggle may be passionate and well-meaning. But with the state of affairs in their organizations and the homeland, they may have gone roughish. Their sense of value and purpose should be doubted in the context of the insecurity and normlessness that they have helped to entrench in Ala-Igbo. We can no longer allow ourselves to be caught up in the obsession of what our enemies are planning against us while we are damaging livelihood and cultural environment for our survival and even resilience. We cannot be fixated on a fairytale Biafra when our towns and villages are almost turned into Northeast Pro Max.
Azota Ala, Azowa Ute.