There is a peculiar talent in modern Western politics, the ability to wrap hatred in silk. To dress venom in polite euphemisms. To call a fist a handshake and hope no one notices the bruises. And nowhere is this talent more meticulously perfected than in the political careers of Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, and Viktor Orbán, three men who have built their legacies by mastering the art of sanitizing bigotry.
The accusations of racism against Nigel Farage are not some shocking revelation emerging from the shadows. They are not sudden earthquakes; they are the steady tremors of a fault line that has always been there. Farage didn’t suddenly become xenophobic because of Brexit or migration. Trump didn’t wake up one day and discover he disliked immigrants. Orbán didn’t slip into authoritarian fantasies by accident. These men were not pushed into extremism, they walked into it proudly, theatrically, applauded by the crowds they had spent years preparing through carefully measured doses of fear, resentment and grievance out of Hitler’s playbook
Yet the media, political analysts and even many of their critics have spent years softening the language around them as if afraid to say the quiet part out loud. Farage’s racist dog whistles become “concerns about immigration.” Trump’s white nationalist winks become “populism.” Orbán’s creeping authoritarianism becomes “illiberal democracy.” And the most insulting euphemism of them all? Calling their flirtations with fascist ideology merely “far-right,” as if adding a hyphen somehow neutralizes the historical weight behind their choices.
The point is that words like xenophobia, Euroscepticism and national conservatism are not neutral descriptions when used in this context. They are linguistic fig leaves. They provide a veneer of legitimacy to ideologies that thrive on division and dehumanization. Farage’s so-called “Euroscepticism” was always just the polite British mask placed over the ugly sneer that immigrants were the problem. Trump’s “America First” was always a smoother slogan for “America for some.” Orbán’s “defence of Christian Europe” was always a sanctimonious way of saying “keep the outsiders out.”
These men did not rise to power despite their hateful rhetoric; they rose because of it. And the more they were rewarded for it, the more shameless they became. But what is even more dangerous is how successfully they manipulated the vocabulary surrounding them, how they convinced the public, the press and even their adversaries to use language that minimized the threat they posed.
Farage’s grinning pub-humour persona was treated as British eccentricity rather than a political strategy designed to normalize hostility. Trump’s theatrical childishness was dismissed as entertainment, even as it emboldened extremists who understood exactly what he stood for. Orbán’s anti-migrant policies were even admired by some European politicians who thought he was simply “tough on borders,” as if toughness is measured by how many vulnerable people one can exclude.
We have become so terrified of naming things for what they are that we’ve allowed political correctness to be hijacked by those who hate it the most. The irony is grotesque; the champions of “saying it like it is” rely entirely on our unwillingness to say what they truly are. They howl about cancel culture while hiding their own ideologies behind carefully curated labels that make their worldviews seem more palatable.
Farage is not simply a Eurosceptic. Trump is not just a populist. Orbán is not merely conservative. These labels do not describe them, they excuse them. And excuses repeated long enough become permission.
But permission comes with consequences. Europe is watching a new generation of hard-right leaders rise, each more openly hostile than the last. The United States is wrestling with the Trump unleashed discriminating antics. Hungary has transformed from a democracy into a laboratory for soft authoritarianism. And through it all we continue to use vocabulary that understates the severity of what is happening.
If someone weaponizes racism, what do we gain by calling it “controversial views on migration”? If someone undermines democratic institutions, what honesty exists in calling it “illiberal democracy,” as if democracy can be prefixed into submission? If someone encourages hostility toward minorities, why package it as “cultural protection”?
This linguistic laundering is not harmless. It helps normalize the intolerable. It helps political leaders walk right up to the line of fascism, wave to the cameras, and walk back without consequence. It allows the public to pretend that these are just “strong personalities” navigating “difficult times,” rather than political actors consciously dragging their countries toward a darker, narrower vision of society.
Enough. If the world is sliding toward extremism, the least we can do is stop lubricating the slope.
We owe ourselves the honesty of calling political ideologies by their real names, not the marketing version. We owe society a vocabulary that reveals rather than conceals. And we owe the victims of these politics, immigrants demonized, minorities targeted, institutions eroded, something more than euphemisms.
Farage, Trump, and Orbán did not stumble into today’s accusations. They have earned them. Through years of dividing, scapegoating, and posturing, they crafted political careers built on fear packaged as patriotism.
It is time to stop pretending their words were ever harmless. It is time to stop pretending the poison wasn’t always there. And it is time to stop calling it medicine.
There is something almost theatrical about the way Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, two men who cannot agree on the colour of the sky unless it flatters them politically, suddenly find common ground in blaming Europe for the world’s troubles. Their latest point of convergence came after an hours-long meeting at the Kremlin between U.S. envoys and Putin, an affair that produced plenty of stern faces, ceremonial handshakes, and resolute posturing, but not a glimmer of actual progress. And yet, as if pre-scripted, both leaders emerged with a shared refrain: peace is elusive not because of Russia’s aggression, not because of America’s political whiplash, but because Europe, poor, aging, bureaucratic Europe, is simply too stubborn. It would be almost funny if it weren’t so predictably cynical.
Europe, in this telling, becomes the geopolitical equivalent of the fussy neighbour who refuses to “just be reasonable” about the noise coming from your backyard flamethrower experiments. The accusation is smooth, convenient, and infinitely malleable. Europe is too hawkish. Europe is too soft. Europe is too aligned with Washington. Europe is not aligned enough. It is the sort of argument that collapses upon brief inspection, and yet in the mouths of Trump and Putin it sounds less like analysis and more like alibi.
What makes this convergence particularly rich is that Trump and Putin conceive of Europe as obstacles for opposite reasons. For Putin, Europe is the fortress of sanctions, the scolding schoolteacher blocking his ambitions, the moralizing continent that insists borders matter and invasions shouldn’t happen on Tuesdays. For Trump, Europe is the ungrateful dependent, the cost center, the fraying alliance he alternately threatens, courts, and shrugs at. One man wants Europe quieted; the other wants Europe billed. But both enjoy the symmetry of saying Europe is the problem. It offers them a shared antagonist that asks nothing in return. This is not, however, really about Europe. This is about narrative convenience.
Blaming Europe absolves Washington and Moscow of responsibility for the calcified stalemate they jointly maintain one through erratic diplomatic overtures, the other through kinetic force. It shifts accountability from the two governments actually sitting across the table to a third party outside the room. Europe, meanwhile, lacks both the unified voice and the raw theatricality to counter the accusation effectively. Brussels does not tweet. Paris does not improvise. Berlin does not bluster. Europe responds with communiqués, and communiqués, no matter how sternly worded, are no match for two leaders adept in the politics of spectacle.
The deeper truth is that the U.S.–Russia impasse lives in the space between incompatible worldviews. Putin clings to an old-world sphere-of-influence philosophy, a map drawn in the ink of 19th-century entitlement. Trump, meanwhile, approaches global politics like a real estate negotiation, everything transactional, everything renegotiable, everything personal. Neither framework allows for the kind of multilateral, rules-based diplomacy Europe holds dear. So when discussions falter, Europe becomes the designated culprit by default.
But the irony is that Europe’s “stand,” the very position Trump and Putin call obstructionist, is simply consistency. Europe likes treaties. Europe likes institutions. Europe likes the idea that borders remain where cartographers put them and not where tanks later decide they belong. In a world increasingly driven by improvisation, Europe’s steadfastness suddenly feels radical.
Perhaps that is what unnerves both men. Europe, with its mild technocrats and its cautious language, quietly asserts that power still has limits. It insists that ambitions must be bounded by law, that wars cannot be shrugged off as misunderstandings. Europe is, in a way, the last adult in a room full of performative strongmen, an identity that earns respect privately but derision publicly.
What emerged from the Kremlin meeting, then, was not a breakthrough but a familiar pantomime. U.S. envoys expressed concern. Russia expressed grievance. Everyone expressed “commitment to continued dialogue,” which is diplomatic code for “we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” But because the world demands a storyline, and because leaders require a villain, Europe was pushed forward like a reluctant actor entering stage left.
Still, Europe’s role in this drama is not merely reactive. If anything, it now faces a moment of recalibration. The continent must decide whether to continue serving as the moral backbone of the West reliable but often sidelined or to adopt a more assertive posture, even if that invites louder criticism from those accustomed to a pliant Europe. The choice before Europe is not whether it should act, but how loudly it should speak.
What Trump and Putin cannot admit, though perhaps they quietly understand, is that Europe’s resistance is not obstruction but principle. And principles, inconveniently, do not bend simply because two powerful men find them annoying.
In the end, the most telling part of this convergence between Trump and Putin is not what they say about Europe, but what it reveals about themselves. For all their differences, both men share a belief that global order is something to be shaped by force of personality rather than collective agreement. Europe disrupts that narrative by insisting that the world is not, in fact, a wrestling match between giants but a long negotiation between equals.
If Europe is an obstacle to peace, as they claim, it is only because peace defined on their terms is something the continent cannot, and should not, accept.
There are political collisions that materialize like sudden storms, and there are those that build slowly, thundercloud by thundercloud, until even the most diplomatic optimist can see the lightning forming. The latest ruling, one that appears destined to pit the European Commission against a billionaire with a taste for spectacle, and quite possibly drag Donald Trump into the fray as the self-appointed champion of bruised plutocrats, belongs squarely in the second category. It is not an accident. It is not a misunderstanding. It is the inevitable end of years of arrogance meeting years of institutional exhaustion.
The European Commission has tolerated more than enough tantrums from wealthy moguls who believe that because they own companies, they also own the consequences of their actions. And the EU is tired. Tired of pandering. Tired of being cast as the schoolteacher to billionaires who behave like hyperactive students refusing to hand in homework while complaining that the curriculum offends their freedom.
And somewhere across the Atlantic, Donald Trump is most certainly licking his lips, delighted at the prospect of reentering the European theatre, not as a policymaker, but as a sideshow barker cheering on the billionaire victim of the “big, bad Brussels bureaucrats.” Trump loves a grievance parade. Especially one he’s not paying for.
But here’s the twist: Trump may be the “friendnemy” the EU never asked for and the billionaire never truly controlled. Their alliances, when they appear at all, are marriages of convenience. The kind where both sides sneak out of the house at dawn before anyone asks questions. One insult away from collapse, one compliment away from revival. Unstable, theatrical, and utterly on-brand.
The ruling in question may deal with competition, digital regulation, privacy, or financial compliance ...pick any, the pattern remains the same. When the EU enforces the rules, billionaires cry foul. Not because they oppose regulation in principle, but because they oppose regulation that does not bend neatly to their business model. They want laws the way children want bedtime: optional, negotiable, and preferably nonexistent.
And when they don’t get that? They reach for the oldest toy in the box: public outrage. “Unelected bureaucrats!” they shout, forgetting that democratically elected governments wrote the laws those bureaucrats are enforcing. “Overreach!” they cry, while building empires that span continents and swallow competitors whole. Their definitions of overreach are suspiciously one-directional.
Now, let’s not pretend the European Commission is made of saints. It can be slow, overly procedural, painfully self-congratulatory. But on regulation—especially involving Big Tech, Big Money, or Big Egos, it stands practically alone on the global stage. The US oscillates between admiration and apathy; Asia acts with efficiency bordering on ruthlessness; and the rest of the world looks on wondering who, if anyone is brave enough to confront the modern-day industrial barons.
The EU, for all its flaws, is at least trying. And that is what infuriates certain billionaires more than anything else.
Because defiance of power is acceptable, admired even until the defiance comes from institutions rather than individuals. Institutions are boring. They cannot be charmed by a private jet. They do not care how many followers you have. You cannot buy lunch with them, because they are not a person. You cannot intimidate them, because they have nothing personal to fear. They are built precisely to withstand the gravitational pull of influence. A billionaire who cannot charm, buy, or bully an institution becomes something rare, powerless.
Enter Trump. He can smell powerless billionaires the way sharks smell blood. Because while he may project strength, his political persona thrives best among the aggrieved, the cornered, the persecuted. If he steps into this European dispute and you can bet he is already drafting some all-caps, vowel-deficient truth-social proclamation, it will be to cast the billionaire as a martyr, himself as the defender of free enterprise, and the EU as the overbearing foreign empire hellbent on crushing American greatness. Or whatever slogan he’s recycling this month.
It will not matter if the billionaire in question actually wants Trump’s help. Trump will give it anyway. Help is his favorite stage, and the spotlight can never be too bright. The EU, in turn, will shrug. It has weathered worse storms, including Trump himself during his presidential era.
The collision course is set not because the ruling is radical but because the ecosystem surrounding it is dysfunctional. Billionaires want exemption. The Commission wants enforcement. Trump wants attention. None of these forces are compatible.
What happens next? Expect dramatics. The billionaire will threaten innovation, jobs, or investment. Trump will accuse Brussels of plotting against freedom. Commentators will treat this as a geopolitical crisis rather than a regulatory dispute.
And then, quietly, methodically, inevitably, the Commission will proceed with the enforcement anyway. Because institutions do not blink. Billionaires do.
The deeper question is whether this marks a turning point. A moment when the EU finally stops negotiating with tycoons who howl at the moon whenever the law touches them. A moment when Trump’s interference in European affairs produces little more than an eye roll.
A moment when power recalibrates itself. If so, the ruling is not the story. The story is the shift. A shift toward accountability, however imperfect. A shift toward a political landscape where no billionaire can bend a continent with a tantrum. A shift toward an international order where Trump’s theatrics, though still noisy, matter a little less each time.
And that, quietly, stubbornly, unglamorously, is how a collision becomes a correction. And how a correction becomes history.
There are moments in international politics when the present feels less like a linear progression and more like an elaborate reenactment. The actors change, the costumes update, but the script somehow remains eerily familiar. As the world watches the ongoing negotiations, posturing, and geopolitical theatre surrounding Ukraine, one can’t help but sense an unspoken yearning from two central figures, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Beneath their bluster and surface-level antagonism lies a shared, almost nostalgic aspiration, to revive the spirit of 1945’s Malta (or Yalta) conference, that smoky backroom moment in history when great powers carved the world into spheres of influence with an imperial confidence so casual it might as well have been a parlor game.
It is not the details of that conference that matter here, but the underlying ethos, the world as a chessboard belonging to a select few. The world as something owned.
Putin, for his part has never hidden his preference for a world governed by hard borders of influence rather than fluid democratic aspirations. He is a man whose imagination is rooted firmly in the past. His vocabulary “historic lands,” “traditional spheres,” “civilizational territories” is itself a form of ideological archeology. He digs backward, not forward. For him, the post–Cold War settlement was less a triumph of openness than a catastrophe of fragmentation. In Putin’s worldview, the West’s sin was not expansion but intrusion stepping into zones where Russia believes history itself had signed Moscow’s name in permanent ink.
Trump, admittedly, doesn’t share Putin’s sentimental attachment to history. Trump is not a student of archives; he is a collector of transactional instincts. Yet, strikingly, he ends up at a similar place. His rhetoric during and after his presidency has often implied that America’s global commitments are less about ideals than burdens, burdens that could, in theory, be redistributed, renegotiated, or abandoned altogether. Trump’s worldview shrinks the global order to a kind of cosmic real estate market; there are plots, and tenants, and landlords. And if the rent’s not worth it, you get out and let someone else take over.
This is where their visions intersect. Not in ideology, but in structure. Both men, albeit for different reasons, imagine a world where the powerful divide territories like divorcées sorting through holiday homes. Ukraine, for them, plays the part of unfortunate real estate caught between competing bidders.
What feels most troubling today is not the conflict on the ground, though that alone is catastrophic but the sense that in the geopolitical imagination of these two men, Ukraine becomes less a sovereign nation than a pawn in the revival of a long-abandoned world order. A world where smaller nations are not actors, but objects. A world where the right of self-determination is a decorative flourish, not a foundational principle.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are expected to pretend that the conversation is happening on conventional diplomatic terms. We pretend this is about NATO technicalities or election cycles or energy corridors. But the subterranean conversation, the one neither will ever say aloud, is older and far more blunt, let us divide the world again.
Of course, the world has changed since 1945. It is too interconnected, too combustible, too multipolar for even powerful men to casually redraw borders over conference tables and crystal glasses. The Malta mentality no longer fits the planet we inhabit. But nostalgia is a potent political drug, particularly for leaders who see the present as a disappointment. Putin longs for the stability of empire. Trump longs for the simplicity of deals. Both see chaos not as tragedy but as opportunity.
To be clear, this is not an argument that Trump and Putin will literally sit together and draft a new world map. History does not repeat itself with that sort of theatrical neatness. But the impulse, the quiet, gravitational pull toward a world carved into authoritative zones, shapes their actions, their statements, and the shadow their ambitions cast across global affairs.
This becomes particularly vivid when they speak about Ukraine. When Trump casually remarks that he could “end the war in 24 hours,” one hears the unmistakable echo of great-power hubris: the idea that the fate of nations is something to be decided between leaders who see themselves as global protagonists. When Putin insists that Russia and the West must engage in “serious dialogue” about security architecture, what he really means is that other nations must accept the limits of their autonomy.
The tragedy here is not merely geopolitical. It is human. The Malta mindset transforms people into abstractions—into populations to be shifted, negotiated, or sacrificed in the service of influence. It imagines the world as bounded by spheres, not lives. Every time a leader leans into that logic, the space for democracy shrinks a little. Not because tanks cross borders, though they may but because the underlying assumption becomes normalized that the world belongs to a handful of men who believe history has ordained them as custodians of destiny.
There is, thankfully, a counterforce at play. Smaller nations, civil societies, alliances built on shared principles rather than raw power, they push back. They insist on being participants rather than prizes. Ukraine, in particular, has refused to play its assigned historical role. It has chosen, loudly and painfully, to assert its own agency.
Perhaps that is the real story of this moment not the attempted resurrection of old imperial fantasies, but the resistance to them.
Still, the ghosts of Malta linger. They drift through press conferences and campaign speeches, through veiled threats and boastful promises. They remind us that the world order is only as strong as the imagination of those who uphold it. And unfortunately, some imaginations remain stubbornly anchored to the past, dreaming of a world that was never as stable or simple as those who long for it would like to believe.
There is a particular kind of political theater that plays out when a man who spent decades mastering the optics of triumph suddenly discovers that the world stage refuses to play along. Donald Trump’s public longing, at times barely disguised, at times shouted, for a Nobel Peace Prize has become one of the more revealing obsessions of his persona. It is not simply ambition. It is a craving for canonization, a hunger for recognition from the very global establishment he has so often dismissed as weak, corrupt, or elitist. Yet for all his bluster, his repeated attempts to wedge himself into the center of international diplomacy end up resembling a slapstick routine performed on a marble floor: loud, frantic, and perpetually a few degrees off balance.
Trump’s fixation on being remembered as a dealmaker of historic proportions has always run parallel to his equally robust desire to be viewed as a prophet of peace. The contradiction is not accidental. In Trump’s world, peace is secured not through patience, trust, or long-term strategy, but through force, force of personality, force of spectacle, force of will. Peace to him is a trophy not a process. And the Nobel, shimmering in the distance like a celestial participation award, has become the one prize he cannot negotiate into existence.
One can almost imagine the scene: Trump, scrolling through global headlines, scanning for conflicts not to understand their complexities but to evaluate whether they might be staged into a triumphant photo op. A handshake here, a signature there, a quick speech about ending centuries of strife, cut, print, submit to Oslo. This is the man who spoke of Middle East peace with the same cadence one uses when pitching a new golf course in Miami. “Beautiful land,” “great people,” “incredible potential.” In business, such language can move investors. In diplomacy, it tends to provoke winces, if not full-body cringe.
The problem is not that Trump wants peace. Many leaders want peace, even those with problematic track records or questionable motivations. The problem is that Trump’s pursuit of it appears less like statesmanship and more like brand management. Peace cannot be forced, and it certainly cannot be arm-twisted into existence as though it were a recalcitrant zoning board. But Trump, whose professional successes were built on the premise that everything, from loyalty to truth, is negotiable, has approached diplomacy as if it were merely another product to package.
Consider the recurring spectacle: a conflict erupts, the world braces for long, delicate negotiations, and Trump appears on television insisting that he alone can end the fighting, if only someone will invite him to the table. His approach often resembles an overeager wedding crasher determined to seize the microphone during the best-man speech. He barrels into the narrative with confidence, promises resolution, and seems genuinely perplexed when the participants in the conflict, who have decades, sometimes centuries, of blood and history between them, fail to yield to the gravitational pull of his ego.
In the realm of international diplomacy, appearing ridiculous is not merely a matter of aesthetics. It signals to allies and adversaries alike that American policy can be manipulated, that its leadership may be swayed less by strategy than by the dangling of shiny objects. And no object shines more brightly in Trump's imagination than the Nobel Peace Prize, that elusive endorsement from the global elite he simultaneously derides and craves.
His public commentary betrays this yearning. On more than one occasion, Trump has reminded audiences unprompted, that he “should have” won the Nobel for various initiatives, including negotiations that either fizzled, were incomplete, or were only nominally connected to him. The Nobel becomes less a symbol of peace and more a symbol of validation, a cosmic nod of approval from a universe he believes has undervalued his contributions.
But of course, peace is not a real estate transaction. Its contours cannot be shifted with a signature. Its foundations cannot be poured overnight. Diplomacy requires a humility that Trump has never demonstrated, a willingness to listen, to absorb nuance, to proceed without expecting applause. These are not qualities he built his career on. They are not qualities he rewards in others. They are, in fact, qualities he actively mocks.
And so the spectacle continues: Trump lurches from conflict to conflict, searching for one that can be coaxed, bullied, or glamorized into providing him the moment he feels history has denied him. But the world is not a television episode, nor is it one of his resorts. The players have their own scripts, their own motives, their own unwillingness to be manipulated for someone’s legacy project.
What remains, then, is a political figure wandering the global stage with the restless energy of a man who feels cheated by the judges. He wants the medal. He wants the legacy. He wants the affirmation of greatness carved into the annals of world history. But peace is not a branding opportunity, and the Nobel Committee does not award prizes for effort or enthusiasm.
Trump’s quest for a kind of diplomatic sainthood makes for fascinating theater, but it ultimately underscores a profound misunderstanding that global peace is not summoned by a personality, no matter how outsized. It is built, slowly, painfully, and anonymously by people who do not need a prize to continue the work. Trump may continue to chase the gleam of international grandeur, but as long as he treats peace as a commodity, he will remain what the world increasingly sees him as: a man auditioning for a role he does not understand, on a stage he cannot command.
But does the Igbo have any plight in Nigeria? I think all Nigerians will accept that the Igbo face a plight in Nigeria. The Igbo fought a civil war with the rest of Nigeria.
Am I qualified to write this piece? What are the qualifications? It is a necessary first question. I’m not Igbo, but I’m Nigerian; I’m Yoruba. The Igbo are citizens of the same country, Nigeria. I have schooled with them, I have attended the same church with them, and I have lived with some of them either in the same compound or in the same hostel. I have bought from them. You can’t evade this as a Nigerian. The Igbo control the commerce of this nation. If you have not bought from an Igbo man or woman, then you are not living in Nigeria. The Igbo live everywhere, even in the remotest parts of Nigeria. It is said that if you get into a community and you don’t see an Igbo man or woman there, then don’t stay in that community; you won’t enjoy your stay there.
I have spent years trying to unravel the Igbo man. I have had to pray to God to help with Igbo friends from whom I can learn about this very important race. My prayer was answered with one; we lived together in a one-bedroom apartment with my family. He made a real sacrifice for my family and me. We both thought we desired cross-tribal communion, but today our friendship is no longer as we wanted it to be. We are still friends, but not as we wanted it to be. What broke our relationship? The 2023 elections brought my friend’s Igbo factor to light. I was unable to get him to understand my own truth. He tried to push some of his, which I accepted, but he will not even consider mine. For example, the question he posed: was the 1966 coup Igbo? He posed the question when General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, IBB, the dictator and former self-declared president of Nigeria, wrote in his biography, A Journey in Service, that the 1966 coup was not an Igbo coup.
We will come back to this. But does the Igbo have any plight in Nigeria? I think all Nigerians will accept that the Igbo face a plight in Nigeria. The Igbo fought a civil war with the rest of Nigeria. They lost thousands; the Igbo, for propaganda reasons for which they are very good at, will tell you they lost millions of souls. They will say it as if there is no loss on the side of Nigeria.
The Igbo knows how to play the victim. There is nothing wrong with them in any conflict; everything is wrong with their opponents. They heap blame on others and accept none on their side. My early exposure to what seemed to me to be Igbo but which I know today was wrong was that every fair-skinned person in Nigeria is Igbo. Again, as a youth that anybody who lived anywhere from Benin City upward was Igbo. We called them Okoro then, and honestly even now I don’t know why. My early exposure marked out Igbo as very brilliant. I can’t imagine any Igbo man as a dullard. I don’t know how that got into me, but as I read history as an adult, I found one reason that may have helped my view of Igbo.
It was when I read Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s exploits as a politician. He was a fantastic propagandist who fought his wars with words. For example, he was said to have told the Igbo Union in an attempt to recruit Igbo into the NCNC in order to gain control of the party that because of the martial prowess of the Igbo, the Almighty was by that showing the Igbo his ordination by God as ruler of Africa. Therefore the rulership of Igbo in Africa was a question of time. Azikiwe commanded the press in a way that nobody before him did, and he deployed them effectively. So powerful was this deployment of his press that Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the leader of Action Group (AG), kept the formation of AG secret from Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in the fear that if he heard, the party would be killed in its youth by Azikiwe’s verbal onslaught. That was the power of Azikiwe’s pen that Awolowo, of equal power in oratory and writing, feared.
Azikiwe’s newspaper gave a fillip to all the Igbo who believed in him. They are the strongest; therefore, be afraid when you want to engage them in fisticuffs. They are very brilliant; therefore, be afraid when you are in the same classroom with them. No matter how brilliant you think you are, they are sure to beat you. They are very smart, and in any encounter with them, you must know you can never outsmart an Igbo man. They don’t come second; they must be the first always. The Igbo are very hardworking, and because they have the highest need for achievement score in Nigeria, all of them succeed. The Igbo are conquerors, and they must conquer; it’s only a question of time. The Igbo are very neat, while others are very dirty. They are widely travelled, and therefore they know the frailties of other persons, while others know so little of them. Because of their exclusiveness, not many people like to visit their cities, towns, and villages. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, through his newspaper, helped give vent to all these assumptions. Really, some of them are true, but also true is the fact that others also have these, some in greater measure than the Igbos.
When I went to work in Lagos, I met real Igbos, and I started getting to know them. They have strengths like every other person, and they have weaknesses just like every other person. But the over-promotion of the Igbo has become a problem for this very good race. They believe all these things about themselves, and they become proud and secluded. The Igbo love money. An Igbo preacher once said that if you really want to know whether an Igbo man is really dead, shake a can filled with coins in his ears. If he didn’t wake up, then he is truly dead. All these ascribed qualities, not real in some cases, are the plights of the Igbo. It made them incapable of any objective self-examination. And others who observe them too, believe because of years of propaganda. I’m a very good example.
But as the years went by and these self-ascribed qualities began to clash as others met and interacted with Ndigbo, the mask began to tear off, and the real man, subject naturally to weaknesses, began to show up. As I grew up in life, as I wrote public exams with the Igbo, I began to realize that anything built on hype cannot endure; Igbo are like other humans with a mixture of strength and weakness. But the Igbo had gone too far in that show-off and braggadocio that it was impossible to retrace his steps. That was the cause of the civil war. Yes, Igbo was offended by the genocide.
History is now revealing how the intelligentsia and senior civil servants of the north travelled round the north for two weeks inviting the Hausa-Fulani to rise in vengeance against the murder of northern leaders in the Igbo-led coup of 1966. It is now known that the commoners were not going to react, but the top civil servants and intelligentsia of the northern region felt the north would be permanently weak if the people didn’t react to the murder. It took a top civil servant, Ahmed Joda, now late, I think, on the orders of his colleagues and possibly with the acquiescence of their military governor, Major Hassan Katsina, to mobilise people in the north against the Unification Decree of 1966, which the North believe would lead to Igbo domination. The riots were a culmination of various political tensions and events of that era. The riots, which occurred in May and intensified after the July 1966 counter-coup, were largely a spontaneous, though possibly mobilized by elements of the elite and military, response to a number of factors: The January 1966 coup, the first military coup, perceived as an “Igbo coup” because most of the plotters and casualties among political and military leaders were of northern and western origin, created deep suspicion and animosity in the North.
The outbreak of riots in the north were a widespread, mass phenomenon involving soldiers and civilians. Thereafter began massive killings of the Igbo. All you needed to be killed was to be Igbo.
Lt. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, who had been appointed the military governor of the Eastern Region and who had brought the ascribed Igbo invincibility and pride to the top in his personality, behaved typically in the crisis. First, Ojukwu thought he was superior to Gowon, who was made the Head of State courtesy of the intervention of the British High Commission in Lagos. Gowon was humble and gentle and virtually offered Ojukwu the nation in their popular Aburi Accord until top civil servants in Lagos told him he had offered Nigeria away. Humble Gowon accepted the advice and reneged. Lt Col Ojukwu was unfortunate; the corps of top Igbo civil servants and academics he gathered around himself who also shared in those ascribed values strengthened Ojukwu in his stubbornness. The East must secede.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first premier of the Western Region, put his life on the line and travelled to the east to meet Ojukwu. He told him war was unnecessary and that Ojukwu should stay on so a “larger Nigeria can be built which can accommodate all Nigerians.” Headstrong because of the ascribed Igbo qualities, Ojukwu declined the advice of the elderly Awolowo, saying when he met Awolowo on the tarmac as he went to board a flight back to Lagos, “Baba awa ti lo” (Baba, we have gone). With that parting handshake, there was no going back again for Ojukwu, and the east, which he labeled Biafra, must leave the union. But that was the last stubbornness that broke the camel’s back. It was a civil war that set the Igbo back. They quickly recovered because of some of the ascribed qualities, but not without a cost.
Ojukwu himself said that the Igbo that went all over the world to look for money because the war made them abjectly poor did not go out with the traditional real Igbo values given by the parents. They just must make money at all costs. (See ‘Because I’m involved’ written by Odumegwu Ojukwu). That journey began with the unbridled search for money, which has marred Nigeria’s reputation everywhere the Igbo are today. In some cases, he was either forging a certificate or carrying drugs or engaging in one heinous crime or the other. That does not mean he is the only one doing it. Indeed, a southern Kaduna man who was my boss told me that the Igbo didn’t start the drug business, that the Hausa-Fulani had been at it for long before the Igbo jumped into it, “but you know everything Igbo does, they bring their braggadocio and pride and show off.”
Why did the Igbo follow Ojukwu almost blindfolded? Even great Zik was not left out; he had gone with Ojukwu, allowing his dream of ruling Africa to shrink to ruling a tiny enclave in the east of Nigeria. But he quickly detoured and returned to Nigeria when it became obvious to him that the secession was a journey in futility.
Again, why did the Igbos follow Ojukwu? It takes likes to follow likes. Ojukwu and his fellows shared in the ascribed qualities of Igbos. Pride is the principal ruin of all men and women, and it takes rough and terrible circumstances to prune it. Igbo will always ascribe their plight to other men or to circumstances outside of themselves. But for anybody in religion, he will know that the greatest enemy of man is himself. Igbo has no enemy outside of Igbo. And pride is that enemy that decades of propaganda have fed. The Bible says God hates pride, but he gives grace to the humble. Because the Igbo had been proud, God allowed them to fall into Ojukwu’s deception in order to humble them. Not that God will excuse those who did evil to them, no. All that is happening all over the north now is all vengeance of God against the Igbo genocide. God will not do iniquity, the Bible says, and he leaves no sin unjudged.
I do not think the Igbo learned the lesson in humility during the civil war. Israel as a nation never learned their lessons till today. It can take several deals before lessons are learned. The Igbo have again fallen into the same trap as Ojukwu in following Nnamdi Kanu, who has become an idol in the east. If there is any man that summarizes the Igbo ascribed qualities, that person is Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. He is so brash, so rash, so rude, so overbearing, and so abrasive and intemperate. I’m still coming to terms with how an otherwise very intelligent people will follow such a brute. But the Igbo did. He will insult them and even spend their money on himself in pursuit of fashion, and they will still follow him. How can a person with any modicum of intelligence do the kind of thing Nnamdi Kanu did, giving instruction for the destruction of his country through a radio message? Though it was a stupid thing to do, the Igbo still followed him, even giving him their money, and if you know Igbo, don’t joke with their money. You must know how blind they became to give such huge money to Nnamdi Kanu and Simon Ekpa in Finland, who wept like a baby at his conviction in a Finnish court.
What happened again? Humility from God. Why did it happen that the conviction of both Nnamdi Kanu and Simon Ekpa happened within months of each other? This is none other than the hand of God to get the Igbo sensitive to this problem of pride. Pride is very subtle and dangerous; it takes the help of God to detect it and to remove it.
Now because of the Igbo pride, they want to wish away the 1966 coup as not Igbo-centric. No, that coup was Igbo. For revolutionist Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, it was a revolution, but for other Igbo in the group, it was a coup to assert the ascribed qualities of Igbos and to lord that race over others. That was the point my Igbo friend and brother will not accept but which God resolved for us. I don’t know how he resolved it, but I received a ten thousand naira gift from my brother after he refused a relationship with me for some time. Let the Ndigbo search their hearts individually; let them come humble before God and before their neighbours. And the plight of the Igbo will be over in a corporate Nigeria.
First Published in METRO
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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
Founded on the values of solidarity and mutual trust, volunteerism transcends all cultural, linguistic and geographic boundaries. By giving their time and skills without expectations of material reward, volunteers themselves are uplifted by a singular sense of purpose. -Ban Ki-moon.
5 December has been selected as the International Volunteer Day by a 1985 UN General Assembly resolution. This year 5 December comes as government representatives and volunteers of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are meeting in Paris to develop a new international climate agreement, COP 21. The NGO representatives are fewer in number than originally planned due to the 13 November shootings in Paris and thus tightened security conditions. However, those that are present are doubly active as world media attention is focused on the conference and its outcome.
In practice, as with all major UN conferences, negotiations among governments have been going on for two years with a good deal of input from NGO representatives. At the Paris stage, there is a preliminary “Final Document and Action Plan” of some 30 pages with a good number of square brackets around words or sentences on which there is no agreement. Negotiations concern making the document shorter so that the main ideas will stand out better and to remove square brackets. If a suitable word is not found, often the whole sentence will be dropped.
Both government representatives and NGOs are discussing post-Paris action and coalition building. There is also a concerted effort to bring the business community, especially transnational corporations into the action. While the UN system has a structure of consultative status for NGOs through the Economic and Social Council, the world of business is largely not represented. Only the International Labour Organization with its headquarters in Geneva has a three-party membership : governments, trade unions and business associations from each of the member States. The business world is not really a “voluntary association” in the sense of NGOs. Material reward is an important element in business.
COP 21 is a prime example of the need for cooperative action at the local, national and world level. As has been often said, the climate does not recognize national frontiers. The relations among ecologically-sound development, security, conflict resolution and respect for human rights have now assumed a more dynamic form than at any other time since the creation of the United Nations in 1945. To meet these strong challenges, NGOs, academic institutions, business and professional associations and the media must work together cooperatively. International Volunteer Day can serve as a time of reflection on capacity building and improved networking.
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Rene Wadlow, President and a represeentative to the UN, Geneva, of the Association of World Citizens
There is a soft, persistent hum inside the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, a sound stitched together from monsoon winds, human breathing, and the dull throb of waiting. Waiting is its own weather system there, heavy and humid, impossible to escape. More than a million people, an entire nation without a nation, have lived inside the world’s largest refugee encampment for years, long enough for children to grow into teenagers who have never seen the land their parents still call home.
And yet the world treats this place as a paused story, a tragic footnote with no plot progression. The headlines have thinned. The promises have thinned further. And now the aid is thinning too.
When funding shrinks in a place where everything depends on it, food, water, medicine, dignity, the consequences unfold slowly at first and then all at once. Shelters that once at least pretended to be sturdier than the storms are no longer provided to new arrivals. Families step off trucks or trudge across flooded paths only to discover there is no space for them, not even a tarpaulin or bamboo frame to call their own. It is difficult to imagine something more humiliating than being stateless, but being stateless and shelterless may come close.
The international community, that elusive chorus of well-meaning voices, often speaks of compassion in the abstract. But compassion, to the Rohingya, has become an increasingly unreliable currency. It evaporates when politics blow hot. It disappears when donors look elsewhere. The Rohingya the forgotten people, the displaced, the unwelcome, have learned that abandonment happens not with shouts but with silences. Long, bureaucratic, politely phrased silences.
The camps were never intended to last this long. They were meant to be temporary, a humanitarian bridge until Myanmar’s government faced its own reflection and allowed the Rohingya to return home safely. But home is now an idea more than a geography. Half-destroyed villages, scorched earth, and political inertia make return not only unrealistic but dangerous. And so the camp grows into something resembling a city, though a city without rights, without permanence, without the basic infrastructure that transforms a cluster of shelters into a place where human beings can imagine a future.
There are informal schools where volunteer teachers try to convince restless children that learning still matters. There are makeshift clinics where doctors must play a daily game of triage because they simply do not have enough supplies. There are markets, tiny ones, where bartering serves as the closest thing to an economy. The Rohingya have done what all displaced people eventually do: they’ve built a life inside the ruins of what was taken from them.
It is fashionable in some circles to speak of “compassion fatigue,” as though empathy is a natural resource prone to depletion. But fatigue is a luxury the Rohingya do not have. Nor is it a luxury afforded to the Bangladeshi communities hosting them, who shoulder the environmental strain, the political complications, and the economic frustrations of absorbing a population larger than many countries’ capitals. Host nations often receive praise for their “generosity,” but praise does not rebuild eroding hillsides or fund schools or address the simmering tensions that arise whenever resources grow scarce.
To walk through the camps is to feel the contradiction that defines the Rohingya condition: they are both hyper-visible and utterly unseen. The scale of their displacement is enormous, undeniable, impossible to ignore and yet the world has managed to look away. There is no powerful lobby advocating for them, no geopolitical advantage in championing their cause. They drift in the margins of global concern, a crisis that refuses to end but also refuses to excite the urgency needed to solve it.
What does it mean, then, to insist on hope? In many Rohingya households, hope has become a quiet act of rebellion. Mothers teach their children stories from a homeland the kids have never touched. Men gather to discuss community leadership, imagining systems of order inside disorder. Teenagers, who should be flirting, dreaming, discovering, gather in cramped rooms to learn English or Burmese, preparing for a future that has not been offered to them. It is astonishing, almost unreasonable, the human instinct to imagine a tomorrow even when today collapses around you.
An opinion column is supposed to offer a point of view, a prescription, maybe even a solution. But the Rohingya crisis resists quick solutions. It asks instead for endurance, for the mundane work of sustained attention. It requires the international community to resist the temptation of distraction. To remember that a million displaced people do not simply disappear because our focus shifts to another crisis.
The truth is that moral responsibility doesn’t expire. It doesn’t diminish because the news cycle moved on. The Rohingya are still there, in the tarpaulin-and-bamboo labyrinth of Cox’s Bazar, still listening to the monsoon winds and the bureaucratic silences. They are still waiting.
And perhaps the most radical thing we can do, the most human thing, is to stop pretending that waiting is an acceptable substitute for a future.
