Umunne m,
I write to you today not in anger, but with a mind sharpened against self-deception. This is neither a letter of comfort nor a stage for fragile egos, but a reckoning forged through brutal reflection. If you are seeking reassurance, validation, or easy affirmation, this is not for you. You may stop here.
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These past few weeks, no doubt, have exacted a serious emotional toll on all Nigerians. The country has mutated into one in which peril no longer startles the moral imagination. Danger has been domesticated, disciplined, and absorbed into the rhythms of ordinary life. Kidnapping is no longer an aberration; it has become the steady tempo of our collective existence. Murder no longer shocks, it murmurs faintly in the background, a constant and unremarkable soundtrack to our days.
Nigeria is a republic where power determines guilt and innocence, and ethnic identity silently seals fate. The law, in practice, is not a shield but a cudgel, unsheathed not in defence of justice but in service of dominance. Courts have been reduced to theatres. Judgments bear the unmistakable scent of scripts written elsewhere. Some citizens arrive at birth already condemned by invisible verdicts.
For Ndigbo, however, the conviction and sentencing of Nnamdi Kanu, followed by his onward procession toward the iron confines of Sokoto prison, have acquired a more profound and unsettling resonance. These are not mere judicial events. They are state spectacles, choreographed and saturated with historical resentment.
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It would be preposterous and intellectually dishonest for us to pretend that Kanu’s hands are immaculate or that his conduct was devoid of monumental consequences. But that is not the major point of contention. Our grievance lies elsewhere. It resides in a republic that has mastered the craft of selective justice, whereby ethnicity, rather than evidence, subtly but decisively tilts the scales.
Within our own ranks, the Kanu question remains a source of rupture. For some, he is the defiant embodiment of resistance against an unyielding state. For others, he is a reckless provocateur who widened already festering wounds. These fractures are real. They are personal. Yet, this reflection is not an exercise in factional allegiance. The more fundamental concern is what his ordeal has exposed. It has illuminated the steady, methodical relegation of our people to the most fragile and precarious margins of the Nigerian experiment, estranged within a nation we helped to conceive, construct, and steady in its formative years.
Nigeria is a republic where power determines guilt and innocence, and ethnic identity silently seals fate. The law, in practice, is not a shield but a cudgel, unsheathed not in defence of justice but in service of dominance. Courts have been reduced to theatres. Judgments bear the unmistakable scent of scripts written elsewhere. Some citizens arrive at birth already condemned by invisible verdicts.
Many Nigerians remain perplexed by the wellspring of sympathy Kanu commands among vast segments of our people. From their vantage point, he stood at the helm of a movement associated with defiance, disorder, and the reckless spilling of innocent blood. Their incomprehension is not entirely irrational. Yet, the truth is both more layered and more disquieting than the moral cartoons offered in public discourse.
Movements such as IPOB did not spring from any cultural predisposition toward violence. Like MASSOB before it, IPOB emerged as an instrument of political expression, a language of protest birthed by humiliation, systemic exclusion, and structural abandonment. It was voice before it became force. For countless numbers of our people, the frustrations it gave articulation to had existed long before Nnamdi Kanu found international amplification.
Nevertheless, grievance movements, when left untended and unguided, often rot from within. They metastasise. That rot became visible when radical splinter elements, most notoriously the Autopilot faction under Simon Ekpa, transmuted political agitation into an architecture of terror. Violence turned inward. Markets were shuttered. Families were uprooted. Traders and artisans, whose only transgression was the pursuit of honest survival, were summarily executed. Communities were psychologically and socially mangled. The very population such movements claimed to emancipate became their most routine casualties. What commenced as managed resistance deteriorated into self-devouring anarchy.
Yet, to conclude the narrative there would amount to the highest act of dishonesty. The Nigerian state carries a weighty historical indictment. Prior to Operation Python Dance, IPOB’s activities were largely nonviolent in method and posture. The state’s answer was not engagement, reform, or inclusion. It was militarisation. Unarmed youths were cut down. Peaceful assemblies were dispersed with gunfire. A movement that might have remained political was forcibly radicalised by state brutality. Its leader was driven into exile, not by due process, but by naked fear.
The contrast in state behaviour remains grotesquely transparent. Militants of the Niger Delta were granted amnesty and lucrative security contracts. Many Boko Haram terrorists were absorbed through rehabilitation and reintegration schemes. The leadership of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) were quietly pacified and accommodated. Yet, when unarmed Igbo youths marched to protest injustice, the state answered with armoured tanks and unrestrained force. This disparity is not incidental. It is structural, deliberate, and deeply embedded.
The spectre of January 1966 refuses to recede. Credible testimonies, including those of former heads of state and respected historians, have clarified that the coup was not designed as an ethnic conspiracy of Igbo domination. It was the act of young, idealistic officers recoiling against what they perceived as national rot. Yet, history is governed less by intent than by memory, fear, and myth.
Whether one casts Kanu as hero or villain, a deeply unsettling truth persists. Justice in Nigeria is not blind. It is calculated, conditional, and ethnically hued. For many of our people, justice feels distant, abstract, and perpetually deferred.
The tragedy becomes starker when placed against the longue durée of our history. There existed a period when the Igbo occupied the intellectual and administrative epicentre of Nigeria’s national life. Our people pioneered educational advancement, commercial innovation, civil service discipline, and military professionalism. The Igbo name once signified excellence, resilience, and adaptive brilliance across West Africa. We were not peripheral actors in the Nigerian drama. We were central architects. That trajectory was violently severed by the cataclysm of the Nigerian Civil War.
What followed was not reconciliation but bureaucratised retribution, dressed in the language of policy. The twenty-pound savings ceiling. The abandoned property edicts. The methodical engineering of political irrelevance. The quiet institutionalisation of second-class citizenship. What was offered in the aftermath was not integration, but tokenism. Presence without power. Visibility without influence.
Yet, candour compels us to turn the searchlight inward as much as outward. No architecture of marginalisation is sustained by external hostility alone. It endures when a people fails to consolidate its own power. We have become fluent in the grammar of grievance, much of it justified, yet we have persistently evaded the confrontation with our internal deficiencies. Chronic fragmentation. Leadership vacuums. An enduring inability to transmute individual brilliance into a collective political machinery.
We produce world-class minds, yet lack a disciplined political infrastructure. We oscillate between fury and withdrawal, between protest and paralysis. Emotions have supplanted strategy. This void has been opportunistically exploited by those whose loyalty is not to justice, but to relevance. They harvest Igbo pain as political currency. But outrage divorced from structure is not power. It is theatre.
Perhaps most corrosive is our increasing hostility to introspection itself. Voices of caution are called “Otellectuals” and branded traitorous. Debate is displaced by insults. Reflection is mistaken for weakness. No civilisation advances by criminalising self-examination.
The spectre of January 1966 refuses to recede. Credible testimonies, including those of former heads of state and respected historians, have clarified that the coup was not designed as an ethnic conspiracy of Igbo domination. It was the act of young, idealistic officers recoiling against what they perceived as national rot. Yet, history is governed less by intent than by memory, fear, and myth.
The reality remains brutal. Most of the principal actors bore Igbo names. The Prime Minister and Northern and Western leaders were killed. No prominent Igbo political titan fell. In a federation already convulsed by suspicion, perception hardened into immutable dogma.
General Aguiyi Ironsi deepened the wound. His failure to prosecute the coup plotters, his ill-timed centralisation of authority through Decree 34, and his tone-deafness to Northern anxieties, widened the chasm. What followed was not merely a counter-coup. It was the institutionalisation of distrust.
Make no mistake: Nigeria will not concede political or economic space to Ndigbo out of sentiments, regardless of how justified our grievance may be. Power is never gifted; it is organised and taken. The responsibility rests with us to build internal cohesion, cultivate strategic clarity, and undertake the difficult work of political organisation and alliance-building.
It is neither morally defensible nor intellectually rational to punish an entire people for the actions of a few idealistic men. But history does not obey morality. It moves through memory, myth, grievance, and inherited fear.
Here we stand today, marked by history, viewed with suspicion by the state, divided within ourselves. We are a people of immense intellectual and entrepreneurial capacity, yet often unable to organise our collective strength into disciplined political coherence. Our brilliance shines most vividly in individual achievements, but this remains poorly translated into unified strategy.
We are a resilient people, once written off by the Nigerian state, yet rising from the ruins of war, dispossession, and deliberate marginalisation to rebuild lives of dignity and distinction. The post-war Igbo recovery stands as one of the most striking examples of communal resilience in modern African history.
Yet resilience, when not tempered by wisdom, can harden into restlessness.
Our assertiveness, once a virtue of survival has, in some instances, evolved into needless abrasiveness, performative triumphalism, and a troubling inability to manage success with quiet power. We have conquered markets, classrooms, and professions but are yet to conquer ourselves.
Decades ago, Chinua Achebe warned us that survival alone was not enough; that we must “learn less abrasiveness, more shrewdness and tact, and a willingness to grant the validity of less boisterous values.” That warning was not an insult; it was a prescription for maturity.
Here is also one unpalatable truth we must confronts. Fairness has never been the prevailing currency of group relations. Groups compete. They manoeuvre. They organise for advantage. This governs families, clans, states, and subnational groups.
Make no mistake: Nigeria will not concede political or economic space to Ndigbo out of sentiments, regardless of how justified our grievance may be. Power is never gifted; it is organised and taken. The responsibility rests with us to build internal cohesion, cultivate strategic clarity, and undertake the difficult work of political organisation and alliance-building. Volume is not power. Impatience is not strategy. Disdain for institutional process is not influence. And a mythology of exceptionalism, untempered by discipline, is ultimately self-defeating.
This first part of this letter is not a manifesto. It offers no solutions and prescribes no remedies. It is a diagnosis. No people recover from a disease they refuse to name. And our deepest wound is not only that Nigeria marginalises us, but that we are yet to master the discipline of thinking strategically about power.
Part two will confront what must change.
Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor and author. His works include Black Grit, White Knuckles: The Philosophy of Black Renaissance and a fiction work titled The Velvet Court: Courtesan Chronicles. His latest works, Pray, Let the Shaman Die and Ma’am, I Do Not Come to You for Love, have just been released. He can be reached through: [email protected]
