![]() Every year, the Indian government organises Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Expatriate Indians’ Day), an annual jamboree of Diaspora Indians, which is also used to attract expatriate investment. The Indian model may be instructive here. All this empty media hype won’t go anywhere. Who says Igbos in other parts of Nigeria (and the world) can’t do the same for Igboland?īut first, the governors of the five South-East states must work consciously and painstakingly to woo rich Igbo Diaspora back to Igboland. In 2012 alone, it is estimated that remittances from Nigerians in Diaspora into the Nigerian economy are in excess of N3 trillion. Nigerians in other parts of the world are also known to do the same. We can take a cue from the fact that there are many foreigners living and doing business in Nigeria who make huge profits here and repatriate their profits to support the economies of their home countries. I often imagine what Igboland would be if just a quarter of Igbo investments in Lagos alone is brought back to Igboland! It may not be economically viable at first, but it will be, over time, and it’s something worth doing, however you look at it. What can be done for now is for the Igbos to begin to consider taking part of their investments home. Land hunger was part of the reasons the people emigrated out of their traditional homeland in the first place. Of course, Igboland cannot even contain all the Igbo people were they to suddenly return home. That can’t and won’t happen – not even for those Igbos living in the flashpoints of northern Nigeria. The Igbos have never looked back ever since not even the events of 1966-70 could hold them back.Īs it is, it’s obvious, given their stakes in their various host communities in other parts of Nigeria, that the Igbos cannot possibly return home en masse – permanently. Harrison Church did assert that the “Ibo are found in temporary work all over Nigeria, and some 20,000 are employed in Fernando Po”. Writing as early as 1957 in West Africa: A Study of the Environment and Man’s Use of It, R. It’ll sound unnecessarily repetitive to restate the oft echoed sentiment that wherever you go and don’t find an Igbo person, then that place must be uninhabitable. ![]() It’s not our portion (permit me to go Pentecostal just this once), but supposing, just supposing, considering the vagaries of our daily existence in this hole of a country, something happens to Nigeria right now? Sorry to say, but given the unquantifiable loss the Igbos have suffered, in man and material, in riots across Nigeria since 1953, it would be most tragic if, this time around, the Igbos are caught napping, with all their eggs in one wrecked basket. To re-echo the optimism of many a Nigerian leader, this country won’t break up – and nobody prays it does. But that did not seem to have lasted for long before they reverted to their pre-war ways. The Igbos learnt to take part of their wealth to their native land – in the form of community development projects through the town unions, as well as big mansions. That sad experience brought about a new thinking – aku ruo ulo (literally, let the wealth be felt at home). Reason: they had no homes in their homeland. Many of them who had lived in fine mansions in the cities where they had established themselves prior to the war returned home as refugees to squat in mud houses with their relatives in the villages. There is a sense in which one can argue that the civil war experience – particularly the ‘abandoned property’ saga – did inculcate some sense of responsibility into the Igbos. Igbo people are all over the place contributing to socio-economic development while Igboland remains grossly underdeveloped. The bottom line is this: huge Igbo investments are scattered in all parts of Nigeria with the exception of Igboland. I have amply dwelt on that in an earlier article “Are Igbos suffering from collective amnesia?” which is available online. I do not wish to return in detail to the various ways the Igbos have exhibited their collective amnesia since the civil war ended. But would he have envisaged that decades later, the Igbos would, unfortunately, themselves relapse into amnesia, forgetting totally the hard lessons of that brutal war? I doubt so. When, in the immediate post-Nigeria/Biafra Civil War years, Ukpabi Asika, then administrator of East Central State, told his fellow Igbos that “amnesty does not mean amnesia”, he meant to remind them that though the victorious Federal Government (or the rest of Nigeria, if you like) may have forgiven them, it certainly hasn’t forgotten – and it may never forget.
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