“This BOOK OF LIES, intended for the INDOCTRINATION of Ibo children into a LIFE OF FALSEHOODS, was written by two Ibo people. It was approved by an agency of the Federal “One Nigeria” Government in the Education Ministry. And it was allowed to be published.

I bet it is already in circulation and being taught to their children. Nobody says nothing. Our Obas say nothing. Our Politicians, lawmakers and Governors say nothing.

“Yoruba parents whose kids are going to be hearing the stories from their Ibo peers and whose collective future is about to be mortgaged are saying nothing. Even Oòniòrìsà whose words the people are quoting extraneously has said nothing. Everywhere is quiet as the Ibo people are saying THEY OWN ILÉ-IFÉ AND BY EXTENSION THE WHOLE OF YORUBA LAND. You will think it is a joke. It is because you don’t know what ZIONISM is about. They don’t play. They know what they are doing”.

“Soon, your children who you are teaching liberal i-am-yoruba-but philosophy will soon join the Gbarebos and Davidos to propagate the story.

These people are hijacking the history of UGBO people in broad daylight and appropriating it as Ibo history.

This is exactly the way the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe started in Palestine. The companion piece titled ZIONISM IS TERRORISM. IT HEARS AND RESPECTS NO OTHER LANGUAGE BUT A BALANCE OF TERROR is a rehash of the earlier one above”

To these wild allegations, the federal ministry of education has adequately responded:

“The attention of the Federal Ministry of Education has been drawn to a petition titled ‘Petition to Defend Yoruba History from Ethnic Distortion in Nigerian Textbooks,’ submitted by the Concerned Citizens of Yoruba Origin and Supporters of Truth, through its National Chairman, Otunba Abayomi Odunowo,” .

The statement further said, “The Ministry wishes to clarify that the said textbook was not authored, commissioned, or approved by the Federal Ministry of Education. “It is not among the instructional materials approved for use in public basic education institutions across the country, and the Ministry is not in any way affiliated with the publication”.

The governorship election in Lagos in the general elections of 2023 brought to fore the dangerous heights the latent animosity between the Yoruba and Igbo has attained. Hitherto, those Yoruba who were liberal and cosmopolitan enough to vote for Peter Obi against the then presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in the prior presidential election, furiously repudiated their “detribalised” stance and branded the Labour party candidate, Gbadebo Rhodes Vivour, the the Igbo candidate. They came to this conviction on account of the fact that Gbadebo’s mother and wife are Igbo!

As the Director General of the Labour Party presidential campaign, it was my duty to monitor the elections. On the day of the governorship election, my driver, who had gone ahead of me to vote, rushed back to inform me that Igbo people were being barred from voting at the pain of being macheted. I hurried to the polling booth to verify the report. On getting there, my worst fears were confirmed. I saw some people cowering in poodle groups. I went over to them to hear their tales of sorrow.They had been brutalised and hounded like criminals.

When I added the momentary strange anti-igbo venom of some of my friends who had turned coat, the history of the latter part of 1966 resurfaced in my imagination. I had even been threatened when I interceded for the right of every Nigerian to vote. Tapping from the precolonial and amalgamation roots of disparate peoples comprising Nigeria, it does not take rocket science to project the evolution of Nigeria into near permanent disunity and discord. In tandem are the prevalent and pervasive conspiracy theories.

The problem with Nigeria and just about any other multi ethnic African country that were arbitrarily pooled together to form a state is that the inherent disunity was adopted and cultivated as colonial policy.The colonialists weaponised such fractiousness to ensure that the post-colonial states remained weak and subordinate to them. Let’s go down memory lane again.

“In administration, in land policy, in a dozen different fields of colonial government, the administration reinforced not the unity of the colony, but the differences between North and South”

“The colonial governor of the Northern region, Sir Theodore Adams, went as far as to say, in 1941, that the emirs considered the Northern provinces as a separate country and that enforced cooperation with the South would lead to a demand for ‘Pakistan”

“A frequently heard quip was that if all the Africans were to leave Nigeria, the Southern and Northern administrations could go to war”

‘Aided by his wife Lugard’s fabrications still colour Whitehall’s attitudes to Nigeria, which can be summed up as pale-skinned Moslem North good, black-skinned Christian South bad’

Following in the footsteps of their colonial masters, the Yoruba and the Igbo never run short in inventing bitter conspiracy theories against one another.

In contemporary times none fared worse than the internationally renowned scholar, Chinua Achebe in the predilection to demonise Awolowo/Yoruba. Shortly before he passed on, he said this of Awolowo “It is my impression that Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself and for his Yoruba people.

“Awolowo saw the dominant Igbo at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigeria-Biafra War – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams”.

“In the Biafran case, it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.”

‘At the other end of the bigoted exchange was the typical Yoruba position during the 2023 governorship election in Lagos state.”In the weeks leading up to the 2023 gubernatorial elections, candidate Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour who is part Yoruba (from his father’s side) and part Igbo (from his mother’s side) had anti-Igbo attacks directed at him. Though he has two ethnic backgrounds he was repeatedly questioned based on his Igbo ancestry and his wife’s Igbo identity’.

My brother, Bayo Onanuga, came out swinging with a below-the-belt sucker punch. “Let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics. Let there be no repeat in 2027. Lagos is like Anambra, Imo, any Nigerian state. It is not No Man’s Land, not Federal Capital Territory. It is Yoruba land. Mind your business”, bellowed the presidential spokesman.

The Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu, had set the ball rolling with the threat of throwing Igbos who were not prepared to vote for Yoruba candidates into the Atlantic Ocean. Then came the Tony and Ijeoma Duru discovery of how the Igbo were the original inhabitants of Ife. Being a discovery based on nothing more pea-brained than the mis pronouncement of the name Obàtálá Òsèèrèìgbó.

Anyone who is fluent in Yoruba language would readily attest Igbó as annotated above does not tally with the pronunciation of Ìgbò. In reference to the futility of behaviour like this, the Yoruba would say that what you went to search for in Sókótó is right inside the pocket of your trousers (Sòkòtò). So it is with this superfluous controversy. It is obvious that the Igbó in reference here is the neighbouring Ugbó community in the Ilaje area of Ondo state.

There must be something compelling about the Yoruba that makes other ethno nationalities want to seek validation by insinuating themselves into their history. There was the recent whooper of Farooq Kperogi claiming a northern heritage for the Yoruba with a series of false citations and dubious testimonies. There is the latter day historical revisionism of the identity of Oduduwa championed by the Oba of Benin.

It is noteworthy that this ‘new discovery’ somehow eluded the academic vigilance of Nigerian expert historians including Kenneth Dike, Ade Ajayi, Robin Law, Robin Horton, Akinjogbin, Akintoye, Osuntokun and Adiele Afigbo, who found no occasion to deem the thesis of ‘Igbo original ownership of Ife’ worthy of consideration. As Olomola said: “There is no book or research work that traced the history of Igbo to Ile-Ife. Some of their scholars claimed they are part of Jews that did not follow Israelites to the Promised Land.”

If there is no basis for the speculations of Tony and Ijeoma Duru, so is there no warrant for the virulent rejoinder of Yoruba netizens in the social media

To begin with, this narrative of Yoruba conquerors putting the Igbo to the run from their original home in Ife is not one the Ndigbo should be proud of. It is a sad commentary on their martial prowess. It is akin to trading places with the red Indians in their rout and displacement by the Gringos (white Americans) or how the British/ Dutch conquerors and settlers supplanted the black Africans in South Africa.

It is also very unlikely that this ethnic identification, Igbo, have survived down the ages from antiquity with its integrity intact. There was no ethnic formation, known by that name until two centuries ago. In the same manner, it is also quite improbable that the Oduduwa era society would have understood and perceived themselves as Yoruba. Obaro Ikime shed further light on this. “It is a fact of our history that these ethnic groups( Yoruba, igbo, Hausa, Edo, fulani, idoma…) did not exist as such in pre colonial Nigeria. What did exist were many groups within each of today’s ethnic groups, each of which was independent of one another and had its specific interests to protect”. 

Nearer home is the somewhat akin situation of how the Fulani supplanted the Yoruba in Ilorin. Should the Yoruba take pride and seek validation in this historically humiliating encounter?. At any rate if we adopt the creation day myth of history that Ife is the cradle of mankind including the Igbo, doesn’t this lend authenticity to the desire of the Igbo to have emanated from Ife since all of mankind is native to Ife!

The most notable scholarly work on the subject of inter ethnic migration between the Yoruba and Igbo communities was this observation by Kenneth Dike

“In Yorubaland, incessant strife and related insecurity of tribal states was principally fomented by slave raiding.The ensuing massive population dislocations and dispersal resulted in the phenomenon of the abnormally high population density of the Eastern Nigeria forest belt. Professor Kenneth Dike attributed this phenomenon, in part, to an influx of people from the West and the North, seeking to escape the raids of slave chieftains in the more open country”.