The Governor of Plateau State, Caleb Muftwang, recently tendered a heartfelt apology to the Igbo ethnic nationality in Plateau State for the role the state played during the civil war.
Even though the war ended 56 years ago and the Igbo have since moved on from their monumental losses, both human and material, they have managed to seamlessly reintegrate themselves into every part of the country and into all its socioeconomic and political sectors.
For 56 years, Ndigbo have largely lived peacefully with their hosts in different parts of the country without starting any skirmish, and this includes Plateau State. Many might have wondered why Ndigbo chose to return to these territories so soon and have remained for so long without an iota of bitterness towards those who led the war against them. The reason is simple! Ndigbo do not dwell on adversities. They move on quickly from the ashes of life and turn adversity to prosperity. They make everywhere home without harbouring resentment for their hosts or guests irrespective of the unpleasant past. They raise families there, establish businesses, and contribute without reservation to the development of the area.
However, a gang from among those on whose side the great people of Plateau fought the Igbo in the civil war have been relentlessly raiding the Plateau, sacking whole communities and taking over ancestral lands belonging to their hosts, murdering fathers, sexually assaulting mothers and daughters, ripping open pregnancies and decapitating babies, all and more with reckless abandon. Despite all these, it is a harmless apology by Muftwang that Barr Solomon Dalung chooses to criticise. In his riposte to the governor’s apology, he lamented the death of Col. James Pam in the civil war of 56 years ago but chooses to ignore the deaths of thousands of James Pams currently going on on the Plateau and perpetrated by a band that has proven to be implacable. A band that steals, kills and destroys, boasts about it and spits on the graves of the innocent ones by threatening to unleash more mayhem, does not stop at that but goes ahead to carry out the threats, every turn of bloodletting more daring and bloodier than the previous. That is the band of terrorists on whose behalf Dalung is angry about an innocuous apology!
Such a sad time for the great people of Plateau State!
The truth is that a majority of not just the people of Plateau, but the Middle Belt generally, share the same sentiments with Governor Caleb Muftwang. Even though I am Igbo, I, just like several other Igbo activists and writers, belong to several WhatsApp groups of Middle Belters. And that is because they see us more as brothers who stand by them and openly condemn the repeated raids on the Plateau and the Middle Belt at a time when others, including some indigenes like Dalung, grovel on the floor before their traducers and make excuses for them.
In my article titled “Plateau Killings: Femi Adesina and other Presidential Morticians,” published in Daily Post on June 29, 2018 (https://dailypost.ng/2018/06/29/jude-ndukwe-plateau-killings-femi-adesina-presidential-morticians/), I, like several other Igbo writers and activists, stood up for the people of Plateau in particular and the Middle Belt region in general, and condemned another round of mindless blood-spilling escapade carried out on the Plateau by the usual suspects. At the risk of being hounded, I did not spare the Buhari administration for not only looking the other way while our brothers and sisters were mowed down in cold blood and their ancestral lands ransacked and taken over, but also for making excuses and reducing the tragedy in Plateau to a game of numbers.
It was the same thing when in my earlier article of March 15, 2016 titled, “Agatu Massacre, the Police and the Tragedy of a Peace Talk,” published in Premium Times (https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2016/03/15/171751/?tztc=1). I had upbraided the police for choosing to embark on an ineffective “peace talk” with the bandits that kept raiding Benue State instead of going after them to bring them to justice.
The question is, where were the likes of Solomon Dalung then? Why was their voice silent? Why did he not stand up for his people? Where was his condemnation of the relentless attacks against his own people whom he now pretends to love so much that a simple apology riles him so greatly?
He claims that the civil war that ended 56 years ago killed two of his uncles and robbed him of his education, but to the glory of God, today he is a lawyer. Why is he quiet about today’s pogroms on the Plateau? Why is he not condemning those who have embarked on killing sprees that have killed thousands of uncles and robbed thousands more children of their future? Why is he stuck condemning a settled past while ignoring a present danger? Oh, I almost forgot, he even served in the cabinet of a government that failed abysmally to protect his people of the Plateau. There was no outrage. There was no resignation. He served a government that not only excused the killings but even advised people of the Middle Belt to give up their ancestral lands to the marauders for peace to reign. That was the government Dalung cheerily served under. He looked on with the helplessness of a slave and the subservience of a captured mind! He did not give ultimatums then nor did he write long epistles, all because it served his selfish political interests.
And that is what all the attack on Governor Muftwang is all about. Selfish political interests. Dalung is playing politics with history and the lives of the people because of politics. Just like he held tight to office during Buhari’s era despite the killings back home and the government’s failure to address the matter, he wants to make a political capital off the back of the people’s sufferings and divert attention from those who have turned Plateau into a river of blood.
Fortunately, Dalung and his co-travellers are in the minority on this issue. Nearly everybody in all the Middle Belt groups I belong to aligns fully, completely and totally with the action of Governor Caleb Muftwang while criticising the reaction of Barr. Solomon Dalung, describing it as selfish, a betrayal of his people and an unconscionable stand that does not reflect the true feelings of the masses.
While he sounded so brash at the Governor and gave him an ultimatum, Dalung went soft on the brigands and plunderers regularly raiding the people of Plateau without giving them an ultimatum. He is lucky that Muftwang is a peace-loving leader who seeks harmonious living among all the people of Plateau, including his vitriolic political opponents. If not, such an ill-advised ultimatum that is nothing but a grandiose proclamation emblematic of Barr. Solomon Dalung’s self-ridicule, would not have gone unanswered. But he can take Muftwang for a ride because the governor has proven to be a gentleman, a true democrat with a large heart and the capacity to accommodate criticism no matter how unreasonable, subjective and acerbic.
Let me end this piece by saying that it is only a belligerent and bellicose person that gets riled by apologies meant to cement bonds and further harmonious living among the people. Plateau State does not need such a person around the corridors of power. Muftwang remains Plateau’s best option.
Jude Ndukwe sent this piece from Abuja and can be reached at stjudendukwe@gmail.com
