Keep Drinking Gin on an Empty Stomach: A Love Letter to IPOB

 

There is a saying in Argentina that power is like drinking gin on an empty stomach. You feel dizzy. You get drunk. You lose your balance and you end up hurting yourself and those around you. A practical demonstration of this could be seen on the trails of devastation and ruins in Northeastern Nigeria after Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram, and his followers got drunk and dizzy from drinking gin on an empty stomach.

 

The same scenario is currently playing out in my backyard and I can’t help but write this love letter to my Supreme Leader and IPOB brothers that have been drinking gin on empty stomachs since Goodluck Jonathan lost the 2015 election.

 

As I watched my brothers on social media, I observed that majority of IPOB supporters are die-hard surrogates of GEJ. It is thus okay to mock and challenge the federal government for declaring IPOB a terrorist group because when the present government was in opposition they opposed your hero GEJ for doing it to Boko Haram. Your reasoning: if Boko Haram should be used to bring down the government of GEJ, you should be allowed to use IPOB to bring down Buhari’s government. Fair enough, so, I feel you my brothers.

 

But, the battle for 2019 cannot be won by the same strategy that led to the downfall of PDP in 2015. 2015 belongs to yesterday. So, for openly supporting your beloved IPOB, I suspect that most you are still drinking gin on an empty stomach long after your hero Goodluck Jonathan lost the 2015 election. My brothers, it is a brand new day and we should stop saluting ourselves with “welcome to yesterday.”

 

Because you have drunk on an empty stomach, you feel dizzy, you call your governors cowards and prefer to listen to PDP political lepers like Femi Fani-Kayode, Reno Omokri, and Fayose. When you get drunk, you hug the three political lepers that love us more than our governors. When they taunt you with “see what Nigerian military are doing to Igbos,” you surge forward shouting “nzogbu nzogbu, enyi mba enyi” like mugs to be killed by crude Nigerian soldiers.

 

We all condemn the murderous actions of the soldiers as uncivil and unconstitutional. We cry to Amnesty International to document the crimes of Nigerian soldiers, just like they did in Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Yemen. But whose sons and daughters are being killed?

 

As we kept drinking on an empty stomach, we forgot that it was neither Lai Mohammed’s South-West nor Buhari’s North-West, nor Saraki’s North-Central, nor GEJ’s South-South that faced the scars of war and subsequent famine and devastation in the North-East. Because our reasoning is unbalanced, we forget that both IPOB and Nigerian military will unleash devastation and atrocities on us and our people just like what happened in the North-East.

 

You expressed love for your articulate and intelligent Supreme Leader! His head got swollen. After drinking gin on an empty stomach, he became dizzy and declared that he will go to Abuja and return with the head of the man parading himself as the President of the “zoo”. Because his followers and sympathizers are drunk themselves, they believed him. After all, he is a Jewish messiah sent by god to save his people from slavery.

 

So, he assembled the unemployed youths in the villages around Umuahia and boasted that he will trample on an elephant when katakata starts at the market square. But when trouble started, it appears that my Supreme Leader chickened out and left the small boys to die while protecting him.

 

I am no longer troubled that some of us who should know better are still drinking gin on an empty stomach and getting dizzy. What is troubling to me is that instead of going to bed, they are still picking up their phones and sharing the pictures of our brothers that were killed by crude Nigerian soldiers. Because they are drunk and dizzy, they forgot that the dead deserve some respect. You forgot that these youths that were brainwashed have parents and wives.

 

For my brothers, the intellectuals, who are still defending my Supreme Leader and faulting the federal government and Southeast Governors for banning IPOB, I love you. It seems that you guys are scared that your beloved channel for settling your score with PMB is being shut down.  E-yaah. Don’t worry; Facebook and WhatsApp are still there for propagating truth, lies and fake news.

 

I love you all and your lies. If you are not spreading lies on Pete Edochie endorsing the boycott of the Anambra State Election, you are spreading lies that Chimamanda Adichie has endorsed the Biafran cause. Just recently, one of the PDP political lepers FKK led you to spread the lie about Mama Taraba implicating APC and El-Rufai in the kidnap of the Chibok girls.

 

I have sometimes wondered why these IPOB-GEJ surrogates will not stop revisiting that tragedy that led to his ultimate downfall in the 2015 election. For some reason, it seems like my IPOB brothers badly need the confirmation that the APC and the north conspired to bring down their dear hero Jonathan.

 

As we continue to search for the way forward for Ndigbo in Nigeria, just remember that the realities we are facing in Nigeria today cannot be resolved simply by protesting in front of the United Nations building in New York. Sharing clips of one idiot from Turkey as a show of foreign support is a deceit. One million petitions on Change.org will not smoothen our relationship with even the Ikwere and Ijaw people of the Niger Delta. Making empty noise on social media or sharing the gory pictures of our dead brothers cannot help the repositioning of the Igbo nation in Nigeria that we urgently need.

 

I love you all, my IPOB brothers, because it feels right in continuously hurting ourselves. Keep punching yourself in the face until you see the bruise. Keep scratching your skin with your nails until you see blood. But please, don’t stop. Your addiction to imaginary misery and drama, though a toxic behavior and gloomy demeanor reinforce our story that “they hate us.”

 

I love my Igbo brothers who are shamefully supporting My Supreme Leader because their hero Goodluck Jonathan lost the 2015 election. Though you represent this Igbo generation stuck in a pothole of miserable thinking, I still love you. Keep drinking gin on an empty stomach as you spin, unable to move like tires clenched in a 2015 mud. Keep sucking up oxygen and expelling all the positive energies around us as we make ourselves look like suckers to the rest of the ethnic groups in Nigeria.

 

I already know that you hate Buhari. You are free to do that, but must you also destroy yourself just to prove to the world that Buhari hates us? The world is not paying attention and no “Super Power” is coming soon to “give” us an independent State of Biafra.

 

What we need is wisdom - political and economic wisdom. Most importantly, we should fear the destruction we are capable of inflicting on ourselves

 

I love you all!

 

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By: Churchill Okonkwo. E-mail [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @churchillnnobi.