Yesterday, was dedicated to first of five distinguishing things between Nehemiah’s timeless way for reconstructing a broken but beloved homeland and the death-dishing methods of the hordes of ethnicpreneurs and politicspreneurs who have set their sight on notoriety and ill-gotten wealth, self-preservation from deserved justice or monthly amnesty allowance leveraging the Ndi-Igbo name or any segment of its history: especially the 1966 – 1970 period encapsulated in the Biafra mantra.

“Nehemiah knew and embraced his surname and history” with integrity and without embellishment, was first on the queue. In fact the Book opened with the declaration: “The words of Nehemiah son of Hecaliah”.

In the seeming pedestrian statement – devoid of bombast – priceless personal integrity oozed. In it we find a healthy sense of history and personhood connected to the idea of an ascertainable even if historically unremarkable father.

Unlike all the eccentric demagogues, ethnicpreneurs and radio revolutionaries making a grab for public notoriety using ‘Ndi-Igbo’ and ‘Biafra’, the simplicity of the man Nehemiah, his resort to established mode of identity that would have resonated with decent and intelligent people of his generation helped secure for him a legal tender for negotiating the pressing challenge of his time: rebuilding a dilapidated homeland.

The challenge he faced was not unlike what faces the location and stakeholders known as Ndi-Igbo today.

The only thing largely significant in its pathetic diminishing quotient is the constant recourse to methods that have failed over and over again while neglecting timeless methods exemplified by Nehemiah and given to all mankind everywhere for free. Which brings us to the second Nehemiah principle:

2. Capacity to Care about a Sad or Bad Situation in the Homeland with Integrity.

“In the month of Kislev, in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, Hanani one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem. They also said to me, Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The walls of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burnt with fire. When I heard these things, I sat down and wept” [Nehemiah 1: 2 – 4].

Here was a man who kept diary on the present to salt the far and distant past with perspective arising from the no less important recent past. He was CLEARLY INTERESTED in the present time, location, and identities.

Unlike Biafra’s latest promoters, (especially the MASSOB and IPOB ilk who use NOW, TODAY and their living followers as pawns, as dispensable and anonymous fodders in their quest to keep wet the bloody shrine they have set up to a corner of history – 1966 – 1970 – so as to promote their own mindless high-priesthood of it), Nehemiah paid attention.

To the present. Time. Place. People – down to their names and their capacity for intelligent engagement as to what the state of the homeland is. His engagement of the state of the homeland was not so much about redeeming past glories as it is to uplift the condition of the people in the homeland who he clearly cared about.

It is therefore not surprising that such a man could attract persons of integrity resident in the homeland who could equally bring communications with integrity. Eagles after all roll with eagles. It is important. Because? Those men could have brought a report whose end would not be a sober and mourning Nehemiah motivated to shift his intervention efforts forward.

They could have brought finger pointing reports that could have turned Nehemiah into angry IPOB-Kanu inciting enmity and hatred against his already overburdened kith and kin from their neighbours round about.

Or ones that could have turned him into MASSOB’s Uwazuruike taking economically challenged young and aged people away from their pittance paying enterprises as members of a rag-tag army fighting to build a fortress with cobweb bricks. If there is one thing everyone can agree on concerning the various Biafra-connected movements and other Ndi-Igbo ethnicpreneurial platforms like Oha-na-Eze Ndi-Igbo, it is this: they all are products of highly dubious, selective or self-serving intelligence bases.

The reason is not far-fetched. They are currently not being led by men of unquestioned integrity who know how to put the question as to solicit people-uplifting intelligence with integrity no matter how sad it may appear on the surface. Nehemiah was able to put forward the tough questions.

If a tough-question prospecting competition was set up concerning the upliftment of Ndi-Igbo in Nigeria, there can be very little doubts that all the preoccupations of all the loud groups masquerading as its voices would be put out of business or shown for what they are: misplaced or misguided.

A tough but sincere inquest on the Ndi-Igbo situation in the last 16 years would throw up enough people centric questions that would keep every relevant stakeholder of Ndi-Igbo so busy mourning and thinking of what to do urgently than ‘seceding’ or ‘abusing’ the ‘north’ or other ‘ethnic groups’ in Nigeria. It is that urgent – and the labourers too few.

Why has Abia State produced successively 2 term governors who have on each occasion anointed their successor and yet the State is one of the worst governed in all of Africa –always in perennial crisis from record breaking crime waves, to total failure of infrastructure and even inability to do basics: like pay salary of civil servants without borrowing?

What manner of political stability produces such a chaotic political unit developmentally? How come Ebonyi and Enugu having equally enjoyed such surface level political stability produced little but a certain institutionalized passivity in the engagement of development in those places?

Two States with massive potentials: two States with massive need to educate its people; two States that could build bespoke economic hubs known for specific things globally: why are they content to just be – nothing and let the majority of their people rot? Anambra? With its significant high level literacy quotient (at least, in the recent past)?

Why is it the land of eccentric political leadership? Whether bankers, doctors, politicians: why has it not been able to produce one level headed Governor who would just be content to do the only job really worth doing: uplifting the lives of the people in the State? Imo State, currently ruled by the Governor who literally treats governance as game: a melodramatic enterprise? Where “My People My People” expects the echo of “My Governor My Governor” in 2015.

Why is the Ndi-Igbo contingent at the National assembly aligned on the side set on frustrating governance for the whole nation till 2019? The present wasted – so that the future that cannot be hurried may come and reward the wasters?

Why is there no inter-state tertiary education network in the so-called South East states: centers where the teeming but annually frustrated mass of young people connected to Ndi-Igbo can receive qualitative education complete with a civics curriculum incorporating Igbo language or history of Igbo people as a General Studies course?

Why has, since Oha-na-Ndi-Igbo seized for itself the platform of mouthpiece for the Ndi-Igbo has the States connected to the group regressed in every relevant developmental indices: social infrastructure, healthcare, education, trade and investment, good governance and worst of all: recognizable leadership personalities who command respect at home and abroad?

Why has the part of Nigeria whose ancestors were for the most part renown for republican tenets in the way they organised themselves socio-politically become this enclave of teensy-weensy petty monarchs numbering in their thousands at home (ancestral or national), abroad and in radio stations?

How did the creation of ‘autonomous communities’ each with its own monarch set up for no seeming purpose than the daily devising of eccentric ‘royal’ garbs, titles, entitlements, ceremonies, illegal and illegitimate toll-gates, injustice and of course – election rigging centers, everything contrary to republicanism?

How did the part of the country that should have easily been struggling with the envious charge of unfair but strategic advantages in harnessing and promoting the Republican designation of Nigeria, at least, constitutionally and internationally become this unrecognisable spectacle hobbled by the poisons of multitudes of eccentric pseudo monarchs aping what they are not and can never be?

There are a million and one genuine, people-uplifting and pressing questions flowing from Igboland which render vile and heartless all the placebo-questions being asked and answered by the Biafrapreneurs and Ndi-Igbopreneurs making a nuisance of themselves all over the place.

Why is genuine election hard to deliver in any part of Igboland in spite of the clear need for change? Why is an Igboman content to sit as an illegitimate Deputy President of the Senate of the Federal Republic when honour bids him resign and go spend time developing bills and cultivating development partnership that could help uplift the people of Ndi-igbo? Why…?

“They also said to me, Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The walls of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burnt with fire. When I heard these things, I sat down and wept.”

That’s the reason. Even the stoniest of hearts will cry when they come face to face with the real plight – the trouble and disgrace in Igboland; it’s broken down walls and burning gates.

That’s why playing the ostrich is in vogue: anything but the real thing. Because these men have no Nehemiah heart. It is the way of the coward and the weak who are not ready to confront the real giants in battle and have them pose the challenge: “Step up if you are capable of a life of personal sacrifice for the upliftment of others playing and overcoming by legitimate principles and norms.“

“Step up if you care. If you are man enough to care enough.”

Care, for the present, as the steward or curator of the past and birth-mother of the future: that’s not for these men who have convinced themselves that caring for the people in the present is not worth their pursuit: it is the fossilized causes in the Museum of history for them. And never, shall the twain meet.

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Sam Eleanya, is Executive Director/Managing Editor of Tree & Trees JusticeMedia, Facilitators of LawNigeria.com, The Nigerian Constitution Hub, Children and Women Law Project, Standards & Enterprise Development Center and Obi-na-Obi Ndi-Igbo Foundation. He is also the Author of We, The Young People (Constitution of Nigeria Translated) and Preambles Before The Preamble (Collection of Poems). You may reach him at [email protected].