Why Are Igbos Kidnapping Other Igbos For Ransom Money? Igbos
This afternoon (February 15, 2011) I got some disturbing news from home (Nigeria). The daughter of my cousin (Fabian) was kidnapped. The young woman is a recent university graduate planning to go to law school. She was working for one of the contenders in the upcoming elections in Nigeria. Apparently, she and a fellow worker had disembarked from a plane at Imo state Airport and took a cab to Owerri. When they got to their gated compound they did not have the key to get in and no one was home to let them in. They stood by the gate trying to figure out a way to get into the house when some Igbo hoodlums came along and kidnapped them. The kidnappers demanded a million naira which, apparently, was paid and they were released.
Apparently, Igboland now is for thugs to kidnap folks, demand ransom money and if paid they release them, if not they may do with them as they wish (if the victims are women they are raped or worse). I listened to the phone call narrating what is happening in our part of the world and could not believe what I was hearing but there it was happening in the land.
Being me I decided to assuage my anger by trying to understand why this kidnapping phenomenon is going on in our land. Why are Igbos now kidnapping their fellow Igbos for money? This paper will try to understand this phenomenon in as disinterested and dispassionate a manner as is humanly possible. What I am going to say may not sit well with so-called Igbo nationalists who see nothing wrong with Igbos but always see things wrong with non-Igbo Nigerians, who (other Nigerians), incidentally, are less involved in this kidnapping business (wealthy Igbos these days seek refuge from their own Igbo kidnappers by living in other parts of Nigeria, keeping their families there, so much for pride in Igboness). Let them be angry at me if they want; the course of truth demands that courageous persons state the truth as they see it and may God help them. A caveat, however, is in order. Much of what I am about to say is said in general statements. It would seem to stereotype Igbos. Clearly, not all Igbos engage in kidnapping or are evil. Statistically, deviancy from the norm seldom exceeds five percent in most human populations. I regret to make general statements but when a phenomenon is rampant it is a useful literary device to talk about it as if it affects every person. The reader therefore must know that there are exceptions to everything I said about Igbos.
I have observed Igbos in every which way a social scientist could observe a group of human beings. This is how I see them, and how I see them has a bearing on this current spate of kidnapping of their own people for money.
I see Igbos as wildly individualistic. That is correct; they are wild individualists! I say wild because their individualism does not seem to recognise the need to put the fruits of individualism to serving social good. Each Igbo that I see is out for himself. He works very hard to amass wealth. He is ready to sell his mother for money or sell his brothers into slavery if in so doing he seems rich in his eyes and the eyes of his Igbo compatriots. The Igbo is unscrupulous in the way he seeks wealth; he is very unprincipled and opportunistic in pursuit of money, fame and power.
The Igbo works for himself and finds it very difficult to work with other persons or for the collectivity. In business he is at his best in sole proprietorship and finds it difficult to have partners, let alone forming corporations. We all know the disadvantages of sole proprietorships. If you made the mistake of forming partnerships with Igbos the chances are that they would seek ways to take the business from you or liquidate it from stealing from it. The Igbo finds it very easy to rip off his partners for he does not identify with them; he wants to take from them but not give to them.
The Igbo is totally self-centered and thinks mostly about his self-interests and the interest of his immediate family members but seldom about other persons’ interests; his ego is not expanded enough to include the larger social interest. He certainly does not love his fellow Igbos for action speaks louder than words: if he loved them would he be kidnapping them for money?
In character/personality the typical Igbo is a narcissist; he fancies himself important and admires his image in the mirror (or pool of water until like the proverbial narcissist he falls into it and drowns). He fancies that he is so good that other people ought to admire him; he actually believes that other Nigerians admire him (and unbeknown to him they detest him!).
The typical Igbo has delusion of importance that in many cases borders on delusion disorder (paranoia). Delusion of grandeur, delusion of persecution, delusion of jealousy (they frequently attack their wives from jealous rages), delusion of erotomania (belief that important persons like them are in love with them) and somatic delusion (belief in false somatic illness). I must say that I have seldom seen Igbos that did not exhibit some aspects of paranoia and or narcissism. Last week I wrote about how some Igbo ministers exhibit their delusion of grandeur by claiming to be God!
The Igbo works very hard trying to seem wealthy; have no doubt about it, he is very industrious. In the process of seeking wealth he does not mind using other people and discarding them after using them. This is typical narcissistic personality behaviour: use people to attain your goals and objectives and when they are no longer useful to you, you discard them like pieces of scrap iron, toss them into the garbage can.
Igbos do not mind stealing if doing so would give them the money to masquerade around as very important persons. Wherever criminality is going on Igbos tend to dominate. A preponderance of Nigeria’s famed 419 criminals scamming Westerners are Igbos. These people would do anything for money, no question asked: they seem to have no conscience of what is good or bad. Apparently, their psyches are still savage and has not been civilised and made caring for other people by one of the universal religions. Christianity is only about 150 years in Igbo land and that is not long enough to have thoroughly socialised them to love and care for their fellow human beings. Hopefully, in a few more hundred years of exposure to Christianity and its gospel of agape love, caring for other persons, Igbos would gradually give up their irritating self-centeredness and begin caring for all people and working for public good, in the present they are not yet there and one would be deceiving one’s self to think that they would not screw one up if they could get away with it.
They do not exhibit sense of guilt or remorse from stealing; they do have shame feeling for shame is a less mature affect, it is sign of other dependency; shame is rooted in belief that one did not measure up to social expectations hence is not liked by other persons. Guilt, on the other hand, is more mature for it is rooted in self-defined moral standards that if one does not live up to them one feels bad regardless of whether other people know or not know what one did wrong. The lack of guilt feeling indicates presence of anti-social personality disorder, a.k.a. sociopath and in extreme cases psychopath.
Igbos seldom love and care for other people. What they are most likely to do is put other persons down through their famous imanjakiri and Iko Okwu habit. They sit around seeking ways to say derogatory things about other persons, especially about those who call their bluff (they will no doubt say nasty things about me from reading this paper).They are very boastful and childishly arrogant; they claim to be superior to every person on sight when maturity teaches us to be humble for no matter how much one knows one does not know even one percent of what is knowable; Western science knows a lot but what it knows so far is less than one percent of what is knowable hence the need for humility. The Igbo national character seems to be looking down on non-Igbos and those Igbos who call attention to their untoward behaviors. These people apparently derive sadistic pleasure from saying awful things about other persons.
Historically certain Igbo clans (Abriba, Abam, and Ngwa, etc.) roamed around Igbo land capturing their fellow Igbos and selling them into slavery. During the Trans-Atlantic Slavery Trade era (1500-1900) a certain Igbo clan, the Aro, arranged with Efiks (at Calabar) to sell Igbos to them and the latter sold those Igbos to white slavers parked at the Atlantic coast and from there it was onwards to the Americas. The Aro were evil beyond belief; these people bastardised religion and transformed it into a means of kidnapping their fellow Igbos for sale. They convinced Igbos to bring their squabbles to them for settlement and those found guilty were passed through the famous underground tunnel at Arochukwu and were said to have been taken by the gods in lieu of punishment. Actually, at the other end of the tunnel were enslavers who took the unfortunate persons and sold them to Efik folk and the latter sold them to white folks.
History would not be studied if men were still not making the mistakes of their ancestors. In today’s Nigeria Igbos and other Nigerians are still doing what their slaving ancestors did. Today, Igbo politicians would take the money given to them by the Federal Government to be spent on development projects in Igbo land and pocket it. They buy governorship positions because from them they enrich themselves. Igbo politicians are nothing but thugs and we all know it. There is not one single political leader in today’s Alaigbo, what we have are criminals in politics. These people’s hearts are made of stone and they could care less for their people’s suffering. And it does not stop with politicians. Igbo professionals, such as doctors, are there to make money. If you do not have money they would not treat you, the shoddy treatment they offer, that is. These people have the devil may care attitude towards their fellow human being (if you have money to seek better treatment, of course, you would not go to Igbo professionals, you go to the white man for he is more likely to care for you!).
Igbo so-called big men are in office for themselves and for their families and do not care for their fellow Igbos. It is now time to call a thief a thief, even if he is Igbo; no more euphemism and kid gloved treatment of Igbo thieves while yelling about Nigerian thieves; a thief is a thief, Igbo or Nigerian. It is no longer kosher for Igbos to see their leaders go to Nigeria and obtain money on their behalf and misappropriate it and then turn around and urge them to blame other Nigerians for the lack of development in Alaigbo. It is time folks wised up and stopped being gullible simpletons that anti-social Igbo leaders manipulate by urging them to blame Nigerians while they appropriate money that the Nigerian state gave to them for the development of Igboland.
•This article, according to the author, traces the current spate of kidnapping and other anti-social behaviors in Igbo land to what it calls warped Igbo character and pathological Igbo society; it says that Igbos have wild individualism that seeks individual achievement without caring for the larger society, leaving all to fend for themselves and the ignored youth resorting to criminal behaviors. It says that Igbo land is approaching Somalia where law and order broke down and that unless something is done and done soon that Igbo land will become Somalia, with no law and order, with chaos and pillage the order of the day and Igbo life become nasty, brutish and short.
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