An Open letter to Abavo People
My dear brothers and sisters,
I feel highly constrained but with an obsessive compulsive inspiration laden with a deep sense of patriotism for Abavo to write this piece.
I do not need to remind you of the story most of us already know very well and can recite with so much ease even when woken from the deepest slumber, about Abavo, the town we all, hopefully love so much.
Twenty-one years ago, the course of Abavo�s history and destiny was altered when to the bewilderment of the Abavo people, a group of self-serving Abavians injected a devastating legitimacy controversy into the Abavo Royalty in what can be described as the worst brazen assault on the tradition of the Abavo people, especially with reference to the succession pathway of ascension to the headship of the monarchy.
The reason they gave then for denying a legitimate successor who was born within wedlock access to the throne was that his mother was not an Abavo woman and that they needed a full blooded Abavo King in the saddle. To me and possibly a significant number of Abavo people who watched helplessly while the coup d��tat played out, that action was not only discriminatory but an arrogant definition of travesty of justice.
Was that not stupid? What is full blooded Abavians?
So does that mean that my own children born by a Nigerian-American of Igbo extraction are not full blooded Abavians? Those people who concocted that fraud by foisting illegitimacy on the Abavo in 1991 acted without a vision for Abavo and successfully plunged the community into the leadership anarchy that has just gotten worse.
Ok. They had their way. But what do we have today? Is this one a full blooded Abavians? You tell us!
I have never known the Abavo people to be discriminatory or selectively discriminatory to that extent in my entire life but once that precedence had been set, we were supposed to be following it whenever we encounter such a logjam.
This is a nightmare and moral albatross that the Abavo people must address now or will forever remain in this Royal quandary and its attendant odious implications on the future of Abavo and the Abavo people.
Those who live in glass houses must not throw stone.
That ridiculous, obnoxious, odious, despicable and deplorable action by a few powerful individuals then, effectively derailed the Abavo succession plan that has worked very well for the over one thousand years of Abavo�s existence as a Kingdom, setting off a chain of catastrophic reactions; spiritually, culturally, politically, economically and environmentally, putting the Abavo people in jeopardy and making Abavo more vulnerable than ever before in its entire history.
It is interesting to note that the new monarchy did nothing to prove beyond reasonable doubts that they were poised against all odds and expectations of the visibly disturbed Abavo people, to take Abavo to new heights just as the legendary "Askia the Great" of the Old Songhai Empire did when he seized power from the ruling monarchy, making Songhai empire one of the greatest pre-colonial empires in African history.
Instead, they embarked on a serial plundering and looting of Abavo resources at the detriment of the Abavo people who mostly became mentally emasculated for fear of real or potential physical violence actively perpetrated by the ruler and a combined alien mercenary terrorist force with religious and tribal connotations respectively, drawn from Eastern and Northern Nigeria and which has taken over the Abavo Royal Palace, to the exclusion of and against the tradition and norms of the Abavo people. This killer squad now denies legitimate Abavo citizens, including some vocal members of the Royal ancestry, access to the same Royal Palace where they were born and raised. Is it not tragic to be denied access to one�s place of birth by an alien or a foreigner to Abavo?
What is the new Abavo monarchy trying to prove to the Abavo people? So far, they have proved beyond doubts that they anti-Abavo and against the development and progress of Abavo in all ramifications ranging from extortions of market women at the Abavo market to granting autonomy to a federating part of Abavo for the sake of money that would be made from Pan Ocean Oil company. Abavo is currently under siege of a brute colonial regime which has shown the Abavo people that they are not Abavo people and therefore, do not care about the excruciating pains they are taking the Abavo people through in their grab-everything expedition.
The most annoying and most recent assault on the Abavo People occurred when without the consent of the Abavo people, the head of the Abavo monarchy fraudulently sealed a deal with Pan Ocean Oil to commence Oil drilling on Abavo soil with people posing as leaders and members of the executive of the Abavo Clan Union and collecting several unaccounted Millions of Naira in the process. What a fraud known in local parlance as 419? For the avoidance of doubts, Pan Ocean brandishes the images of the Abavo Monarchy and his cohorts signing documents to collect payouts each time they are confronted with the illegalities they are committing against the Abavo people. It won�t be too long before they will be subpoenaed to tender them as evidence in a competent court of law, locally and internationally.
Does he think the Abavo people are stupid?
It is so sad that Abavo, once known as the food basket of Old Midwestern Nigeria and the engine room and fountain of honesty of the Ika nation has become a bastion of squalor, poverty, disease and all forms of criminality that have never been seen or heard before.
Abavo is in a tragic leadership crisis that must be addressed now by this generation or we will forever regret it and face an eternal condemnation by future generations for our failure to act in a manner that would ensure a promising roadmap to their future and beyond.
The past few weeks have seen a flurry of an aggressive ill-footed royal diplomatic offensive on the youth population of Abavo on Facebook where friends are currently being conscripted indiscriminately or with reckless abandon from a hide-out in London where all kinds of lies about how Abavo will turn to London overnight, with unlimited access to the internet whose gateway would be MTN cell phone mast illegally erected in residential neighborhood throughout Abavo without a damn understanding of risk of exposure to unsolicited radiation by those who reside in those neighborhood and which has opened a new frontier of legal contest for the Abavo People�s Voice and by extension, the Abavo people.
I was alarmed to read the kind of accolades the pronouncement generated from amongst a predominantly youth population in the group some of whom one would have thought knew something about the environmental and healthcare problems citing a cell phone mast and base station in a residential neighborhood could bring upon the residents by virtue of what they studied in various Schools of higher learning.
Hmmmmm!!! I am really troubled by the naivety of some of our youths and their lack of sense of understanding of the failure of the Abavo system but instead, elect to become blind sycophants of an expansively out-of-touch individual who is abusing the instrument of the Abavo monarchy to squander their future and the proceeds from Abavo resources on the streets of London, Johannesburg and Dubai.
If these are the people on whom the future of Abavo rests, then Abavo will be in deep hot water and would be sold for less than its actual value.
But gladly enough, I find solace in the fact that these few but profoundly ignorant youths truly do not represent the faces of the real Abavo youths some of whom I have worked very closely with on the platform of the Abavo People�s Voice and beyond, in our effort to bring Abavo back into contention from a forced oblivion.
The Abavo youth that I knew growing up was one who;
– Trusted himself
– Thought for himself
– Acted for himself
– Spoke for himself
– Was himself at all times, with a background knowledge and understanding that imitation was suicidal.
I love the youths for the energy they exude if positively and constructively channeled for the good of any community.
Any community that wishes to remain relevant must pay a particular attention to its youth population or risk being imperiled and this is exactly what we want Abavo to avoid as we are aware of the disconnect that exists between the Abavo youth and the Abavo�s older generation. It is this disconnection that has created the youth identity crisis which has been severally been taken advantage of by groups such as a Muslim group which came and recruited Abavo youngsters into a strange form of Islam with the active connivance of again the Abavo monarchy and were taken to Maiduguri, Borno state to brainwash into what looks like the deadly Boko Haram sect which has become Nigeria�s latest Achilles� hill as a good number of the kids stopped going to school once they returned home.
The urgent need to correct this disconnects and our vision to make Abavo Great again, was one of the reasons the Abavo People�s Voice came into existence.
In the effort to nurse Abavo back to the path of recovery, we expect the youths to;
– Trust themselves
– Think for themselves
– Act for themselves
– Speak for themselves
– Must be themselves at all times; understand that imitation could become suicidal in some cases.
The Abavo People�s Voice was founded partly to put the Abavo youths on a good footing that would prepare them for a future that would hold a promise for them and the next generation. Do not allow anyone tell you anything to the contrary. You can be their friends but you must not allow yourselves to be used to rob the Abavo people as there will be long term consequences for you, for me, for every Abavo person and for generations unborn.
Some Abavo people have set aside the comfort they enjoy in their various places of domicile, created time and put their resources on the line to champion this compelling rescue effort to save our fatherland and as such demand of you and other Abavo people to stand up for their rights instead of acting like clowns, sycophants and hypocrites that an insignificant few of us have understandably become in recent times.
Abavo has a choice to make and we expect the youths as well as other Abavo people to gear up for a resolute journey into a new Abavo which will have no room for corruption, deceit, fraud and tyranny by anyone or group of people who may think that Abavo is their plantation to do as they please.
I am therefore using this to formally invite any of you who have a passion for Abavo without expecting anything in return to become a member of the Abavo People�s Voice if you have not already done so.
Conquer fear as the force massing behind you is as great as that of the biblical Jehoshaphat who won a mighty battle while his men stood still.
Abavo will rise out of this ash and become great again.
God bless you
God bless Abavo
Smart M. Ajaja
Ikaworld.com
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