PAT ONUKWULI argues that a nation cannot preach brotherhood while allowing prejudice to become an instinct
A police uniform should conceal tribe and reveal the Republic. It should transform the wearer from an indigene of a particular place into an officer for all. Yet in a video circulating online, a Nigerian policeman appears to tell a motorist that, had he been Igbo, he would have detained him. The statement is brief, but its implications are profound. If accurately understood, those words convert protection into prejudice and discretion into discrimination.
They suggest that liberty may depend not on conduct but on origin; that one Nigerian may comply with the law while another faces inherited suspicion. The Nigeria Police Force has reportedly commenced disciplinary proceedings. That is necessary but insufficient. Nigeria must investigate not only what the officer said but also what led him to believe he could say it. Was this merely personal bias, or a window into a deeper national culture?
A television anchor recently dismissed the incident as random and isolated. But an act can be individual without being accidental. One mouth may speak the words while society supplies the vocabulary. The officer did not invent “Igbo” at the checkpoint. He inherited it from a national narrative in which the Igbo are admired for enterprise yet distrusted in politics; welcomed as investors yet resented by some neighbours.
Igbos are Nigerian enough to build markets and pay taxes, yet sometimes not Nigerian enough to enjoy unquestioned belonging. This is Nigeria’s contradiction: inclusion in rhetoric, exclusion in practice; unity in the anthem, suspicion at the checkpoint. A nation cannot endlessly preach brotherhood while allowing prejudice to become an operational instinct.
The policeman’s words also did not emerge in a vacuum. Before the 2015 Lagos governorship election, the Oba of Lagos was widely reported to have warned Igbo leaders that those who opposed his preferred candidate would perish in the lagoon. However, his palace later described the remark as proverbial. Years later, during the 2019 election season, Oluremi Tinubu made remarks about summoning Lagos deities to drive away Igbos who did not understand Yoruba.
Fact-checkers described the exchange as banter rather than a formal threat, yet banter is not harmless merely because it wears a smile. Hatred sometimes comes laughing. Exclusion sometimes wears humour. A joke sometimes merely tests whether society will object. The powerful may call it banter; the powerless may experience it as permission. What begins as rhetoric can end as routine. What starts as metaphor can mature into misconduct.
History teaches that prejudice seldom arrives with a bang. Genocides do not begin with mass graves; they begin with grammar, and before the machete comes the metaphor. Before the blockade comes the label. Nigeria’s refusal to confront its historical narratives has allowed old falsehoods to become modern weapons. For decades, the January 1966 coup was branded an “Igbo coup”.
Yet General Ibrahim Babangida’s memoir challenged that narrative, arguing that the coup was driven not by an Igbo agenda but by young officers responding to political and social failures. If that correction is accepted, the reprisals justified in its name require fresh moral scrutiny. A lie told about yesterday easily becomes a licence for discrimination today. Truth without consequence is merely information.
Against this background, Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang’s recent apology to Ndigbo deserves recognition. He admitted that Plateau people had been deceived into participating in the Civil War and expressed regret, despite criticism from some of his kinsmen. His apology should be welcomed not because it settles history, but because it begins to confront it. An apology is not a weakness but an act of courage; not surrender but responsibility.
What Mutfwang attempted, General Yakubu Gowon failed to do in his memoir. Gowon preserved Nigeria but did not heal it. He ended the war but not the wound. His famous “No Victor, No Vanquished” promised reconciliation, yet many returned to abandoned property, depleted savings, broken livelihoods, and enduring suspicion. His memoir remembered the war but stopped short of repentance.
This brings us back to the policeman. What did he believe an Igbo identity justified: detention without cause, greater suspicion, or harsher treatment? More importantly, what goes through the minds of officers who harbour similar prejudices but never speak in front of a camera? The video may have captured one officer, but it may also have illuminated an invisible hierarchy of citizenship.
Nigeria must avoid two errors: condemning the entire Police Force because of one officer, or pretending that one officer’s words are unrelated to the wider social climate. Institutions entrusted with coercive power must ensure that ethnicity never influences discretion. Otherwise, the Constitution promises equality, while the checkpoint delivers something entirely different.
This issue ultimately transcends the Igbo, though their experience gives it urgency. Every Nigerian ethnic group has memories of grievance, but no nation survives by competing in victimhood. The answer to anti-Igbo prejudice is not anti-Yoruba resentment, just as the answer to northern domination cannot be hostility towards northerners. Fire does not become water simply because it burns in the opposite direction.
Nigeria must decide whether it will be a federation of equal citizens or a marketplace of suspicious tribes. It cannot proclaim unity in Abuja while permitting profiling on the highway. It cannot sing that tribe and tongue may differ while making tribe the evidence and tongue the offence. The policeman’s alleged statement therefore raises a question larger than a single roadside encounter: what kind of country does Nigeria truly want to be? The answer will determine whether future generations inherit a united republic or merely a shared geography.
Dr. Onukwuli is a legal scholar and public affairs analyst. patonukwuli2003@yahoo.co.uk