Two Words, One Country: When Political Pain Becomes Ethnic Ammunition

The Evidence Nigeria’s Courtrooms Would Demand, but Its Politics Never Did

Identity Claims That Fail the Test of Identification

IN Nigerian courts, evidence collapses the moment identity is contested without objective linkage. Curiously, Nigeria’s politics thrives on claims that its courts would reject: “we built it,” “we own it,” “they are strangers,” “they want to push us out.” These statements are not tendered to prove — they are tendered to provoke.

The terms “Iyamiri” and “Ndo Ofemanu” are not ethnographic records. They are emotional exhibits — arguments disguised as identifiers.

The Historical Record the Internet Ignored

Historical investigation shows:

• No structured Igbo–Yoruba conflict before independence

• Commercial migration patterns that were mutually beneficial

• Political rivalry that was party-driven, not tribe-driven

• Urbanisation that rewarded cooperation, not ethnic eviction

• Post-war reconciliation that society embraced faster than politics admitted

What social media has done is not documentation — it is retroactive emotional editing.

The Real Liability

Nigeria’s ethnic groups are not each other’s greatest legal or civic risk. The greatest risk is this:
When citizens argue identity instead of accountability, political actors escape scrutiny while society prosecutes itself.

Epilogue — The Cost of Winning the Narrative but Losing the Country

The most dangerous words in any Nigerian dispute are:

• “Everybody knows it’s him.”

• “This land is ours.”

• “Go back to your states.”

• “Without us, it wouldn’t exist.”

Not because they are loud, but because they are assumptions dressed as evidence.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once warned, violence — physical or rhetorical — does not solve social problems, it only multiplies them. Nigeria learned that lesson in blood. It should not learn it again in comment sections.