By Armstrong Amobi
Perhaps, this would be the most powerful message, backed by verifiable stories, to the Igbos and every other tribe in Nigeria.
You see, sometimes a people rise not because their country loved them but because their country abandoned them.
Sometimes greatness begins the day you stop waiting for a government that will never come.
If you look around the world you will see that history has a pattern. It repeats itself with frightening accuracy.
There are tribes and regions that were broken, insulted, sidelined and forgotten.
But the moment they said “enough” and faced their own land, something supernatural happened.
Let me show you.
1. The Basques. Spain treated them like strangers in their own land.
For decades, the Basque people were suppressed.
Their language was banned. Their identity was mocked. Their culture was almost crushed by military dictators.
They begged Madrid for development. Madrid gave them silence. They asked for justice but got humiliation.
So the Basques turned inward. They assembled their best brains. They created their own schools. They built their own factories. They formed one of the largest cooperative networks on earth.
They did not wait for Spain to lift them. They lifted themselves.
Today the Basque region is one of the richest, safest and most industrial parts of Europe.
A people that were once treated like a burden now carry the economic spine of their nation.
This is not luck.
This is what happens when a wounded tribe decides that pain will no longer define their future.
2. Catalonia. Marginalized, punished, mocked. Now the economic heart of Spain.
Catalonia cried for fairness for so many years but
Spain ignored them.
For years they were accused of being rebels, troublemakers, dreamers who should know their place, just like the Igbos.
So they turned to themselves. Through their sufferings and struggles, through the fire of rejection
they built Barcelona. They built industries.
They built thriving small and medium enterprises.
They built ports that now feed a nation that once fed on them.
Today, Catalonia produces almost a quarter of Spain’s GDP.
A region treated as inferior became the engine that powers the whole country.
The lesson is not political. The lesson is human.
When people unite around their own land, mountains bow. Even those who suppress them will begin to learn from them.
3. The Kurds. A tribe that tasted real genocide but turned ashes into gold.
The Kurds were bombed.
The Kurds were gassed.
The Kurds were hunted like animals.
They were tortured, slaughtered, buried.
Whole villages were wiped out.
Their suffering would break the spirit of any ordinary people. Please, read about them. If you think you have seen suffering, ask the Kurds what it means to be hunted by those who should protect you.
But instead of choosing extinction, they chose determination.
They built schools in the middle of ruins.
They started businesses in the middle of war.
They rebuilt their cities with their own hands.
They protected themselves when no one came to protect them.
They rose from ashes of destruction, rebuilding every home at a time.
Today, Kurdistan is the most stable and prosperous region in Iraq.
Foreign investors go there.
Tourists go there.
Peace goes there.
Pain did not stop them. Pain shaped them.
4. The Jews. The most hated people in European history created one of the strongest nations on earth.
And the Igbos have consistently likend themselves to the Jews.
The Jews were despised.
They were clamped into ghettos.
They were chased from country to country.
They were massacred, discriminated, and nearly exterminated. It was a natural abomination to be born a Jew to those that hunted them.
But they held one belief.
If the world would not embrace them, they would embrace themselves.
They invested in education.
They invested in intelligence.
They built communities that flowed with knowledge like rivers of fire.
When Israel was established, they turned desert into farmland.
They turned sand into silicon.
They turned a barren land into a global powerhouse.
Because a people who survive centuries of hatred become impossible to destroy.
Today, who can dare Israel and not regret it? The Jews commands a top rank when it comes to global wealth, education, invention, and military power, evn though they are less than 0.2% of the world’s population.
5. The Gujaratis. Haven’t you heard about them? They were mocked in India. Now they are the bloodline of global commerce.
There was a time when Gujaratis were looked down on.
People said they were traders, not thinkers.
People said they were inconsiquential, not important.
People said they added nothing to the soul of India.
So they decided to build their own region with their own hands.
They created business clusters.
They built cities like Ahmedabad and Surat.
They built industries that fed millions.
They grew beyond their borders and carried their homeland on their backs.
Today they run some of the largest companies in India and the world.
A once mocked tribe became a global financial force.
This was possible because when a people invest in themselves, no insult can stop them.
Now let me ask you a painful question.
If these people could rise from banishment, genocide, humiliation and neglect,
what exactly is stopping the South East of Nigeria?
Igbos are some of the most industrious people on the continent.
They build empires anywhere they enter.
From Lagos to Accra.
From Johannesburg to New York.
From London to Guangzhou.
Yet their homeland bleeds.
Not because they are weak.
Not because they are incapable.
But because they were taught to expect salvation from a government that benefits from their silence and suffering.
The truth is simple.
A region rises when the people rise for themselves.
If the Igbos decide today to:
-rebuild their cities
-industrialize their communities
-invest their global wealth at home
-unify across political lines
-protect their land the way others protect their interests
Then the South East will not just rise.
It will shock the world.
History has shown that marginalized people do not win by waiting for fairness.
They win by creating their own destiny.
The Basques did it.
The Catalans did it.
The Kurds did it.
The Jews did it.
The Gujaratis did it.
And the Igbos, if united, can do far more.
Because there is nothing more powerful on earth
than a wounded tribe that refuses to die quietly.
Let the pain propel us to build instead of the constant agitations that only further create choas in our home.
