It’s often said that a lie told so many times, if unchallenged, may – in course of time – begin to pass for the truth. One of such terrible lies, institutionally purveyed since the end of the Civil War, is that Southeast or Igboland is landlocked or has no access to the sea, and thus cannot have a seaport.
By this piece, I will debunk this lie with some simple historical and topographical evidence that are even in plain sight. In the Southeast, there are many waterways and little-known slithering tributaries that meandered through Igbo-delta wetlands and ended at the Southeastern waterfronts of the Atlantic.
These rivers and their contiguous tributaries have varying lengths of short navigational paths to the Atlantic, and in some cases, are far shorter nautically (and even on footpath) than the dredged Lagos seaports are to their contact with the Atlantic.
Many of these pathways, including particularly the ones from the outer reaches of Imo and Azumiri Rivers terminate at the Atlantic at no more than 30 Nautical miles to the Atlantic beachhead. Thus, the contiguity of Southeast (not even the greater Igboland lying in the South-South) to the Atlantic is nautically less than the Atlantic is to the seaports in Lagos.
To be sure, Ikwerre land or Igweocha which bears the greater portions of the Portharcourt seaport was dredged up to 50 miles to the Atlantic front through the Bonny River. Onne seaport was dredged up to 60 miles to the Atlantic and Calabar seaport was dredged some 45 nautical miles to the Atlantic and the Lagos seaports were dredged up to about 50 nautical miles to the Atlantic.
Compare all these to Obuaku in Abia State, which is only 25 nautical miles to the Atlantic from the confluence of Imo and Azumiri Rivers, of which Azumiri, on its separate merits, lies not more than 30 nautical miles to the Atlantic beachfront; and so is the little-known Oseakwa (Urashi) in Ihiala (Anambra State).
Additionally, what is geopolitically known as Igboland today is far smaller than what it was and legally supposed to be.
As far back as 1856, Baikie – one of the earliest and credible geographers of ancient Nigeria, had this to say – “Igbo homeland, extends east and west, from the Old Kalabar river to the banks of the Kwora, Niger River, and possesses also some territory at Aboh, an Igbo clan, to the west-ward of the latter stream. On the north it borders on Igara, Igala and A’kpoto, and it is separated from the sea only by petty tribes, all of which trace their origin to this great race” (Baikie, William Balfour, published with a sanction of Her Majesty’s Government in 1856).
But with the infamous post-War abandoned property policy and the egregious institutional injustices in boundary adjustments, coupled with the widespread anti-Igbo gerrymandering, Igbos physically lost political hold of their vested ancestral lands, all to the point of not caring anymore about their historical contiguity to the Atlantic Ocean, which Igbo ancestors beheld with their eyes and exclaimed: ‘Oshimiri’ which means: ‘the infinite sea’.
The post-war psychological beat-down and gang-up got so bad and institutional that some of the descendants of these Igbo ancestors (nearest to the Atlantic and now lying outside Southeast) are no longer sure whether they are Igbo or not.
The worst injustice was in 1976 when the Justice Nasir Boundary Adjustment Commission made a serious and targeted agenda of carving out core Igboland territories into some neighboring States of the South-South. But they didn’t quite make an absolute success of it.
They missed the southernmost Southeast lands that possess Rivers that meandered through slices of Igboid South-South territories and ended up at the Atlantic waterfront.
