Farooq Kperogi: Nigeria’s dangerously rising post-election ethnic tension

I wasn’t born in the First Republic (i.e., 1960 to 1966) and hadn’t come of age in the Second Republic (i.e., 1979 to 1983), so when I say this year’s presidential election represents the most toxic brew of ethnic and religious chauvinism Nigeria’s democracy has ever had, I’m talking within the limits of my experiential reality. 

To varying degrees, the three major candidates in the election exploited Nigeria’s primordial fault lines to enhance their chances of winning. We’re now contending with the aftershocks of this fact.

But what has kept me awake these past few days is the creeping normalisation of genocide-triggering Igbophobia in popular social media discourse, no doubt encouraged by the intolerably violent and maximalist pigheadedness of many of Peter Obi’s Igbo supporters, but dangerous and inexcusable, nonetheless. The attack and murder of Igbo people in Lagos this week is a sad manifestation of this.

The discursive anchor of the growing Igbophobia in the…