Just after the civil war, Igbos were brainwashed by vile propaganda to believe that the northerners and Yorubas had herd mentality.
We would proudly say things like, ” it only takes one Sultan, Oba, Alfa or Imam to issue an order and all northerners and South Westerners will flock in obedience” The brainwashing was virulent! It was meant to make us see such herd mentality as a negative !
More than 50 years after, the world now knows which people in Nigeria it is who not only have herd mentality but who also have the most negative form of it!
Ndigbo and Igboland have been destroyed by that attribute because it seems we copied it with the wrong mindset. We did not copy the herd mentality for its positives or for our good. That has been the deception. So, to prove that we are one, we must agree on every issue no matter if such issues were positve or negative.
We rather copied it as a weapon against others. Unfortunately for us, the natural law, abhors negative energies. When one returns evil with evil, the consequences are always harsher on the one who does it as a retaliation! Oh yes! Anything learned for negative reasons, will always return negative energies and the consequences are enormous.
Herd mentality saw most Igbos supporting Onyendufu Kanu and his IPOB criminalities. They hailed his hate spews, his lies, his propagandas and all that. They said and still say evil things they’d do and actually do them but the herd mentality that breeds self deception and incorrigibility triggers the usual denials! These things birth damnation and like Soddom and Gomorrah, Igboland is seemingly cursed!.
Our folks are being beheaded, their means of livelihood destroyed, and families torn apart because those who criticize Kanu and the negative energies he wraps our people in, are shutout or hounded with threats. And we do all that, not because we truly believed in what Kanu was saying and asking us to do. We believed because we had and still have the herd mentality that makes us see others as enemies and the only way to fight back was to hate on them by all means.
Mmesoma’s case is a perfect example of how hateful herd mentality can make a people crazy. We bought Mmesoma’s bad market because of the evil herd mentality we have adopted. We saw it as an opportunity to get back at our perceived “enemies”! Some of us didn’t even bother to investigate the matter in order to get all the facts. We just found it convenient to jump into the herd bandwagon!
Herd mentality leads to the syndrome of cognitive dessonance. An inimical condition if you ask me! Now see what it has done to them. Mmesoma has accepted her fraudulent act and apologized, and the herd mentality in us and the shamelessness it imbues, has turned us into that obnoxious denial mode.
But hey, isn’t that what Franz Fanon warned about when he postulated the cause of that syndrome? Cognitive dissonance makes you refuse accepting the factual alternatives of a view. It makes them deny evident truths and will do any and everything to rebuff truths to hold-on to their lies.
That there, is the worst influence of negative herd mentality. It does what imminent death does to the proverbial stubborn fly that follows the corpse to the grave! It is a very sad day for Igboland and concerned Igbos. Our youth have been completely destroyed and redemption may come real hard!
Max Njaka Obinna (MON)
