Veteran Nigerian journalist Reuben Abati has claimed that some Igbos in the southeast region of the country do not sell their lands to outsiders.
During the morning show on Arise TV, the ex-presidential spokesperson narrated how the minister of information in the first post-independence government, Theophilus Benson, recounted his experience on how Igbos refused to sell lands to non-indigenes.
He said, “Chief TOS Benson, former minister of information, now late, on one occasion at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs and I’m not making this up, he said it publicly, if anybody can contradict me, let them do so… he said something about Igbo people.
“He said he had an Igbo wife, and had an Igbo daughter, that he wanted to buy land in Igbo land for his daughter, for his wife, and he said ‘I’m getting old, let me build in this place for my wife’.
“He said that his in-laws told him that they don’t sell land to outsiders. That is the irony of Nigeria, about the politics of federation of unity.
“The same Igbos who are so industrious that they are all over and do well in other parts of Nigeria, you go as a non-Igbo man to go and buy umunna (kindred) land, you will be told that you don’t belong even as an in-law.”