NIGERIA LET MY PEOPLE, THE IGBO, GO!

(76^th Birth Day Message of OkpalaEzeNRI Chukwuemeka Ifeanacho Onyesoh)

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states. (Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)     

                                      

Igbo problem in Nigeria predates independence. First of all, while Igbo pathfinders, like The Right Hon. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the pan-Africanist, were busy fighting for the emancipation of the black of the world from any form of colonialism and/or abridgement of fundamental human rights, Northern Nigeria leaders on the contrary were busy plotting how to enslave the Igbo and the rest of Nigeria. They were very open about their intention to conquer and dominate Nigeria.

 As far back as 1947, Hausa/Fulani leaders were already boasting of their intension to enslave Southern Nigeria including the Igbo people in the East. And the mechanism usually adopted was and is Jihad – a struggle in which the non-Moslem either got killed or converted into Islam and slavery.

Marginalisation of the Igbo in Nigeria, which the Ohanaeze Ndigbo and South-East Governors’ tout as the main grouse of the Igbo against Nigeria, is indeed less than 25% of Igbo grudge. It therefore appears that there is a world of disconnect between the Igbo man on the street and the position of South-East Governors and Ohanaeze Ndigbo. If the issue was merely marginalisation, restructuring would have been the solution. The most worrisome issue for the Igbo is indeed, genocide and the permanent threat to genocide. 

Life is the ultimate gift of the Almighty God to man. It is irreplaceable once taken, no matter the circumstances. All modern civilizations are in place, primarily, to protect and preserve life before any other thing. Land is God’s number two gift to mankind. Land boundaries, in municipal and international law, define the territorial limits of nation states, regions, cities, communities, estates and homes. Disputes over land and other property are civil matters, whereas issues involving threat to or extinguishing of life, are criminal offenses against society. Section 14.-(2) (b) of the extant Constitution of Nigeria provides that ‘the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government;”whereas Section 33.-(1) guarantees every citizen the right to life.  Section 34.-(1) protects the right to the dignity of the human person. Multi-lateral treaties of UN, AU and ECOWAS, which Nigeria ratified and therefore is subject to, guarantee these rights as fundamental to the existence of all humans in planet earth. The present government of President Buhari exists in denial in its role as protector and defender of all fundamental human rights and goes out of its way to abridge. At the appropriate time full documented incontrovertible disclosure will be made to the world.

It is the violation of these precious intrinsic and extrinsic God’s gifts of life to the Igbo by the oligarchy of Nigeria through the instrumentality of President Buhari’s government that engineers the agitation for separation from a republic which Igbo man on the street has come to regard as evil, indeed, an animal farm.

The drive to compel the Igbo to accept their domination and probably conversion to the oligarchy’s religion or face death has not been hidden by the Hausa-Fulani leaders, even before independence. 

Concluding his address to the first session of the Nigerian Legislative Council in Lagos in March 1947, Mallam Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who later became Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, had declared:

“We shall demand our rights when the time is ripe. If the British quitted Nigeria now at this stage, the northern people would continue their uninterrupted conquest to the sea.” (Ref:Trevor Clark: A Right Honourable Gentleman, Hudhuda Publishing Co., Zaria, 1991, p.99). 

  In Jihads, the non-Moslem has a choice to submit and convert to Islam or get killed. Either way, the non-Moslem gets conquered and enslaved, if he survives. Sheik Othman Dan Fodio successfully concluded his Jihad in Hausa land in 1810, occupied Hausa land and set up the Sokoto Caliphate which till date, rules all Hausas of Nigeria. Mallam Abubakar’s 1947 address to the Legislative Council in Lagos was therefore a threat of Jihad on Southern Nigeria. Pursuit of ‘un-interrupted conquest to the sea’ was therefore Sir Abubakar’s dogma in the various forms of Jihadwhich he surreptitiously executed vigorously throughout his regime as Prime Minister of Nigeria, until he was killed on Jan 15, 1966. All the crises that dominated his tenure as Prime Minister of Nigeria, 1959-66, were engineered and executed with the mindset of his above 1947 Jihadist declaration. He was the Deputy Leader of the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC), the party that controlled the Federal government of Nigeria from independence till the demise of the First Republic on 15^th January 1966. In brazen efforts to completely emasculate and dominate Nigeria, he recklessly drove Nigeria from the 1962/63 Census fraud and crisis; the Tiv resistance/massacres of the 1960s; the Western Nigeria Crises – Coker’s Commission of enquiry, Police unprecedented violation of the immunity of Western Regional House of Assembly, the back-dating of the amendment of Western Nigeria Constitution in order to re-install the properly dismissed Western Nigeria Premier, Chief S L Akintola, which illegal back-dating Sir Abubakar justified on grounds of “expediency;”  the arrest, treasonable felony trial and conviction of Chief Obafemi Awolowo including the criminal machinations of the Judiciary through the shameful shenanigans of Chief Justice of Nigeria, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola; the decimation of the Nigerian army by an outrageous northernisation policy which included commissioning of northern cadets rejected and back-loaded to Nigeria as unqualified for training in Canada, as if they had been trained, and thus putting them, years ahead of those who actually completed the training (mainly southerners); the desperation in the outrageous rigging of the 1964 general elections despite all the desperate warnings of the sinecure President – HE Rt. Hon. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe;  and the 1965 Western Nigeria regional election heist.

Sir Abubakar’s boss, party leader, and premier of the North, summarised Northern leaders’ morbid drive for the enslavement of all non-Moslems of Nigeria in his declaration which was published in the Lagos-based newspaper, now extinct, The Parrot of 12^thOctober 1960.

“The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate from our great grand- father, Othman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We must use the minorities in the North as willing tools, and the South as conquered territories and never allow them to have control of their future.”

 Alhaji Ahmadu Bello’s politics all his political life, simply displayed the atavistic ambition of one strong man with his lieutenants and hangers on, to turn the Nigerian Nation into a glorious dynastic fiefdom for himself and his family through the instrumentality of Islamic faith, a perverse ambition which came close to realisation and has so persuasive that even in 2017, under President Buhari, the spirit of his goal continues to haunt the Nigeria and misdirect its affairs fifty years after his death. His ghost is obvious in President Buhari’s fixation on tyrannical exercise of primitive power, blind and brutal; totally ignorant of enlightened ideas of open multi-ethnic rainbow unions of free peoples; and contemptuous of any democratic tenets and the rule of law. 

Massacres of unarmed pro-Biafra agitators for the right to self-determination, his complicity in the Cattle-Fulani herdsmen Islamic militancy and indiscriminate slaughter of Igbo people all over Nigeria are unabashed aspects of that common goal – Islamisation and domination of Nigeria.

 Indigenous People of Nigeria (IPOB) and THE Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) see through and understand it. Given the opportunity, President Buhari’s regime would wipe out all of the peoples of the South East and South-South zones and flood it with Hausa-Fulanis. Both South-East Governors and Ohanaeze Ndigbo do not get it and thus go on talking about marginalisation; and with cap in hand, go on pleading for restructuring. Or if they do, some other considerations, including the fear of the unabashed military dictatorship which Nigeria has been subjected to since 2015, distract their focus on the genocidal threat Nigeria poses to the survival/existence of the Igbo as a race in its present land space. They have not thought it wise, or better if they do, are afraid they would offend the Caliphate, to build memorials for millions of their fellow Igbo killed in the genocide that Nigeria has executed and continued to execute on the Igbo to date. 

Politicians are indeed prostitutes of conscience! I owe this apt characterisation of government and Ohanaeze leaders to Ronald Reagan’s( 40^th US President, 1981-1989) popular folksy quote from a 1977 address:

 “Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to understand that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

President John Kennedy (35^th President of USA, 1961-1963), seems to have validated Reagan in his ruminations over initiating the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (enacted by US Congress as a way of honouring him after his 1963 assassination), which he knew was popular and in the public interest but was unpopular with his fellow whites. 

“Politics is a jungle: torn between doing the right thing and staying in office – between local interest and the national interest – between the private good of the politician and the general good.” 

(Jilly Hunt: Ethics of Politics-Leaders, Raintree Publishers, Basingstoke Hampshire, UK, 2013, pp. 36 & 37).

As per world’s best practice, no meaningful restricting has ever been accepted by any majority in any polity in the world without, the minority and the oppressed first, having to agitate by act of open rebellion in armed conflict or persistent peaceful protest for independence - Ireland, Quebec province of Canada, Scotland, etc.

In the Nigeria peculiar case in which extremist religious flavour, no amount of restructuring would extinguish the carnivorous thirst of an Islamic fundamentalist oligarchy for blood of people they regard as the kafir’s (unbeliever) blood. As it is known world-wide, Islamic fundamentalists uphold and owe their first loyalty to Islamic Law - the Sharia - before any national Constitution.

Sharia, the moral code and religious law of Islam which guides all aspects of Muslim life including daily routines, familial and religious obligations, and financial dealings, deals with many topics addressed by secular law, including crime, politics, and economics, as well as sexual intercourse, hygiene, diet, prayer, every day etiquette and fasting. Sharia Law is derived primarily from precepts set forth in the Quranic verses (ayahs) and the examples set by the Islamic prophet in the Sunnah (Hadith – the sayings, practices, and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad). 

The introduction of Sharia is the long-standing goal for Islamic movements globally. Moderate Moslems, like Yoruba Moslems, are not so minded. World-wide, attempts to impose Sharia, particularly in multi-religious societies, is usually accompanied by controversy, violence, and even warfare. Nigeria is not in any way different.

It would therefore surprise no one who is conversant with Islamic law, why mainly Christian Igbo people are indiscriminately massacred by fundamentalist Hausa/ Fulanis and no one is held account by a government dominated by Islamists. Verses in the Quran and the Sunnah/Hadith issue following injunctions to all fundamentalist Moslems:

 Quran Surah (Chapter) 8.39: “And fight them (the unbeliever) until there is no more persecution (fitnah) (tumult or oppression), and religion should be only for Allah; . . .”

Surah 2: 191-193: “And kill them (the unbeliever) wherever you find them and turn them out from where they have turned you out.”

Hadith Vol. 9:50: “No Muslim should be killed for killing a kafir.” 

Sharia Law, a product of fundamentalist Islamic injunctions, quite often imprecise and leaving a lot of discretions to ulamas that are frequently not so well grounded in Civil and Common Laws (or if they are, put Quranic injunctions over any other Law), is antithetical to Civil and Common Laws; and therefore inconsistent with secular democracy. In most secular democracies of the world, particularly multi-religious federations, Sharia has proved unmanageable with Common Law. Controversies in managing the two have resulted in Muslims being involved in over 90% of all the wars/violence in the today’s world.  

 Riots and Massacres of Igbo People of Nigeria:

 In Nigeria ethnic massacres directed at forcing other ethnic groups, the Igbo in particular, to accept religious/political viewpoints of the oligarchy, found first expression in the Jos riots of 1945 in which over 200 Igbos were slaughtered and no one was held accountable. 

The licence of reward to the northern hordes for killing the Igbo was certified in 1959, when Mallam Inua Wada was appointed Federal Minister of Works in the 1959-1966 federal government of Sir Abubakar. Inua Wada was the Kano Organising Secretary of Northern People’s Congress (NPC – the political party which controlled both the Northern Regional government and the Federal Government of Nigeria) who admitted he organised the Kano riot of 1953 in which 150 Igbo people were massacred for a political quarrel between the Hausa/Fulani and the Yoruba, over the motion for early independence for Nigeria, which was moved in the Nigeria’s Legislative Council, the same year, by Chief Anthony Enahoro.

One unpunished act of impunity breeds many. Consequently other unpunished massacres followed to date, in the interminable sequence of riots in northern Nigeria: 

1966 May riots (3,000 Igbo dead); Sept/Oct. 1966 (27,939 Igbo deaths); Sept. /Oct. 1967Asaba Massacre (4,665 deaths); 1967-70 Genocide branded Civil War (3.5 million dead, including 2million children, women, the old and infirmed); and multiplicities of riots in Kano 1980 and 1982; Buluta, Maiduguri 1982; Yola 1984; Gombe 1985; Kaduna March 1987; Zaru, May 1988; Ahmadu Bello University, 1988; Bauchi, 1992; June 12, 1993 crisis; 1994, Kano Beheading of Gideon Akaluka; 1999, Katsina Riots; 2000, Sharia riots in Kaduna and Zamfara (2,000 to 5,000 deaths); 2001, 7^th to 17^th September, Jos riots (500 to 5,000 deaths); 2002, November 22 Miss World Riots, Kaduna (approximate deaths 200; 2004 Feb. to May - Massacre in Yelwa, Shandam and Kano massacres (approximate deaths – 975); 2005, June 8, Apo Six Killing of 5 Igbo boys and their Bini girl friend by highly placed Hausa/Fulani Police officers; 2006, 18^th February, Danish Cartoon Crisis in Maiduguri (over 50 deaths); 2008, November 28 to29, Jos Local Government election riots (500 deaths, [120 Igbo deaths]); 2009 July, Boko Haram Uprising in Maiduguri, Bauchi, Potiskum and Wudi (over 1,000 deaths); 2010 Jos massacre (over 992 deaths mainly Christians including the Igbo); 2011 December Mandalla bombing of a Catholic Church ( 41dead and 73 injured); 2012, Jan. 20, Kano – Boko Haram attacks of Churches and Christian businesses – over 185 dead; 2015-17, Shooting of unarmed pro-Biafra Agitators for the Right to Self-Determination (including September invasion of Nnamdi Kanu’s home in Umuahia - over 400 dead, 400 terminally wounded and thousands arrested and detained indefinitely in undisclosed locations without charge); and 2015 to date several hundred killed, women raped, farms and homes overrun and/or violated in Igbo ancestral homeland in the South- East in which property worth millions of US Dollars were destroyed; 2016, April: Kano - the gruesome murder of Mrs. Janet Agbahime and the decline of prosecution by Kano State Governor, and eventual discharge of five accused; plus various indiscriminate killings of Igbo people even in the nation’s capital, Abuja.

 Between 2015 and 2017 in the nation’s capital, Abuja:

 “On September 23, 2015, Arinze Chukwem from Enugu State was stabbed 47 times in day time before public view and he died on the spot by a wild group of Hausa/Fulani and the police has done nothing about the known murderers.

In September 2015, Maduabuchi Ezenwa, from Imo State was lynched following an argument with an Hausa trader.

 On March 25, 2016, Ikechukwu Ogbo from Enugu State after barbing entered a “keke” (motorised tricycle) and paid money and asked for balance that was refused. He was accused of being a“barawo” (thief) and was lynched. Police claimed it was a mob action.

On November 26, Ndubisi Ogbuka from Abia State was beheaded in his farm in Abuja; his head was not found until two weeks later.

 In May this year (2017), a young man pressed to urinate, urinated in a gutter close to a mosque in an area in Abuja called Gwagwa. He was lynched and nobody has been arrested or prosecuted.”

(Chief Nnia Nwodo, President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo -page 42 of Vanguard newspaper of Tuesday, June 13, 2017).

What kind of national (except Nigeria) would allow constituents to be so indiscriminately murdered in its capital without question? If Igbo people are so easily killed in the federal capital, it is easy to imagine what happens to them in the remote corners and centres of the 12 Islamic Republics of the North of Nigeria!

Modern Day Slavery is an accepted practice of Islamic fundamentalists among who infant marriage is also accepted norm. The present extension of this modern day slavery to Igbo people, among whom it anathema, is repugnant to Igbo values.

 The abduction and forced conversion to Islam, of 14-year old Ifesinachi Ani, from Umunachi Ngene, Amaechi, Awkunanaw, Enugu State, SS-2 female student of Government Secondary School, Apo Settlement, in Abuja on April 2, 2016, for 6 months until she was rescued; and Lucy Ejeh, 15-year old female student of Senior Secondary School One in Government Secondary School, Talata, Mafara, Zamfara State on October 31, 2009 and the refusal of the Law enforcement agencies to arrest, detain and arraign the known suspects exposes how much the Constitution of Nigeria is trampled upon in the 12 ‘Islamic Republics of Nigeria’, otherwise still branded states of Nigeria majorly for the convenience of economic benefits derivable from remaining Nigeria. Ifesinachi was lucky to have been identified and freed, though defiled, after 6 months in captivity, against her wish and that of her parents, following the commotion that followed Ese Oruru’s abduction to Kano from Yenegoa. To date, Miss Ejeh has been in over 5-year captivity despite her captors having been reported to relevant authorities. Ifeoma Odugisi, another 14-year old Igbo student from Ebonyi state, captured on September 14, 2014 by one identified Alhaji Shehu Abdullahi in Zaria, is still a vassal of her abductor despite her parents’ petitions to Zaria High Court 3. Charity Uzoechina (now Aisha), daughter of a pastor of Redeemed Church of God from Anambra State, and then a student of the Federal Polytechnic, Bida, since 2013 when she was kidnapped from the College, has been condemned to a life as a harem woman of an Emir in Niger State, isolated from her family.

Irreconcilable Differences between the Fulanis and the Igbo:

Sir Ahmadu Bello’s oft-quoted riposte with Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in a conversation in the 1950s, during which Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the incredible optimist on the future of Nigeria and indeed Africa, had urged the Sarduana (Sultan of Sokoto’s “leader of war – Jihad”), to join him in building a new Nigeria by forgetting the differences between the Igbo and the Fulani, highlights the gulf between the Igbo and the Fulani. Sir Ahmadu Bello’s blunt response is generally noted as witty and apt. It said more than what Dr. Azikiwe perhaps understood in the Sarduna’s School teacher’s simple language, stripped of any sophistry.

 “No, we cannot forget our differences. We will rather recognize them. I am a Moslem. You are a Christian. I am Fulani. You are Igbo. It is only in recognizing these differences that we can manage being together.” 

Dr. Azikiwe ignored that wise advice from the Sultan’s Chief Jihadist and since then to date, the Igbo, and indeed Nigeria, has paying for daring to constitute a country whose ethnic constituents share no values, worse still, whose contradictory values are ideological based extremities of faith.  

Most of these differences are indeed unbridgeable, and if Dr. Azikiwe had rightly understood Sir Ahmadu Bello, he would have appreciated Bello’s earlier insistence that both deserve to belong to separate entities, to peacefully co-exist, perhaps as neighbours, like Pakistan separated from India at independence in 1947.

The differences between the Igbo and the Fulani are so inherently profound not to have been overlooked: 

1. Religion is a personal issue among the Igbo; unlike with the Fulani among whom religion is everything. In Islam change of faith is Apostacy, and in Islamic states, punishable with death.
2. With the Igbo, God’s vengeance is His, whereas the Fulanis kill for God.
3. Hospitality to guests and strangers is sacrosanct to the Igbos; and to hurt any is anathema. To the Fulanis, strangers, particularly unbelievers, are indeed expendable and must be isolated in their own enclaves from the word go, perhaps for easy preying.                .
4. Leadership among the Igbo is accountable to the people; whereas among the Fulanis, it is conferred by Allah and therefore not accountable to any human.
5. To the Igbo the dignity of every human is respected; whereas to the Fulani, the unbeliever has not as much as a right to life, not to talk about decency of his person.
6. There is no limit to human aspiration among the Igbo. Among the Fulanis, Allah ordains everyone’s future.
7. Oppression is repugnant to Igbo values; whereas feudalism among the Fulanis thrives on, and is anchored on oppression.
8. The Igbo would rather self-immolate for freedom and are therefore freedom fighters, even for others. These values found expression in the 1803 Igbo landing episode of Igbo slaves at Dunbar Creek, St. Simons Island, Georgia, USA; the liberation of Haiti and Dominican Republic by Igbo slaves and ex-slaves; the anti-slavery efforts of Igbo ex-slaves like Olaudah Equiano and Edward Wilmot Blyden; the fight for independence of Nigeria and other African countries by Igbo pan-Africanist Igbo leaders like Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe; and the declaration of Biafra and the unarmed fight to protect the young republic   The Fulanis are typically enslavers – the Fulani wars by Sheik Othman Dan Fodio and the ongoing struggle to totally Islamise and enslave Nigeria.  Dominion and enslavement are the fundamental basis of Jihad.
9. Igbo people are modernisation and development agents.  As duly confessed in 2000 by Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, now Emir of Kano, “The Fulbes (Fulanis) are present-day zealots, not for “modernisation,” but for the “Islamisation” of Nigeria and West Africa.” This explains why the oligarchy of Nigeria is sponsoring the waste of thousands of lives and billions of US Dollars worth in property destroyed in support of anachronistic and out-moded pastoralism in cattle breeding, in spite of Saudi Arabia, the citadel of Islam and Arabism, having found pastoralism wasteful and uneconomic and therefore, replaced it with modern day hi-tech dairy farming; and thus became one of the biggest source of dairy products in the Middle East. It is estimated that over 99% of Saudi Arabia’s land mass of 2.149 million sq. kilometres (829,195 sq. miles) is desert. STPD.
10. Value on Life: Igbo people traditionally and even before Christianity, place so much value on life that the traditional separation of the dead from the living, involves so much elongated and overburdened process, regardless of status of the individual. To the Fulani, the life of the unbeliever is as expendable as the lives of rodents. Their attitude to the dead among themselves appears to the Igbo very dismissive. The Fulanis also indiscriminately kill themselves to settle common disputes. 
11.  Igbo people attach so much value to their daughters that the spirit of dead married ones used to be represented in family altars (of traditional worship) with the cylindrically shaped dumb-bells (okponsi). The body of married daughters also used to be taken back to their fathers home for proper internment. These days of Christianity, livestock is given in place of the body, for the performance of final rites of such daughters. Once modern day Igbo realised that mothers were advancement agents for their children’s development they extended that same value they attach to their daughters to their wives. That has driven monogamous marriages into the culture of the present day Igbo. In contradistinction, the Fulanis are proud with polygamy and the very extreme limits which Islam has imposed on the rights of women, even in open violation of basic fundamental human rights.
    The Fulanis do not seem satisfied with keeping a lid on their women only. They have now crossed the Igbo red line by abducting Igbo under-aged girls, raping them and forcing them to conversion to Islam and marriage, without parental consent. To the Igbo, the indiscriminate raping of Igbo women found alone in farms and even homes by Cattle Fulani herdsmen militants is yet another outrage.

Conclusion:

Upholding those core values and resistance to any violation are in the Igbo DNA and cannot be subdued or wished away. Other ethnic nationalities of Nigeria might have resolved to live with what the Igbo consider intolerable and repugnant to their values. They might have devised ways and means of accommodation of what the Igbo inherently regard as the over-bearing attitude of the Fulanis; and might even have eaten their humble pie. But, not the Igbo!  Igbo elders who fought and lost the civil war and the political cum business elite Igbo, might tolerate dominion, enslavement and Islamisation out of expediency; but the wandering spirit of generations of the Igbo born after the civil war and yet to be born, will rise against dominion and tyranny. It is in-born in the Igbo to strive to unshackle the fetters of tyranny. The political and business elite constitute less that 15% of Igbo population. 85% population of the Igbo would always rise against tyranny, oppression, inequity and injustice.  

 Other Nigerians might find it difficult to understand the complexities of the Igbo spirit and have offhandedly dismissed it as foolishness and/or lack of diplomacy.

The unfortunate revolting attitude of Lagos elite on Igbo quest for freedom is 100% shown in the editorial opinion of Tuesday, September 19, 2017 edition of Vanguard newspaper (my most favourite newspaper) in which the paper equated Igbo quest for separation to the threat to commit genocide involved in the AREWA Quit Notice to over 11 million Igbo people who live in the North.

“. . . We agree that the calls for secession on one hand, and quit notices to specified ethnic groups to leave the Federal Republic of Nigeria, accompanied with hate songs the other, went way overboard on the scale of free speech.”

Vanguard newspaper, like most Lagos elite was deceiving itself for the quit notice on a group, particularly people on whom the same predators had before executed genocide upon, constitutes threat to commit genocide, an international crime punishable under genocide convention; whereas a call for secession under the right for self determination is protected by Nigerian law, AU and UN multi-lateral treaties, which Nigeria is bound to. If Vanguard newspaper failed to see the difference, I believe it is its choice, just like most Nigerians who have neither experienced genocide nor total exclusion from Nigerians.

The Nigerian State, no doubt, reasons the same way with Vanguard newspaper editorial, when Nigeria awarded an open licence to Cattle Fulani herdsmen Islamic militants to kill, maim, rape, destroy and over-run farms and homes, the same time it wishes to regulate the airing of hate speeches from victims of above atrocities on the culprits of those atrocities. What an animal farm Nigeria has turned into under President Buhari?   

 Lions never father pussy cats. Igbo people owe no apology to above type of hare-brained elite. And merely would seek their understanding that every group is entitled to express values implanted in them by God, the Creator. Lions and tigers are never kept in one cage. Every zoo in the world keeps them in separate cage mesh/fence or enclosure. Put in one cage would generate perpetual and permanent stress between with the two, until one wipes out the less over-bearing one. In the circumstances, the Fulanis are more overbearing and the present circumstances pose a grave of extinction of the Igbo race.

Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) are already at the struggle howsoever disorderly. More groups are bound to spring up and as they sprout, they get more idealistically sophisticated. There will never be an end to the agitation for freedom and liberty among the Igbo, until such freedoms are accomplished.

 Unfortunately, the oligarchy historically in turn is never known to have given up on its quest for dominion and tyranny. They have now corruptly branded agitation for the right to self determination, terrorism and proscribed it after murdering hundreds at Umuahia and Aba. Nigerian courts and courts beyond the shores of Nigeria will determine in course of time whether unarmed rights agitators can rightly be proclaimed terrorists and banned by the same government which has by default licensed Cattle Fulani Islamic militants and sometimes assisted them in murdering thousands of Nigerians and destroying property worth billion US Dollars annually.

 Meanwhile investigators have recovered over 88 corpses of Igbo youths from in and around Mr. Nnamdi Kanu’s residence in Afara, Umuahia, Abia State reportedly executed by Nigerian security agencies in the night of 14^th Sept 2017, when the invaded Mr. Kanu’s village home. The agents reportedly removed 35 dead bodies. Investigators hope to recover more decomposing bodies from combing the bushes for those youths who dropped dead as they ran to escape the Nigerian Army’s killing machine. Information on Aba massacre the same night of 14^th September is being compiled by field investigators.

It is indeed one of the most sadistic ironies of contradiction that five days after the Nigerian Army converged on sleeping Igbo families in Aba and Umuahia and mowed down with exploding bullets, hundreds of family members including pregnant women, nursing mothers and babies at the ungodly hour of 03.00am, the Commander-in-Chief of that same Army of infamy, President Muhammadu Buhari, stood unfazed before the United Nations General Assembly and condemned, in his own very strong words, “the horrendous suffering caused by what, from all indications is a state-backed programme of brutal depopulation of the Rohingya inhabited areas in Myanmar on the basis of ethnicity and religion.” One is left to wonder where the difference lies between the brutalities Nigerian troops, under President Buhari command, have been dishing out to ethnic Igbo Christians of the South-East of Nigeria since he took power in May 2015 and the faith of ethnic Rohingya Moslems of Myanmar. Could it be that the President of Nigeria, being a fundamentalist Moslem shares the agony and pains of fellow Moslems of Myanmar, but least cares about the horrors being dished out to ethnic Igbo Christians of Nigeria?      

 Nigeria under the dominating influence of the Fulanis, indeed will never know peace until the wandering spirits of Igbo people massacred by the Nigerian oligarchy’s machinations are rested by Igbo people being granted the liberty to mind their own affairs internally and internationally.

 The contradictions in Nigeria are too obvious for even the blind to perceive. When Biafra was declared in 1967, all Nigerians conspired and joined hands in crushing the unarmed Republic. In 1999/2000, twelve states of northern Nigeria revolted against the Constitution of the Federation and proclaimed 12 Islamic Republics by pledging their first loyalty to Shariah Law before the Constitution of Nigeria, if at all. Gullible Nigerians declared the revolt as political Sharia which would fizzle out in time, as if Sharia has ever been anything other than the political code of Islam. The government of Nigeria has not found it fit to defend the Constitution of Nigeria in those 12 Islamic Republics inside Nigeria. Nigeria therefore operates two systems of Laws and citizenship rights in order to accommodate the 12 Islamic Republics – one group (the oligarchy) above the Law, except Sharia Law; and the rest including the Igbo, under the Constitution and Common Law.

And therefore for merely expressing dissatisfaction with the Nigerian fraudulent system and inviting Nigeria to verify the wish of the Igbos to leave the duplicitous Republic of Nigeria, the Federal Government of Nigeria proclaimed the agitators for rights guaranteed by Nigeria’s Laws and international Laws, as terrorists. The government even went beyond the agitators for an omnibus clause which includes “any person or group of persons from participating in any manner whatsoever in any form of activities involving or concerning the prosecution of the collective intention or otherwise of IPOB under any other name of platform called or described. . .” This is kind of omnibus decrees the Nigerian Army used to issue in the dark days of military rule, which is now being resurrected under General Buhari’s civilian dictatorship. 

Yet the same Nigeria which has killed and maimed thousands of the unarmed pro-Biafra agitators, who they now brand terrorists, has in obvious complicity, left the world’s 4^th ranked terrorist organisation, by the high number of Nigerians they kill annually, to range freely all over Nigeria killing indiscriminately and committing various atrocities, thus causing damages to property estimated with estimated value of several billions of US Dollars every year.

No wonder when representatives of the 12 Islamic Republics in Nigeria felt their cash cow (Nigeria) threatened by rights agitation of IPOB and issued a threat of genocide, their ‘Quit Notice’ of 6^thJune 2017, on over 11 million Igbo people living in Northern Nigeria, the Federal Government of Nigeria buckled under by failing to arrest and charge the issuers of that genocidal threat and therefore became complicit to that plot to commit Genocide. The same government has now come out in the open and shamelessly endorsed AREWA Youths’ branding of unarmed rights Agitators as terrorists. The government of Nigeria has never been brought so low in bigotry! The Federal government of Nigeria has descended to being directed and run by AREWA Youths – a genocidal group!!

It is worthy of note that the case for independence of Igbo people under their own sovereignty meets all parameters of world’s best practices and international law namely:

1. The Igbo are denied representation by a UN member State’s government,  are systematically disenfranchised by the government of the state they live in by virtue of grave under representation Igbo in both the structure, composition and membership of Nigeria’s government;
2. Igbo people have suffered injustices - worst of all genocide, deportation of 67 Igbo traders from Lagos to Onitsha and its arrogant justification by Lagos State Governor, Alhaji Babatunde Fashola and the indiscriminate destruction of Igbo traders’ wares by present Lagos State, Governor Akinwumi Ambode, in stores built by the traders according to government-approved plans -  for which secession is the appropriate remedy of last resort – “Remedial Rights Only Theory”;
3.  Igbo people by virtual unanimity have chosen a separate state; and
4.  The democratic theory against majority rule justifies session if the existing political entity has allowed secession of any other group within its territory - the Bakassi Peninsular and the 12 Islamic Republics in Northern Nigeria. (For more details refer to my recent work on Self Determination expected shortly in the market).

Finally, Nigeria is a failed State. By its structure configuration, it is incapable of electing competent persons to manage the affairs of its over 180 million people with conflicting values, bunched together. The country needs to be broken into smaller units to match the level of supine political management available in some of the zones. Being the biggest country in Africa, which in a period of over 50 years, is unable to add value to human development of its peoples despite unlimited resources, is not a feat. It is rather a curse to humanity.

APPEAL: My solemn appeal to Nigeria is to let my people, the Igbo, go.

 In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. Having chosen Nigeria as it is, Nigerians should release the freedom-seeking Igbo people from this bondage other Nigerians see nothing wrong with. Restructuring as the rest of Southern and North-Central Nigeria clamours for, obviously will not change the oligarchy’s domineering attitude which is inconsistent with Igbo values.

   Tyranny and enslavement are antithetical to the Igbo spirit of freedom and liberty which would forever destabilise the Nigerian oligarchy’s enclave.

 It is in the best interest of peace for every Nigerian to let the Igbo to go!

 

OkpalaEzeNri Chukwuemeka I. Onyesoh

Enugu,