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| Buhari's Biafra rhetoric very reckless. We shall never forget - Charles Ogbu |
Few days ago, president Muhammadu Buhari gathered a group of Southern youth corp members in his hometown of Daura. And his message to them goes thus:
"Tell your colleagues who are agitating for Biafra to just forget about it!"
As a young Igboman who lost fathers, mothers, uncles and aunties to the Biafran course over 4 decades ago, I find Mr Buhari's statement very reckless, careless, ill-conceived, highly insensitive and criminally offensive. Idiotic, even!
That is as criminally offensive as asking the Rwandan Tutsis to forget the 1994 genocide that saw the Hutus slaughtering about 800,000 of their kind within just a period of 100 days.
This is as criminally offensive as asking the Jews to forget the Holocaust that saw millions of their kind marched to the gas chamber by Adolf Hitler and his murderous gang.
How can any reasonable man expect the Igbos to forget a course for which millions of their progenitors paid the supreme price?
How can we forget the hate and envy-induced pogrom targeted at the Igbos living in the North --a pogrom which started as earlier as 1945 in the North Central city of Jos and saw hundreds of thousands of Igbos being butchered by Northern Muslim youths for no just cause?
The ethnic cleansing got worse in the Kano killing of 1953 when another hundreds of thousands of Igbos were again dispatched to the great beyond in the cruelest manner and for no just cause other than the fact that they were Igbos.
These two major Igbo killings all happened long before Nigeria even got her independence.
So if you are one of those using the 1966 coup as a justification for the numerous ethnic cleansing targeted at the Igbos in the North, it is high time you cured your ignorance.
These killings were induced by sheer hate and envy. And they would later continue long after the country got her independence.
And most importantly, it was those hate-induced killings that forced the Eze-Igbo gburugburu; Dim Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu to pull his Igbo people out of the murderous entity known as Nigeria.
Those who are always quick to use the 1966 coup to justify whatever grave injustice the Igbos have been subjected to, would do well to tell us the justification for the 1945 Jos killing and 1953 Kano killing --all targeted at the Igbos, long before Nigeria even got her independence.
It would equally be nice if they could tell us how a coup organised by soldiers from almost all the tribes in the country including the North... yes, the North... came to be known as Igbo coup.
Even if we pretend to agree to twist history by admitting the coup was an Igbo coup, it would still require those people to tell us from which moral book they learnt it was okay to kill thousands of civilians for a 'crime' committed by a couple of soldiers who share the same ancestry as those civilians.
We will never forget that most of those Igbo killings were carried out by Hausa/Fulani mob with the active connivance of the security agencies under the command of Yakubu Gowon who headed the govt then and was not just unable but clearly UNWILLING to stop the Igbo killing.
The then governor general of the Eastern region, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (the very first Oxford product to enrol in the Nigeria military school) did not just wake up from a malaria-induced sleep and declare Biafra as some terribly dishonest bunch would want us believe.
Far from it. The late Eze Igbo gburugburu (Ojukwu) got the nod of the Eastern General Assembly to declare Biafra when it became very apparent....too apparent, even....that the Gowon-led Nigerian govt was not willing to protect the lives of Igbos living in the North neither was it ready to implement any of the agreements including the most comprehensive of them all; the Aburi Accord, aimed at putting a stop to the Igbo killing.
How can you deliberately refused to protect a people and still refuse to let them go???
How can we forget the fact that during the Biafran war, the Nigerian state committed war crimes against Biafrans civilians?
Worthy of note here, is the very devilish and barbaric role played by the late chief Obafemi Awolowo during the Biafran war.
As the federal commissioner for finance and de facto deputy to Gowon, Awolowo it was who came up with the idea of cutting off food and medical supplies from the Biafran civilians.
In war, there is something called "Rules Of Engagement". Violating any of those rules could be interpreted as war crime.
And cutting off food and medical supplies from civilians constitute a grave war crime.
Even if you are fighting ISIS or Al-Qaeda, as a sovereign nation state, certain responsibilities are still expected of you.
Targeting the civilians wives or children of those ISIS or Al-Qaeda members constitute war crime.
The notion that "All Is Fair In War" is a very foolish notion.
It is on record that the number of Igbo civilians who died as a result of Awolowo's policy were higher than those who died from bullets and bombs of the Nigerian forces.
Based on the above, I reasonably believe that Awolowo was a war criminal.
History is what it is. It is not what we want it to be!
Even after the war, it was still Awolowo who came up with the idea of seizing all the monies Igbos had in their account prior to the war. Igbos who had above 20 pounds in their account before the war were paid just 20 pounds.
I have no doubt that the late sage did what he thought was best for his side, the Nigerian side but that which he thought was best was barbaric, wicked, devilish and against all rules guiding the affairs of decent men.
How can we forget that it was Muhammadu Buhari who led the Nigerian troop in an operation that saw hundreds of thousands of Igbo civilians massacred?
Regrettably enough, all the grave injustices and Igbo killings which forced Ojukwu to declare Biafra then, are still very much alive in today's Nigeria as the Igbos are still being killed and maimed and their hard earned properties taken from them by their Northern neighbours who apparently have no shred of respect for the sanctity of the human lives.
Even more regrettable is the fact that the current Nigerian president; Muhammadu Buhari has continued to demonstrate that almost 50 years after the Biafran war, the Nigerian state is still waging a clandestine war against the Igbos.
As long as Igbos living in the North are still being killed by their blood-thirsty Northern neighbours over the flimsiest of excuses such as the drawing of the cartoon of Muhammed, we will never forget Biafra!
As long as the vampires known as the Fulani herdsmen can still trek all the way from Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, etc. to my village, somewhere in Enugu state and slit the throat of women and children in a state-sponsored land grabbing campaign, we will never forget Biafra!
Biafra is an ideology. It is our identity. It is who we are! Asking us to forget Biafra amounts to asking us to spit on the grave of the millions of our progenitors who paid the ultimate price for the Biafran struggle.
If we forget Biafra, millions of our kind killed during the Biafran war would have died in vain!
If we forget Biafra, our own Prince Nnamdi Kanu; the leader of the Indigenous People Of Biafra detained for over 9 months now, even against court orders, will have suffered in vain.
Why is the Nigerian state so eager and desperate to get the Igbos to forget Biafra? Why is the Nigerian state hell-bent on deleting Biafra from our memories?
How can a state be so vile to want her people to forget an event that led to the death of millions of people --an event that could have been avoided had the then govt of Gowon not been very complicit in the ethnic cleansing against the Igbos resident in the North?
Somebody should help me tell Mr Buhari; the ethnic cum religious bigot who has been running Nigeria as though he was the president for the Northern Muslims only, that neither gods nor men can make us give up on Biafra.
Even if it's just one Igbo man that is left standing in this fraudulent and very oppressive British Business center known as Nigeria, as long as the grave injustices that caused the Biafran war still exist, he will continue to agitate for Biafra.
Lest I forget, IPOB is not an organization.
It is not a club neither is it a political party. It refers to a people --an Indigenous People known as Biafrans.
And its leader is Maazi Nnamdi Kanu who is currently in detention for reasons not unconnected with the Biafran course.
Creating fake groups like TRIPOB and co with the aim of creating the false impression of division within IPOB and discrediting Nnamdi Kanu, was a very foolish, moronic and idiot thing on the part of the security agencies and their collaborators.
We can smell fraud from a million miles away.
Arresting, imprisoning and killing thousands of Biafran agitators as the DSS and the army are currently doing, is a very wrong way to address the Biafran question.
I find it morally outrageous that a Muhammadu Buhari who had no issues offering amnesty and govt protection to the deadliest and fourth deadliest terror groups; Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen respectively, cannot overcome his hate for the Igbos and bring himself to look at the Biafran question with an eye and mind free from hate.
When a section of your country expresses grievance against the state and threatens to secede, as the president, you owe it a duty to invite them like your children and listen to their grievances.
Even if you cannot address all their complaints, you should at least give them the assurance that you'd address some of them.
We cannot deny that the Biafran agitators have genuine grievances against the Nigerian state.
If we could survive heavy bombardment and blockade from the Nigerian state and her international allies for 3 years, survive with just 20 pounds to become among the wealthiest in the country today and still survive having our properties seized in the 'Abandoned property' saga to become one of the biggest owners of landed properties in Nigeria today, it will take more than a badly lettered highly vindictive ethnic bigot called Muhammadu Buhari to stop us.
We are Biafrans!
We will never apologize for being who we are!!
We Will Never Forget Biafra!!!
-Charles Ogbu
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