Grazing land for Fulani militia terrorism in Biafra under the cover of planned occupying genocidist Nigeria military-run “cattle ranches” must be blocked by the Biafran resistance

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IT IS INDEED hilarious how awfully predictable the islamist genocidist Nigeria regime has become of late.

Throughout most of the summer, it unleashed its Fulani militia group (often misclassified in the media in Nigeria and elsewhere as “herdsmen”), cousin of its other created terrorist grouping, Boko Haram (the latter are part of the five deadliest terrorist organisations in the world currently according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-index-increase/6947200, accessed 17 November 2015), to ravage swathes of territory across Biafra, murdering and maiming hundreds of people and destroying their property worth millions of US dollars.  It was in one of such campaigns that the militia murdered some seminary students near Nsukka, northcentral Biafra, and abducted and murdered Akaeze Ofulue III, the highly respected obi or king of Ubulu-Ukwu, west Biafra. These attacks are part of the intensification of the current phase-IV of the Igbo genocide.

NEITHER the regime in Nigeria nor of course the occupying genocidist military on the ground in Biafra ever condemned these atrocities. As I also stressed during the period, neither former British Prime Minister David Cameron nor in fact US President Barack Obama (first African-descent president in 233 years of the US republic) who both installed Muhammadu Buhari as new head of the Nigeria regime in March 2015 for once condemned these outrages (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/select-terroristoutrages-across-world.html).

Besides the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law and other Biafra-based tireless human rights organisations which have meticulously reported these murders as well as others carried out directly by the genocidist military since the Buhari imposition, Amnesty International in London, England, has also elaborately informed the world of the slaughter in two widely-publicised studies it published in November 2016 
(https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/peaceful-pro-biafra-activists-killed-in-chilling-crackdown/, accessed 23 November 2016)
and earlier on in June 2016 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/06/nigeria-killing-of-unarmed-pro-biafra-supporters-by-military-must-be-urgently-investigated/, accessed 10 June 2016).

Corner shop vs “cattle ranch”

SIX MONTHS later, the regime has just made the trite announcement that some of its military operatives would be sent to Argentina to “learn how cattle [are] reared” so that “cattle ranches [are set up] in almost all [military] divisions … and brigades” (Vanguard, Lagos, 20 December 2016).  For a particularly degenerate genocidist military that has spent 50 years in a desperate campaign to destroy Igbo people and which has itself been riven internally by coups and coups and countercoups and variations on coups, this haematophagous monster surely has no conceivably creative enterprising characteristics in its DNA. The Nigeria military cannot run the most rudimentary of a corner-shop; it surely wouldn’t understand what it entails to run an infinitely more complex organisation as a cattle ranch. Definitely not.

Dreadful legacy

ON the face of it, Nigeria’s “cattle ranch” initiative is therefore phony but nonetheless a venture, as will be elaborated shortly, that serves as cover for the concrete, underlying ominous policy calculation which keys into the overarching strategic architecture of what it considers the “final stretch” of this phase of its genocidist drive against the Igbo – currently being played out in this people’s Biafran homeland. 

Thanks to the seeming carte blanche to murder as many Igbo as he thought fit without the possibilities of US/international criticism or sanctions that regime chief Buhari received right from the outset (in 2015) particularly from Barack Obama, Nigeria has by and large been “shielded” from consequential international revulsion in response to this crime against humanity perpetrated on Igbo people. Thus the US government under Obama – the White House, the state department, the US embassy in Abuja, Nigeria – has remained morbidly silent throughout the October 2015-December 2016 raging slaughter of hundreds of Igbo carried out by the Buhari dual force-operational genocidist machine deployed in Biafra: the military, Fulani militia. For Obama, first African-descent US president, it is indeed a dreadful legacy to support this full blown islamist-led genocide in contemporary Africa, this continent of his fathers (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-this-piece-is.html).

Shattering the silence

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’s latest report on the genocide, already referred to, coming literally on the eve of the end of Obama’s 2-term presidency, shatters this orchestrated international silence over the Igbo genocide. The import of Amnesty’s study is a comprehensively graphic reminder to the world on what the survivors of the stretch of the one-year’s murders have been reporting all along, what the Biafra human rights organisations have been publishing during the period, what updated situation report of the genocide on the ground since its own June 2015’s study, what heinous crimes have been committed against a peaceful and industrious people by the reprobate genocidist installed in office by Obama (and ex-British Premier Cameron) without the appropriate response from the “international community”. 

At once, for the first time in 13 months, Amnesty’s report projected the grim news of this phase of the Igbo genocide onto the transmitting wires of the world’s leading news agencies and coverage by television and radio broadcasters and newspapers: Reuters, PA, AFP, AP, CNN, MSN, BBC, France24, Newsweek, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, Fox News, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Die Welt, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Figaro, Hindustan Times…

“Cattle ranch” ploy: annexation & islamisation

PREDICTABLY, the genocidist regime was riled up by the Amnesty International report. Suddenly, its grave atrocities in Biafra, so zealously but cowardly covered up until then by its masters in Washington and London was broadcast and rebroadcast worldwide. The regime’s feverish response was threefold and aimed principally to reinforce its 47 years of occupation of Biafra. First, it launched a major travel clampdown across Biafra to disrupt the journey plans of hundreds of thousands of Biafran families travelling home from Nigeria to celebrate Christmas, one of the most important holidays of the Biafra calendar for a country that is 98.5% Christian. Second, the regime declared that Buhari would visit Enuugwu, the Biafran capital, just before Christmas, in what was seen by the Biafran resistance as a “desperate provocation” by the genocidist. The regime called off the visit at the last minute on the uncompromising insistance by the resistance that Biafrans couldn’t “tolerate such a visit” and would oppose it forthwith. 

Third, its most strategically intuned, the regime announced its “cattle ranch” project which is essentially a ploy to deploy its terrorist Fulani militia with their cows across the valleys and farmlands of Biafra on a permanent basis by expelling millions of Biafran farmers and back up this (fresh) invading Fulani presence with added protection from its already occupying military formations. Here in Biafra, the Fulani are indeed desperate to adapt a strategy of “cow swamping-and-occupy” which they had employed in their conquest and islamisation of parts of Yorubaland and multiple nations and peoples in the Niger and Benue valleys of northwestcentral Africa in the 19th century/early decades of the 20th century, just before the subsequent conquests and occupations of these states and peoples by Britain.

Essentially, there are five words to describe this particularly sinister so-called cattle-ranch genocidist Nigeria programme: annexation and islamisation of Biafra.

Biafran resistance 2017

IN JULY 2010, a group of leading Igbo human rights scholars (including respected literary critic Ben Obumselu) and activists (including influential lawyer Olisa Agbakoba) met in the Ofuobi African Centre, Enuugwu, in a conference and called formally for the termination of the Nigerian occupation of Biafra (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/in-wake-of-murder-of-three-possibly.html). They had stated a preamble to their 10-point call for this termination which we need re-stating here:

[Biafra] has become militarized with a vast deployment of expeditionary and predatory police and army personnel who are from outside the region. For instance, there are 61 Police check-points between Abakal[e]k[e] … to Nsukka … (a distance of about 130km). In [contrast] between Obolo-Afo [Biafra] and Lokoja [Nigeria] (a distance of nearly 400 km) no checkpoints exist. This state of siege is exemplified by the current [situation] of … [Biafran] cities [including] Aba, [Enuugwu, Abakaleke, Onicha, Owere] and Nnewi – hitherto the fastest growing and thriving industrial cum commercial cities in the African continent now being turned into refuse dumps and ghettos. Businesses that would have provided jobs to engage our youths have been strangulated by incompetent and criminal leadership.

I had indicated soon after the Ofuobi conference that the Igbo should stop paying the millions and millions of US dollars worth of expropriation tax that sustains the genocidist occupation and their subjugation and this call must be reiterated once again. One must never, ever, be a participant in their incarceration, their deindividuation. Nigeria must unconditionally cease its occupation of Biafra. A general, indefinite strike across Biafra should be called forthwith, demanding the unconditional dismantling of Nigeria’s barriers of extortion and expropriation, and the evacuation of its military/police/customs bases/Fulani cattle herds from their land. An extensive and continuing-evolving organisation is required as this march of freedom develops.  The Biafra resistance has its work cut out. It is unstoppable and the “cattle ranch” ploy is understood clearly for what it is: stark desperation.

Genocidist Nigeria does know that the Igbo are not Nigerian. The Igbo are from Biafra. The Igbo are Biafran. Whilst the Igbo worked extraordinarily hard by playing the vanguard role in the liberation of Nigeria from the British conquest (beginning from the 1930s), the Igbo ceased to be Nigerian on Sunday 29 May 1966. This is the day Nigeria launched the Igbo genocide. The Igbo renouncement of their Nigerian citizenship is the irrevocable Igbo indictment on a state that embarked on the destruction of 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation’s population at the time. The only future a genocide-state has is that those murdered by it or others apprehensive that it could extend its murderous heritage on them abandon it – nothing else.

BIAFRANS have since abandoned genocidist Nigeria and are on their way to restore their sovereignty in their Biafran homeland. There can never be a reversal. This will be one of the most outstanding breakthroughs of the freedom movement of the age.

(Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be” [personnel: Coltrane, piano; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone;  Jimmy Garrison, bass; Ben Riley, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York, US, 29 January 1968]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe