Towards 29 May 2019 – reminder of those three engraved words that encapsulate the very unlikely outcome of the Igbo genocide, this most gruesome and devastating slaughtering of a people not seen in Africa since the late 19th century/early 20th century, launched by Britain and its client Fulani-led jihadist islamist Nigeria state on 29 May 1966: Igbo people survived

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Extraordinary!

IT IS INDEED an extraordinary survival story of history that someone that goes by the name Obiageli, Nkechi, Chinyere, Ifeoma, Amaechi, Nwakaego, Ngozi, Chinelo, Ada, Uzo, Chibundu, Nkemdilim, Chukwuka, Okwuonicha, Chikwendu, Ogonna, Nwafo, Ikechukwu, Onwuatuegwu, Chukwuemeka, Onyekachi, Nnadozie, Okonkwo, Chido, Okafo, Chikwendu, Nkeiiru, Ifeyinwa, Nkemakolam, Ikenga, Uchendu, Okennwa, Nwaoyiri, Okonta, Ukpabi, Amaka, Ofokaaja, Nnamdi, Mbazulike, Chukwuma, Kanayo, Ndukaeze, Chidi, Kamene, Nneka, Onyeka, Osita, Kalu, Ifekandu, Obioma, Chioma, Ndubuisi…  actually walks the face of the earth, today, having survived this programmed sentence of death by Anglo-Nigeria genocidists beginning on Sunday 29 May 1966 and through to 12 January 1970 (phases I-III). 

The genocidists murdered the grisly total of 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s population during the period. The genocide still continues today, Sunday 12 May 2019, with the additional murder of tens of thousands of Igbo people since 13 January 1970 (phase-IV), including the 3000 Igbo murdered since November 2015 by fiendish génocidaire Muhammadu Buhari, installed in office as Nigeria’s head of regime in February 2015 by none other than ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama, first African-descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic, and ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron.

OBAMA’s support of the ongoing Igbo genocide is an unconscionable tragedy, the abhorrent legacy of his presidency.

(Barack Hussein Obama... unconscionable tragedy, abhorrent legacy of a presidency)

Wilsonian decree of Igbo mass slaughter

NONE of the lead génocidaires of this genocide – Harold Wilson, Adesanya Maja Adekunle, Olusegun Obasanjo, Obafemi Awolowo, Allison Ayida, Ibrahim Haruna, Tony Enaharo, Yakubu Danjuma, Yakubu Gowon, Jeremiah Useni, Muhammadu Buhari, Oluwole Rotimi… reckoned, in their dire prognosis of the outcome of the 44 months of Igbo slaughtering that they directed and executed, that the Igbo stood a chance of surviving. 

Harold Wilson, then British prime minister who chiefly coordinated the genocide from the comfort of his offices and residence at 10 Downing Street, London, 3000 miles away from Biafra, had notoriously set the pace for his fellows on what he saw as the future of the Igbo when he informed Clyde Ferguson, the United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra, that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122). 

(Harold Wilson: “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)

ON the ground genocidist trooper “boy-boy” Adesanya Maja Adekunle who was engaged in the slaughter theater in south Biafra in 1968 was so enthralled by his “massa” Wilson’s notorious directive that he publicly reminded the world, in a news conference attended largely by British and other foreign correspondents, of the definitive goal of this genocide: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that don’t move” (The Economist, London, 24 August 1968).

(Adekunle: “I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat ... We shoot at everything that moves in ... I[g]bo territory ... even at things that don’t move”)

Repudiation

BY SURVIVING the genocide, the Igbo have not only dramatically repudiated this vile Wilsonian decree of Igbo mass slaughter and the Adekunleist wretched-soul-of-“boy boy”-executioner, but they are poised today, 53 years later, as the Biafra freedom movement has grown inexorably, to resume the interrupted construction of their beloved state of Biafra – Land of the Rising Sun.

(Cecil Taylor, “Pontos cantados” [personnel: Taylor, piano; recorded: One night with Blue Note – the historic all-star reunion concert, Town Hall, New York, US, 22 February 1985])

******Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Once again, dismissing this diversionary nonsense that calls itself “Igbo presidency” in genocidist Nigeria

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Architects and operatives

GIVEN THE CRITICAL links between the salient features of the politics of the genocidist anti-African peoples’ Fulani-led islamist jihadists and their loyal pan-African constituent nations’ allies of Yoruba and Jukun and Urhobo and Hausa and Edo and Nupe and Jawara and Tiv and Bachama and Kanuri’s mutually shared frenzied escapades of 50 years of looting and pillaging the immense wealth of Biafra, their follow-up blanket occupation of Biafra since 13 January 1970 (jointly employing that notorious “Nigeria” imprimatur in the process), and the overarching architecture of these 50 years of a genocidal campaign, begun on 29 May 1966, few now doubt that the Igbo termination of the occupation is at once the resumption of their disrupted historic freedom march from Nigeria and the implementation of an expansive socioeconomic programme of reconstruction unprecedented in this southwestcenral region of Africa.  

IF THIS is the case, one does not need an “Igbo presidency” in Nigeria to achieve this freedom goal as some Igbo commentators as well as a few others have, at times, contended, but quite uncritically. Just recently, according to reports in the media in Nigeria, even raging génocidaire trooper Olusegun Obasanjo has waded into this perverse advocacy, “supporting [sic] Igbo presidency in 2019” (Vanguard, Lagos, 25 January 2017). This very development is tellingly dreadful. Obasanjo is one of the most notorious operatives of the Igbo genocide during phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. At its apogee, 1968/1969, an Obasanjo-led brigade, operating in the outstretched south Biafra, had converted this panhandle into a veritable killing field in which it slaughtered tens of thousands of Igbo people – “… everything that moves … we shoot at everything, even at things that don’t move”, as this brigade’s previous commander, the equally notorious Benjamin Adekunle, had so grimly proffered (The Economist, London 24 August 1968). The skies of Biafra were neither spared from this “shoot-at-everything” monstrosity by the Obasanjo death squad. In June 1969, Obasanjo ordered his air force to shoot down a 3-person crew international Red Cross aircraft bringing urgent relief to the encircled, blockaded, and bombarded Igbo, and he later boasted fiendishly of this crime in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command (Ibadan & London, 1980: 78-79). 

It is anyone’s guess, 50 years on, what indeed a surviving Igbo-descent president in a Nigeria is supposed to be working on in their role as “president of Nigeria” as prescribed by precisely none other than one of the most loathsome of the architects and operatives of this genocide.  

Inexorable logic & repulsive legacy

IT CANNOT be overstressed that no “Igbo presidency” in Nigeria, not even one reinforced with an all-Igbo personnel in the key cabinet military/police/“security”-positions can halt this ongoing genocide by Nigeria and its British suzerain state. 

This campaign has now acquired an inexorable logic to its being. The Nigeria military and its adjunct forces, especially Boko Haram and the Fulani militia, now strategise and coordinate the prosecution of the genocide as the world has seen particularly since Muhammadu Buhari, yet another génocidaire, was imposed head of regime in March 2015 by ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron and ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-descent president of the United States, 233 years after the founding of the republic. Buhari has murdered 2000 Igbo people since this imposition. Barack Hussein Obama’s support for the Igbo genocide is the abhorrent legacy of his presidency which formally ended a week ago.

What the emergence of Boko Haram and its Fulani militia cousin (part of the five most deadly terrorist organisations in the world presently, according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace [Melissa Clarke, “Globally, terrorism is on the rise – but little of it occurs in Western countries”, ABC News, 17 November 2015,
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-index-increase/6947200, accessed 17 November 2015]), has demonstrated in Nigeria is that each of the (now) tripartite-prosecuting agency of the Igbo genocide has become very much decentred, very much motivated, very much engagingly virulent. 

The typical Boko Haram suicide-operating cell is a handful-strength, in single digits, and none in the group knows any of the others until they meet at the designated, targeted site of operation – in which they, invariably, are not expected to survive! If any survives, the person, of course, becomes a member of a new cell of hitherto unknown members and the cycle goes on... A Fulani militia cell, employing this decentred operational flexibility, carries out its terror outrage accompanied by a herd of cattle as cover... An army, air force, navy, so-called DSS (“department of state services”)/other terror service units based anywhere in occupied Biafra can organise a murder onslaught anytime on the occupied population without waiting for “direct authorisation” from the genocidist high command back in Abuja, Nigeria...

Inalienable

Proir to this amalgamation of genocidist forces in Nigeria, still on the “Igbo presidency”, we mustn’t forget that Nigeria was under the leadership of an Igbo general when the genocide began on 29 May 1966. Thus, “Igbo presidency” offers no route to the Igbo halting the genocide, one of the strategic goals of the Biafra freedom movement. None whatsoever. 

THE ROUTE REMAINS Igbo freedom from Nigeria. This is an inalienable Igbo right with or without the genocide as I have argued severally. If the Scots, for instance, one-tenth of the Igbo population and without a genocide antecedent would wish to leave a union they have largely been exponential beneficiaries for 300 years (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Rights for Scots, Rights for the Igbo”,
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html), the Igbo, surely, don’t require any agonisingly turgid historical nor sociological treatise to wish to leave Nigeria.

Resolution

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 mid-1930s to October 1960), the Igbo ceased to be Nigerian on Sunday 29 May 1966. This is the day Nigeria launched the Igbo genocide. Consequently, Nigeria became a raging tragedy – one of the five deadliest human-made tragedies in African World history.

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. Tens of thousands of additional Igbo have subsequently been murdered during phase-IV of the genocide which the Nigerians launched on 13 January 1970. The genocide continues unabated. 

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. In the specific Nigeria case, that epitome of its savagery, presidency nigeriãna, is at once repudiated for what it is worth. 

IT IS this possibility of a transformative future of Africa that the Obasanjos and the Adekunles and the Buharis and others in the genocidist lair and war outposts on the continent responsible for the murder of 15 million African peoples in the past 50 years dread most profoundly.

Ascent

Biafrans have since abandoned genocidist Nigeria and are on their way to restore their sovereignty in their Biafran homeland as their resilient and confident freedom movement breathtakingly demonstrates currently. Its outcome on the African scene is of immense epochal consequence, the likes of which we haven’t seen. 

THE BIAFRA FLAG  is on the ascent. There can never be a reversal. This will be one of the most outstanding breakthroughs of the freedom movement of the age.

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Spectrum” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra include Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (2011), Biafra Revisited (2006) and African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe (2001)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe