Ike Ekweremadu in Nuremberg, Germany

(Ike Ekweremadu)

EC Ejiogu

IF YOU are travelling from Enuugwu towards Nsukka on the more recently built roadway that goes northwards of the Nike clan, when you get to Ogbeke Nike, on the right side of the road there begins a sprawling vibrated cement blocks perimeter fence that runs parallel to the road all the way for an extensive distance before it meanders endlessly uphill and deep into the forest indicating what is obviously a mindless land-grab bordering on speculation. There’s nothing about this endless undeveloped land-grab that reveals who it actually belongs to. Not even the road-side signage on it that deceptively announces that the sprawling “PARCEL OF LAND BELONGING TO LEGAL PROTECTION COUNCIL” is truly revealing of the individual to whom it actually belongs.

IT was by coincidental happenstance that this writer got to know that the actual owner of this sprawling endless acreage of land is indeed, Ike Ekweremadu, who is also a member of the Nigerian Senate in Abuja. Mr. Ekweremadu who is from the Ogwu (Agwu) clan, which is located far away from Nike, on the dilapidated Enuugwu-Umuahia-Port Harcourt expressway, has been in the Nigerian Senate since 2003. He was for the four-year duration that ended just this year, the deputy president of Nigeria’s Senate. On the occasion when Ekweremadu’s ownership of the said sprawl was disclosed to this writer, the latter had offered a ride to three middle-age local ladies en route Nsukka. It was during the course of the chit-chat that they held between them during the journey’s course, which this writer eaves-dropped on, that suddenly veered onto the subject matter of land-grab when the car got to and began to speed past the said endless sprawl that those female free riders revealed that indeed, the said stupendous land-grab belongs to Ekweremadu.

EKWEREMADU’s encounter Saturday, August 17 with angry Igbo youth in the city of Nuremberg in faraway Germany brings to context his politics and his avaricious penchant for using same in the main, to exclusively feather his personal nest all the way at the expense of his Igbo race and its destiny in unitary Nigeria. Mouths have wagged and continue to wag in the bid to cast aspersions on the Igbo youth involved without regard for the more pertinent issues that are involved as they tie into the Igbo Question in the Nigeria project vis-a-viz what got Ekweremadu and the youth, together in that infamous dustup.

For full disclosure, the intention here by this writer is neither to condone, nor justify what may have transpired there, indeed happened to Ekweremadu in Nuremberg during that encounter. Instead, the essence here is to contextualize the encounter, and possibly proffer an explainer.

SOME OF THE immediate assertions above tie quite deeply into the raging perception out there amongst many Igbo regarding Ekweremadu and the claims he makes to Igbo identity and his selfish exploitation of same in his politics and avaricious pursuit of his narrow self-interests. The widely held perception out there, which should not be dismissed as invalid is that he parasites off Igbo identity in his politics at a time when the anger over the Igbo condition in unitary Nigeria project is palpable amongst the youth at home and in the diaspora. Anyone who is oblivious of the truism that most, if not all that constitute today’s Igbo Diaspora were

compelled to emigrate abroad in search economic sustainance by the dire situation of affairs with regard to the Igbo in the Nigeria project.

Some of the Igbo who this writer elicited their views on the subject matter of this piece recalled how Ekweremadu cried out loud the other time when he was being throttled by minders of the unitary state in the Nigeria project with the dubious claim that the latter picked on him simply because he’s Igbo! That out-cry of dissemblance from him elicited solidarity response from many Igbo, and it probably compelled his supposed Hausa-Fulani traducers to let up on him at the time.

YET Ekweremadu consistently conducts himself in ways that convey the impression that he’s mindless of the existential threat that the Nigeria project and the configuration of its political economy represent for the Igbo and their destiny as a people since the end of the shooting phase of the Nigeria-Biafra war in January 1970 and the events that precipitated it.

Almost all those surveyed for their opinion by this writer about Ekweremadu voiced the view that his encounter with angry Igbo youth in Nuremberg, Germany is symbolic of expiatory trials of Nazi war criminals that took place in that city right after Nazi hostilities where suppressed in World War II. Some even argued that he encounter could qualify as an attempt by the former to put Ekweremadu and his politics of predation at the expense of the Igbo on popular trial.

Some of those who spoke to this writer went to great length to furnish pointers to buttress their views that Ekweremadu’s primary motivating focus has been the raw acquisition of wealth and aggrandizing fame at the expense of Igbo good. One of them pointed out the placement of giant billboards at strategic locations in the city of Enuugwu earlier this year to mark his birthday celebration. According to eye-witnesses, the said billboards touted banal claims that prefixed him as Professor Dr. Senator Ike Ekweremadu, a professor of law at a university in faraway Louisiana, in the US. One person who claims he knows Ekweremadu quite well swore that he’s aware that Ekweremadu hired and retains a special assistant who ghosted to enable him to acquire two advanced law degrees from a local university in Enuugwu. Another disclosed that he is always quick to deflate requests from his constituents who approach him with the pathetic excuse line that he is merely “in government and not in power in Abuja”. Indeed!

IN THE CONTEXT of Ekweremadu’s sympathizers who voiced strong views that German authorities in Nuremberg must identify, arrest and prosecute the youth involved in the encounter, there is one succinct explainer: Germany’s Nazi past notwithstanding, civil society and the rule of law are still well and alive in that country for all residents, citizens and non-citizens alike. Unlike in unitary Nigeria, in Germany, public protests by aggrieved citizens, and others are allowed and are used to speak truth to power and its public actor custodians. Leadership responsiveness is still an integral component of social authority patterns and the practice of authority in society in democratic Germany.

The implication of the Ekweremadu-Igbo youth encounter being that the former and his likes have been put on notice by the latter, and rightly so, that the tide has certainly shifted against selfish actors in the Igbo public space.

THE VIDEO clips of Ekweremadu in that encounter found online speak volumes. Clad in an outfit resplendent with the motif of unitary Nigerian state, he cuts a pathetic picture as he scampered away in the apparent attempt to seek refuge in a building with his fellow Igbo, angryand in hot pursuit. One of them can be heard repeatedly calling him a “useless man”. Then came the frames when he was quickly dragged out of the building through some distance towards a white sedan car into which he was pushed and driven away. The evident add up from the drama being the apparent message from his fellow Igbo that they have had enough of those who find cheap currency in their destiny as a people.

****Professor EC Ejiogu, formerly at the Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa, is the author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria: Political Evolution and Development in the Niger Basin (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011) and guest editor of the  Journal of Asian and African Studies’s  Special Issue on Chinua Achebe: The Igbo Pogrom, Biafra War and Genocide in Nigeria (Vol 48, 6, December 2013)

Not “xenophobia”! Call the current murders of non-South African Africans in South Africa for what it is: African-run state in South Africa, headed by Cyril Ramaphosa, murders African peoples from elsewhere on the continent domiciled in South Africa so savagely

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THE CYRIL RAMAPHOSA African-led South African regime and its clearly state propped up armed bands of South Africans have continued their unrelentingly mapped out murders of African peoples from elsewhere in Africa who live in South Africa. Twelve Africans have so far been “registered” murdered in the past few days but full casualty figures are sure to rise as more reports from gory crime scenes from particularly the Gauteng province that embraces both Pretoria and Johannesburg, the red cross, hospitals and other emergency services are published.

(1. African-led Cyril Ramaphosa regime in South Africa vs African  émigrés in South Africa, 14 February 2018-present)

IN THE past decade, the South Africans have murdered hundreds of African  émigrés in their country especially those from Biafra, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The murderers have looted and destroyed the émigrés’ homes and have forced hundreds of thousands of survivors sent into horrid South Africa refugee camps or forced to return to their various countries.

The near 26,000 Biafra émigrés in the country, who had themselves fled the ongoing 53 years of the Igbo genocide in occupied Biafra by Fulani-led islamist/jihadist genocidist in Nigeria, have borne the brunt of this savage campaign including the very latest. Since February 2016, over 120 Igbo in South Africa have been murdered as thousands of desperate survivors seek alternative countries for refuge. Observers have been shocked and outraged over the obnoxious obstacles placed recently by the South African immigration services at the main Johannesburg airport on the spirited effort made by Allen Onyeama, the Igbo businessperson, whose “Air Peace” airline services have provided free special evacuation flights for Igbo survivors out of South Africa (Vanguard, Lagos, 11 September 2019).

(Allen Onyeama’s “Air Peace” airline services evacauting Igbo survivors of raging murders of African émigrés domiciled in South Africa, carried out by the country’s African-led regime [saharareporters.com, New York, 16 September 2019]) 

What “xenophobia”?

ALL along, as this murder campaign rages, the South Africa state categorises this  heinous crime exclusively subjected at African  émigrés in its country so quaintly and outrageously with the essentially sanitising euphemism, “xenophobic attacks” – an outrage of a designation readily picked up, re-packaged, re-broadcast, often uncritically with relish, across the world by the usual expressly anti-African lives’ broadcasters and other news organisations and commentators.

Instead what the world is witnessing presently in South Africa is a carefully state-planned murdering campaign against targeted African émigrés in South Africa and executed by organised South African death-squads. It must be called by its name: murder. There must be no obfuscation in presenting this crime for what it is.

According to the latest UN statistics on “people from other countries” or “foreigners” domiciled in South Africa indicating clearly what countries they had been born, there are a total of 33 countries – from across the world, Americas to Australasia, with a population of approximately 4 million (moastarblog.wordpress.com, accessed 12 September 2019). Sixteen of the countries are from Africa and the rest are from Europe, Asia and the United States (moastarblog.wordpress.com).

Zimbabwe nationals constitute the highest number of “people from other countries” or “foreigners” in the data with approximately 650,000, followed by Mozambique, 380,000 (moastarblog.wordpress.com). There are 124,000 British nationals who live here and the figures from just a few of the other 33 countries that follow underscore the range of geographical diversity of “people from other countries” in South Africa: 94,000 Germans; 45,000 Portuguese; 40,000 Indians; 39,000 Italians; 33,000 Dutch; 20,000 Irish; 13,000 French; 13,000 Belgians; 12,000 Australians; 40,000 Indians; 39,000 Chinese; 17,000 Americans; 27,000 Kenyans; 17, 000 Pakistani; 11,000 Ghanaian (moastarblog.wordpress.com, accessed 12 September 2019)

THE WORD “xenophobia” in English means “dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries”.  From the definition, “against people from other countries” is the key principle applicable to any geography of reference in the world that this meaning is solicited and this is crucial in our focus here. No English dictionary defines “xenophobia” in some restricted racialised/regionalised format as “dislike of or prejudice against people from African countries”, for instance, or “dislike of or prejudice against people from other African countries” or “dislike of or prejudice against African peoples from other countries” as the sheer horror of the operationalisation of this South African state-sponsored murder of African émigrés, stepped up more aggressively during the African-led Jacob Zuma regime last decade, has been perversely portrayed to the world by state propagandists in Pretoria.

(2. African-led Jacob Zuma regime in South Africa vs African  émigrés in South Africa, 9 May 2009-14 February 2018)

POINTEDLY, Zuma’s and the present Ramaphosa regime have carved out and designated the residential districts of nationals from predominantly 16 African countries resident in South Africa for murderous assaults on them, as the regimes deem fit, out of the rest of the nationals of the remaining 17 countries of the world resident in the country, principally from the United States, Europe and Asia. These African-led regimes have turned the African émigrés’ populations in South Africa into “hostage” emplacements or South Africanised-adapted lebensraum (borrowed and adapted from the studies of a range of German racist geographers and other “theorists” of the 19th century which were executed on the ground most catastrophically in Africa, firstly, and latterly in Europe by follow on German genocidist practitioners of the 20th century) to enable those groupings of its African South Africans, very pessimistic about their future prospects in the country, to commit regularly orchestrated murder and pillage as their own primary source for social existence.

This is a hardly disguised state diversionary preoccupation. The South Africa state engages in these murders as part of the explosively contentious contemporary politics in South Africa where it has exhibited singularly demonstrable failure to transform the country for its peoples after 342 years of the pan-European conquest, occupation, and subjugation – despite the “breakthrough” of 1994 which occurred, most importantly to stress here, with incomparable several decades’ of unflinching support and solidarity from particularly the African World, from Barbados to Biafra.

African World must now break with South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA has not murdered any non-African national during the course of its so-called xenophobic attacks” on “foreigners” in the country. Neither the Zuma regime nor indeed Ramaphosa’s would dare attack American citizens or any in the range of European citizens domiciled in South Africa (as the list above shows) with such gross callousness that has characterised these anti-African death campaigns and hope to survive in office in weeks. We mustn’t fail to note that the latter foreign national residents, especially from Europe (British, Dutch, German, French, Italian), come from the same countries which originally conquered and occupied South Africa and still exercise expansive interests and control of the economy of the country presently.

The African World faces a killer African-led regime in South Africa which murders African peoples from elsewhere on the continent living within its frontiers with impunity. The silence from the African World to this raging inhumanity at display from African-led South Africa is unconscionable. Africans, worldwide, must now break with South Africa in response to this unmitigated horror starting right away in the following arenas: political/diplomatic relations, businesses and trade, academic/intellectual exchanges, cultural ambassadorships/enterprises, social travels, sports engagements, etc., etc.

African peoples’ lives matter. Or don’t they? If these current Zuma, Ramaphosa et al African-led South African regimes who murder other African peoples in South Africa in the 21st century so flagrantly were led instead by a European in previous eras such as a Hendrik Verwoerd, B J Vorster, Marais Viljoen, PW Botha, Jan Heunis or a FW de Klerk, there would surely have been a thunderous outcry from across Africa and its diaspora to these executions. But it appears Africans appear to “tolerate” the agency of such catastrophic violence on African peoples if the band of perpetrators is African-led. It is precisely because of this morbid silence from African publics that African-led regimes, not from Europe, not from the United States, not “the white man”, not from any extracontinental African aggressor state, have murdered 15 million African peoples in genocides and wars across Africa (west, north, northcentral, northeast, eastcentral, southern regions) since that Nigeria-based Yakubu Gowon-Obafemi Awolowo bubonic genocidist dyarchy launched the Igbo genocide on 29 May 1966. The dyarchy murdered 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation’s population, in this gruesome, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa during phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 May 1970. The genocide goes on, phase-IV, 53 years, and subsequent African-led regimes entrenched in Nigeria have murdered tens of thousands of additional Igbo since.

FOR PEOPLES who denounce anti-African violence and racism in all their forms, especially when directed against them from European peoples or from others (rightly so), Africans, wherever they are, must now know that they stand to forfeit any moral rectitude if they continue this deafening silence over the defiantly, openly waged march of gruesome, irrepressibly driven murders of African émigrés in South Africa. The murders are carried out by African-led regimes of Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa in the country. Zuma and Ramaphosa are no less enwrapped in this state’s cataclysmic laughter of African peoples as hitherto European-led liquidating South African regimes whose names, among others, are, on record, as Naudé, Fouché, Diederichs, Verwoerd, Vorster, Viljoen and Botha.

(Chris McGregor and Brotherhood of Breadth, “Davashe’s dream” [personnel: McGregor, piano, African xylophone; Mongezi Feza, pocket trumpet; Harry Beckett, trumpet; Mark Chaig, cornet; Nick Evans, trombone; Malcolm Griffiths, trombone; Dudu Pukwana, alto saxophone; Mike Osborne, alto saxophone, clarinet; John Surman, baritone saxophone, soprano saxophone; Ronnie Beer, tenor saxophone, Indian flute; Alan Skidmore, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone; Harry Miller, bass; Louis Moholo, drums, percussion; recorded: UK Neon Label, London, 1971]) (alto saxophone and trumpet solos: Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza respectively) 

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s latest books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

89th birthday of Christopher Okigbo – great Biafran and Africa’s most influential and celebrated poet

(Born 16 August 1930, Ojoto, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe  

TODAY, Friday 16 August 2019, is the 89th birthday of the great Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo.

Okigbo is Africa’s most celebrated and most influential poet. He occupied the poetry chair of the continent’s post- (European)conquest literary academy in the 1960s with Chinua Achebe the head of the novel institute and Wole Soyinka, head of drama.

Okigbo’s scholarship and influences are extensive and varied: Igbo history, mythology, art and philosophy, ancient world religious and spiritual heritage encompassing Nri, Kemet (“ancient Egypt”), Babylon, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Greece and Roman as well as the poetry of Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Yeats, Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound, Hopkins.

RIGHT from the outset, Okigbo’s perspicacious intellectual contribution in mapping out the tenets of Africa’s renaissance scholarship is his focus on both redeeming the European occupation’s assault on the spiritual embodiment of the African existence, in the wake of the conquest, and confronting a ruthless genocide state-in-the-making in Nigeria at the first half of the 1960s. Okigbo’s worldview does not tolerate any excuses for either the perpetration or perpetuation of any forms of tyranny and subjugation of peoples. Since then, Okigbo’s poetry has had a profound impact on the work of several poets of his generation as well as on the ever-expanding stretch of the continuing-Igbo genocide-generation of poets and writers in other genres.

Crucial site

FIFTY THREE years on, the state in contemporary Africa is essentially a genocide-state – exemplified, most catastrophically, by Nigeria, the Sudan and the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Okigbo’s incisive scholarship (see, especially, Christopher Okigbo, Heavensgate, Silences, Limits, Distances, “Laments of the Masks”, “Laments of the Deer”, “Four Canzones” and Path of Thunder), to the poet’s eternal credit, anticipates the nature and characterisation of the multifocal crises of this development and rigorously interrogates their tragic consequences.

For Okigbo, given the operationalising backdrop of the European conquest and occupation, the spiritual is a crucial site of the African resistance and campaign for the restoration of sovereignty. This is because the eventual goal of the occupation’s assault is aimed at burrowing a cataclastic fault-line in the soul of the people to pre-empt or complicate their determined process of recovery on the morrow of the triumph of freedom.

EVIDENTLY, Okigbo responds to this emergency, in his poetry, by weaving a multilayered and panoramic landscape of often-complex fabric of overarching architecture of ideas that meditates on the variegated spiritual universe of the people.

Genocide

In the 1960-1966 Nigeria historical context, particularly, Okigbo’s poetry of resistance pitches its tent squarely on behalf of those who would confront blatantly-rigged election results (1959/1960-1966) and imposed parties and leaderships (1959-1966), rigged census returns (1962, 1963), arbitrary arrests and detentions (1960-1966), rabid and rampant authoritarianism (1960-1966) and, most tragically of all, the Nigeria state & its British suzerain state-organised genocide against the Igbo people (beginning Sunday 29 May 1966). The poet himself was killed defending his beloved motherland. The dual-genocidists murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of the Igbo population during the 44 months of phases I-III of the genocide – 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. In phase-IV, which the genocidists launched on 13 January 1970 and continues unrelentingly to this day, they have murdered tens of thousands of additional Igbo. The latter include the 3000 Igbo murdered since November 2015 by the fiendish Muhammadu Buhari genocidist regime which was installed in power by ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron and Barack Hussein Obama, ex-US president, the first African-descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic. Barack Hussein Obama’s unconscionable support for the Igbo genocide is the abominable legacy of his presidency.

In the gripping lines of Okigbo’s last poem cycle, Path of Thunder, written before the 29 May 1966 outbreak of the Igbo genocide but published posthumously, he breathtakingly presages the contours of the cataclysmic consequences of Africa’s foundational genocide of the 20th century and his own likely death during the slaughter:

AND THE HORN may now paw the air howling goodbye …

For the Eagles are now in sight:
Shadows in the horizon –

THE ROBBERS are here in black sudden steps of showers, of
caterpillar –  

THE EAGLES have come again,
The eagles rain down on us –

POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of howitzers, of
detonators – 
THE EAGLES descend on us,
Bayonets and cannons – 

THE ROBBERS descend on us to strip us of our laughter, of our 
thunder – 

THE EAGLES have chosen their game …
…

POLITICIANS are here in this iron dance of mortars, of
generators –  

THE EAGLES are suddenly there,
New stars of iron dawn;

So let the horn paw the air howling goodbye …

O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be
my last testament; let this be
The ram’s hidden wish to the sword the sword’s
secret prayer to the scabbard –
…

BEYOND the iron path careering along the same beaten track – 

THE GLIMPSE of a dream lies smouldering in a cave,
together with the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be
the ram’s ultimate prayer to the tether …

AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever… (Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, 2008: 71-72.)

Many a season

CHRISTOPHER IFEKANDU OKIGBO would be appalled by the devastation of Biafra, 53 years after the end of the phases I-III of the Igbo genocide, and 49 years after the launch of phase-IV of the genocide. The Fulani islamist/jihadist-led league of genocidist executioners on the ground in Nigeria and their centrally actuating constituent  pan-African nations’ accomplices – Yoruba, Gwari, Jukun, Jawara, Kanuri, Tiv, Edo, Nupe, Hausa, Urhobo, Bachama – have indeed unleashed a half of century of unmitigated savagery on Igbo people, unprecedented in African history. Co-genocidist Britain, beginning with Prime Minister Harold Wilson on 29 May 1966, couldn’t have bargained for less in constructing such a ghoulish slaughtering coalition with its steadfast Nigerian allies.

Okigbo wouldn’t rest on his laurels, though, in response to challenge and overcome what is undoubtedly a clear, conscious, beastly-scripted and targetedly-driven juggernaut to destroy the Igbo, one of the world’s very talented peoples. Okigbo, who believes in the power of words, would head for his keyboard … and more… 

HISTORY testifies that the quest for human freedom is not often an engagement pursued over just one season. For many, and the Igbo appear to be incorporated in this group, it is rather much more painfully drawn out; it could entail a cast of over several, long seasons. This trajectory, therefore, inevitably, encapsulates its vivid vicissitudes of pain, grief, opportunities, turmoil, setbacks, triumphs, turmoil, grief, opportunities, breakthrough. What is at stake here is for a more focused, more steadfast, and a more enduring understanding of the huge tasks ahead. Surely this is music in the ears of the resourceful and resilient Igbo people.

The Igbo will defeat this half a century of genocide. Unfailingly. The Igbo will rebuild their battered towns and villages and economy – which was Africa’s fastest growing powerhouse on the eve of the genocide. Unquestionably, the Igbo will restore their sovereignty.  

AS THE Okigboan œuvre demonstrates, human freedom eventually prevails most luminously. Okaa Omee.

(Sam Rivers Quintet, “Mellifluous cacophony” [personnel: Rivers, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 May 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s latest books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

A year ago today! Biafran girls win world’s top technology contest held in the United States

(Save-a-Soul team from Regina Pacis Secondary School, Onicha, Biafra ... displays their coveted gold medals in San Jose, US, Thursday 9 August 2018: great Biafran ambassadors...)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

A TEAM of five teenage girls from the Regina Pacis Secondary School Onicha, southwest Biafra, has won the gold medal in the junior division finalists of the 2018 global technovation contest held in San Jose, United States.

The students are Promise Nnalue, Vivian Okoye, Adaeze Onuigbo, Jessica Osita, and Nwabuaku Ossai. Their team, Save-a-Soul, came top in the competition involving 9,000 girls from across 115 countries with their developed app, FD-Detector, which tackles fake pharmaceutical products in southwestcentral region of Africa.

The Save-a-Soul team had travelled to the US with their teacher and mentor, Uchenna Onwuameagbu-Ugwu, and beaten the group of 12 teams’ finalists which included the US, China and Spain to clinch their gold. 

IGBO people can’t wait for Biafra’s restoration of independence from the Anglo-Nigeria genocidist occupation (enforced since 13 January 1970) to open up unlimited opportunities of creativity and innovation for their young people, one of Africa’s most precocious and hardworking. The opportunities are part of strategies crucially factored into the multitudinal transformative landscape that Biafra will project.  

(Sam Rivers Sextet, “Paean” [personnel: Rivers, soprano saxophone; Donald Byrd, trumpet; Julian Priester, trombone; James Spaulding, alto saxophone;  Cecil McBee, bass; Steve Ellington, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, NJ, US, 17 March 1967])

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s recent books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Igbo insist

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BRITAIN creates a predatory estate in southwestcentral Africa it unabashedly calls Nigeria, a name it concocted cavalierly from one of the derivatives of the racist, dehumanising pan-European-crafted “n*****” epithet with edited part of word “area” added on to emphasise the conquered African peoples’ domicility. 

Igbo people

As part of its strategic calculations to effectuate its age-old obsessive drive to control the destiny of African peoples in perpetuity, following its lead-role in centuries of the deportation and enslavement of Africans in the Americas, Britain then employs an equally predatory and expansionist egregiously anti-African Fulani islamists/jihadists, whose home is the Futa Djallon highlands, 1500 miles to the northwest, to murder indigenous uncompromisingly republican Igbo people at will in this longest and most devastating genocide of contemporary history – with 3.1 million Igbo murdered, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, and tens of thousands of additional Igbo murdered, 13 January 1970-present day. The latter includes the 3000 Igbo murdered since November 2015 by the regime of fiendish genocidist Muhammadu Buhari who was installed in power by David Cameron, ex-British prime minister, and Barack Hussein Obama, ex-US president, indeed first African-descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic. 

BRITAIN could not have found itself in a more ecstatic bliss in March 2015 when this African-descent US president openly supported the genocide against Igbo people that it had prosecuted so unrelentingly with co-genocidist Fulani-led Nigeria for 49 years – since 29 May 1966.  Barack Hussein Obama’s unconscionable support of the Igbo genocide is the abominable legacy of his presidency. 

Freedom

For the Igbo, the resistance and overcoming from co-genocidists Britain & Nigeria are undoubtedly existential. Clearly, the Igbo are the authors of their freedom which, thankfully, 53 years later, is on the cards. 

Neither Britain nor Nigeria nor, indeed, any other power can stop Igbo freedom. 

AS Britain cannot now fail to note, Biafra’s restoration-of-independence predates its own Brexit “self-determination” (Theresa May’s [ex-British prime minister] quote in letter to Donald Tusk, EU president, 29 March 2017) quest by 50 years. The “self-determination” (“self-determination” is an inalienable right for every people, recognised by the UN) that Britain now seeks from the European Union is the same “self-determination” that Biafra has sought from the Anglo-Nigeria Union since 29 May 1966. Unlike its experience from the European Union, Britain has unleashed a genocide on the Igbo in the past 53 years to stop the latter’s goal of “self-determination”. 

Clearly, Britain cannot continue to live a lie of some “civilised” state at a time it has spent 53 years carrying out the gruesome genocide against Igbo people, one of the world’s most democratic and resourceful peoples, steadfastly allied in this campaign with its co-executing Fulani jihadists who British anthropology would otherwise dismiss as “primitive” and “retrogressive”.

IGBO FREEDOM from this Nigeria haematophagous monster, presently in its death throes, is the great African story of the 21st century. Igbo will build, reconstruct, embark on all possibilities of working for themselves and appropriating the fruits of their labour from their land and on their own terms.

(John Coltrane Duo, “Jupiter (variation)” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, bells; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Van Geldar Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 22 February 1967)

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s recently published books on the Igbo genocide are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Biafran ingenuity unstoppable: Chizobam Stephany Ugboaja and Chukwuemeka Favour Alozie from Biafra are top students of the 2019 West Africa School Certificate Certificate Examination results just released

(Ndi akwukwo: Chizobam Stephany Ugboaja [left] and Chukwuemeka Favour Alozie [right] with Emeka Ihedioha [centre], administrator of Imo region, east Biafra, who has commendably awarded university scholarships to both top students)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

DESPITE the ongoing Igbo genocide, the longest and most gruesome in contemporary history, executed on the ground in Biafra by the Nigeria military and its duo-terrorist adjuncts Fulani militia and Boko Haram (2 of the 5 deadliest terrorist organisations in the world presently), despite the occupation of Biafra by Nigeria since 13 January 1970, despite Nigeria’s state of siege imposed over all of Biafra since 13 January 1970, despite Britain’s instrumentalist coordinating role of this genocide by successive governments since Harold Wilson’s in May 1966, very hardworking Igbo students have consistently exercised a stellar performance over Nigerian students in all key categories of the education enterprise – from infant/primary to university/other tertiary.

Assets

In this 2019 West Africa School Certificate Examination, Chizobam Stephany Ugboaja (Jesuit Memorial College, Igwe Ocha, south Biafra) and Chukwuemeka Favour Alozie (Marist Brothers Juniorate, Uturu, east Biafra) came first and second, respectively, out of the total 1.6 million students examined. Ugboaja scored an “A1” or “distinction” in each of the nine subjects she entered for while Alozie scored eight “A1”s from his own nine subjects. 

IGBO youths constitute one of Africa’s best-developed multidisciplinary humanpower conglomeration of assets. Igbo people can’t wait for the restoration of the independence of Biafra to open up continents of creativity and transformation for its young people that will have tremendous impact across the African World and the rest of humanity.

(John Coltrane Quartet,  “Equinox” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Steve Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 26 October 1960])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s recently published books on the Igbo genocide are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe