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No, Igbo
did not “lose a war”. The Igbo did not “lose a war” between 29 May 1966-12
January 1970. No such “war” was waged in Igboland during this period. And this
is not a case of semantics. On the contrary, what went on during those 44
months was a campaign of genocide against Igbo people by Nigeria and its
allies, particularly Britain. 3.1 million Igbo, a quarter of this nation’s population, were murdered.
This figure is about the total fatality of the Vietnam War (both sides –
including all civilians, US
combat troops, the Vietcong, North Vietnam
troops, South Vietnam
troops) between 1959 and 1975. The clearly stated goal of the Nigeria campaign is (note tense of operative verb) to
annihilate the Igbo, as a people: see anthem of the campaign in Hausa,
broadcast throughout the duration of the slaughter on Kaduna radio (shortwave)
and television (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2010/05/29-may-1966.html);
see also key statements made on radio and/or tv broadcasts, interviews/press
conference, essays, memoirs, etc., etc, by leading figures involved in the
campaign – Awolowo, Harold Wilson, Gowon, Danjuma, Useni, Muhammed, Adekunle, Rotimi,
Katsina, Obasanjo, Haruna, Taiwo... To embark on a research of the genocide, it
is indeed staggering to discover what a treasure trove for the researcher just watching
or reading a clipping of statements/commentaries on this crime against humanity
by an Obasanjo or an Adekunle or an Useni or an Awolowo or a Wilson or a Haruna or a Rotimi… This genocide
is ongoing. Those who carried out the genocide do not, at all, deny their
involvement in the crime... It is astonishing.
Survived
The Igbo
survived the genocide. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968/69, few expected the
Igbo to survive. Igbo survival is one of the most extraordinary human
developments of recent history. Some people don’t often appreciate the
resilient spirit and drive that ensured this survival outcome. This capacity
cannot be exaggerated. Provided they survive, no peoples targeted for genocide
lose except, of course, they are obliterated. Those who survive genocide such
as the Herero or Armenians or Jews or Igbo or Tutsi or Darfuri, for instance, are
indeed victors
– because they survived. I am pleased to share the following
link where I elaborate on this subject in a presentation at the historic
conference (in the US) on
Christopher Okigbo, Africa’s
leading poet:
Distinguished
theoretical physicist (discoverer of Animalu’s Isosuperconductivity), expert on
solar energy, professor emeritus, and prolific multidisciplinary author including
a set of biographical studies, one of which is on mathematician Chike Obi aptly
subtitled: The foremost African
mathematical genius of the 20th century Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
Perspicuous
harpist, pianist, organist, bandleader and versatile composer which includes the
ethereal work, Ptah, the El Daoud,
featuring tenor saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
(Born 25 August 1933, Newark, New Jersey, United States)
Jazz
tenor and soprano saxophonist, member of the seminal mid-1960s Miles Davis
Quintet and arguably the most prolific living composer in the repertoire –
compositions include standards “Footprints”, “Nefertiti” and “ESP” and Schizophrenia,
Speak No Evil and the classic, The All Seeing Eye Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
Ethiopian airlines’ scheduled flight lands successfully in Enuugwu on Saturday 24 August 2013 at 1215 hours local time, 1115 Dakar Time, 1115 Accra Time, 1415 Addis Ababa Time, 1415 Johannesburg Time, 1115 GMT, 1215 British Summer Time, 0715 EST, 0415 PST, 0615 Kingston (Jamaica) Time, 0715 Georgetown Time, 0815 Brazilia Time, 1315 Stockholm Time, 1315 Berlin Time, 1415 Helsinki Time, 1515 Riga Time, 1615 Moscow Time, 1645 New Dehli Time, 1915 Beijing Time, 2115 Canberra Time, 2315 Wellington Time... Nnoo nu Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
Straight from the
horse’s mouth: “[Nigeria]
is jinxed and cursed; we should all go to hell”! This declaration is from none
other but Matthew Olusegun Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo, speaking recently in Ibadan, west Nigeria. In the speech, not
surprisingly (saharareporters.com, 13 August 2013), Obasanjo, who had been head of regime for 11 years, totally absolves
himself of being a key agency in facilitating the status of his “jinxed and
cursed” Nigeria as can be
shown clearly in the following (“‘Cargo cult mentality’, Nigeria and the
illusions of NEPAD”, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2011/03/cargo-cult-mentality-nigeria-and.html).
“[J]inxed and cursed” Nigeria
has the unenviable accolade of having carried out the foundational genocide of
post-(European)conquest Africa against Igbo
people. During the course of 44 months, beginning from 29 May 1966, Nigeria
murdered 3.1 million Igbo, or one-quarter of this nation’s population. And
Olusegun Obasanjo is one of the most notorious Nigerian military commanders of
this genocidal campaign. At its apogee, 1968/1969, the Obasanjo-led brigade,
operating in the outstretched south Igboland, had converted this panhandle into
a veritable killing field in which it slaughtered “… everything
that moves … we shoot at everything, even at things that don’t move”, as its previous
commander, the equally notorious Benjamin Adekunle, had so grimly
proffered. The skies of Igboland were neither spared from this “shoot-at-everything” monstrosity. In
June 1969 Obasanjo ordered his air force to shoot
down an international Red Cross aircraft bringing urgent relief to the
encircled and blockaded Igbo and he later boasts fiendishly of this crime in
his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command.
Not since the German genocide against the Herero in Namibia
in the early 1900s had Africa witnessed
such brazen act of savagery on expansive display. As I have argued, severally, Nigeria
collapsed as a state with few prospects on that Sunday it launched the Igbo
genocide (See, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “29 May 1966”,
Given Obasanjo’s imprimatur
on this catastrophe and recalling that it is, after all, not just unbridled
opportunism that the London Financial
Times not too long ago dubbed the same Obasanjo “godfather of modern
Nigeria” (Financial Times, London, 14
April 2012), the genocidist’s Nigeria-is-“jinxed-and-cursed” acknowledgement,
albeit belated, is testimony that the offspring indeed carries the
unmistakeably doomed DNA signature of its paternity.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe On Wednesday 24 July 2013, Nigeria’s
Lagos region regime, headed by Raji Fashola,
deported 72 Igbo people from Lagos
to Onicha, the Igbo Oshimili delta city, 230 miles away. This is the
second such deportation that Fashola has embarked upon within a year. On 18
September 2012, Fashola deported “hundreds” of Igbo people from Lagos to Onicha. The
deportees had all been earlier detained in “warehouses” in Lagos and some in the neighbouring Ogun
region for months before their deportation to Igboland, Biafra. Many of the deportees
are children and older people and some have disabilities.
(Raji Fashola)
Raji Fashola is a lawyer, a member of the Nigerian bar and he is
in fact categorised as “senior advocate”. The world will note that these
deportations contravene articles 2 (b) and (c) of the UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to which Nigeria is a
signatory. The deportations do indeed fit into the overarching architecture of
phase-IV of the Igbo genocide, initiated principally by Obafemi Awolowo,
another lawyer, another “senior advocate” of the Nigerian bar, who was then
deputy to the genocide prosecuting junta (prime minister) as well as head of
the finance ministry and “chief theorist” of the campaign.
(Obafemi Awolowo)
This phase’s strategic objective is to dismantle/degrade the
pre-genocide Igbo economy, Africa’s most
resourceful and dynamic, in perpetuity. The Awolowoist/Awolowoid expectation is
that millions of Igbo would be “forced” out of a “stagnant” homeland-economy with
an ever-deteriorating infrastructure to be domiciled elsewhere in the world,
with Nigeria envisaged as “main destination” where they would primarily labour
in the local industry and services – quite clearly, a form of deportation and
this one is straight out of a nazification textbook. What Fashola has tried his
hands on twice, within the past 10 months, is the beginning of the reverse
trend in deportation. And this can only become more virulently pursued
subsequently – again, out of a nazification textbook.
None of the usually visible and shrilling human rights
practitioners (individuals or institutions) in and around Lagos has condemned this outrage. If the
governor of the state of New York, the US “equivalent” to Raji Fashola, were,
for instance, to have deported 72 African Americans to, say, Georgia or
Louisiana last week’s Wednesday, the Lagos practitioners would have since been
working their phones and pounding their keyboards on calls to the BBC and other
broadcasters and website outlets denouncing (rightly) such an act for the
record! The hapless New Yorker would probably have lost their job by now, due
to the predictable outcry against such repugnant behaviour from both domestic
and international audiences. This outrage is another reminder which often
affronts the sensibilities of the African democrat in the African World,
outside Africa, that continental African heads of regime currently murder
and/or inflict greater levels of damage on the African public than any other
agency in the world and more often than not walk away free.
It is instructive to note that as the nondescript but ubiquitous
Boko Haram cells murder Igbo people (and some others) in their north region
homes, businesses, places of worship and recreation and force survivors and the
maimed and the bereaved racing back to Igboland with the remains of loved ones,
Raji Fashola-operatives, traceable and in uniform, abduct the Igbo from the
streets and highways of Lagos, dump them in secured “warehouses” for
disorientation for months and then “upload” them on trailers for the journey
east to be “offloaded” at Onicha at dawn – usually between 2 and 3. The latter
is no doubt a variation on the ultimate goal of the former as both play out in
sync to Nigeria’s current thinking on waging this protracted genocide:
intensify the murder of the Igbo in the north and begin to challenge Igbo
businesses elsewhere, especially in the Lagos district, despite or rather
because of the well-known fact that Igbo capital and industriousness have
played a key role in building up Lagos for about a century now. These dual
vectors of genocide do clearly point the Igbo to one direction only: the east,
the Igbo homeland.
It should now be evident to all that Igbo deportation is at the
crux of Nigeria’s
sustenance of the Igbo genocide, the engine that fires it on. The deportation
at stake here is of course the Awolowo-original, not the Raji
Fashola-modulation even though the latter has brought this savagery to a head.
The Igbo have no greater opportunity since January 1970 than today, now, to
begin to deal with and overcome this evil permanently. To confront this
deportation with dispatch is to begin the termination of this longest genocide
of the contemporary epoch. No one else will accomplish this feat for them.
Disinvestment and boycott
For the Igbo, the long march to re-take Igboland, re-claim
Igboland, Biafra, their homeland, for
themselves, and consequently end the deportation of 43 years and phase-IV of
the genocide begins now. Aimé Césaire would deftly put it this way: “quest to
reconquer something, our name (sic), our country …
ourselves”. And Lagos, pivotally, where
Igbo investments and assets are worth billions of US dollars, is where this
march begins. Here lies the key to Igbo freedom. Igbo should now embark to disinvest in Lagosand transfer their gargantuan assets to Biafra – move your companies and stocks and shares out of Lagos to Biafra. Business cannot strive in
a fascist stockade. Or would it? The contrast of the democratic redoubts of Biafra couldn’t be more welcoming.
Begin anew and invest and invest and invest in Biafra. The
specifics, vitality and range abound for the choices of the investor, inventor,
scientist, plumber, innovator, thinker, carpenter, analyst, surgeon, builder,
artist, composer, mechanic, estate developer, researcher, chef, sportsperson, manufacturer, trader,
architect, nurse, entertainer, banker, distributor, painter, teacher, insurer, lawyer, fisherperson, musician, engineer,
trucker, producer, sculptor, hotelier, physician, draughtsperson, director, writer, decorator, academic … All
conceivable cutting-edge fields in ideas, science and technology are here to be
worked at – researched on, understood, adapted, reworked, invented,
manufactured, distributed… Biafra will resume the quest towards establishing
the high-powered global-oriented economic enterprise interrupted catastrophically
by the genocide.
Igbo entrepreneurs are therefore thrust with the challenge to turn Biafra into the workshop that serves its people and competes actively with
the rest of the world. The world will surely respond accordingly by
establishing crisscrossing routes of communication to Igboland to enhance
cooperation and exchange. The investment and transformational opportunities
emplaced within the population of 50 million throughout the 200-mile
north-south stretch of highlands and escarpments and forestlands and grasslands and valleys and waterfalls and lakes and assorted reserves of
mineralogical and agricultural resources from the Nsukka plateau (north) to
Azumini, Igwe Nga/Opobo, Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt, Umu Ubani/Bonny, Umuebelengwu
and Ahoada of the Igbo Atlantic (south) and the 100 mile-panhandle from Ugwuta,
Onicha and Anioma west to the Abakaleke/Ehugbo/Bende/Arochukwu east are
breathtakingly immense for the imaginative and industrious investor.
To complement Igbo disinvestment of Lagos
over the deportation, Igbo must also begin to boycott all goods and services
made in and for Lagos.
The Lagos brand is henceforth toxic: “Don’t buy
‘Made in Lagos’”.
The frequently commuting Igbo should cancel all ticket reservations on flights
in and out of Lagos and bookings in Lagos hotels. They should
use other airports en route to Biafra such as Enuugwu, Owere, Asaba, Igwe
Ocha and those in Calabar and Uyo. New airports should be built to cope with
the fast changing situation. A Lagos boycott will only soon force airlines to
route directly to hitherto un-used facilities (with the necessary upgrades of
course!) such as Enuugwu and Owere, for instance, as ultimately, as everyone
knows, successful business orients to the client’s preferences. There is no reason
why the overwhelming majority of Igbo travellers should not fly straight to
their Biafran destinations in a few months as the boycott of Lagos intensifies. No more Lagos business conferences: don’t plan one
there; don’t attend one there – just skip it as “unimportant”! Finally, the
Igbo importers and exporters who command a dominant space in the Lagos district
ports’ activities should move their businesses elsewhere: Igwe Ocha, Calabar,
Warri, Sapele, Burutu and, soon, Igbo entrepreneurs and engineers will add to
these capacities new outlays in Azumini, Onicha and elsewhere and the bridging
up of the Aba-Igwe Ocha conurbation to further diversify enterprise and
opportunities.
The return of the Igbo has indeed begun.
(Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Turnaround” [personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Red Mitchell, bass; Shelly Manne, drums; recorded: Contemporary’s Studio, Los Angeles, US, 23 February 1959])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
