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.
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...
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 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
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