Britain and the Igbo genocide – this annihilative mission, 29 May 1966-24 January 2018

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

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BRITISH SUPPORT FOR the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-Present Day, is driven principally by one factor: to “punish” Igbo people for playing the vanguard role in the mid 1930s-October 1960 movement to terminate 100 years of Britain’s conquest and occupation of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa that it calls Nigeria. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968/1969, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is adamant: “[I] 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, London & New York: Quartet Books, 1977, p. 122).

HAROLD WILSON probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigerian co-genocidist league of slaughters on the ground in SWC Africa, 3140 miles away from Britain, perform far in excess of their “massa”’s  grim target by murdering 3.1 million Igbo instead – an outcome coldly recounted indeed in Wilson’s own memoirs where he notes that the Nigerian génocidaires, duly led by Hausa-Fulani/islamists trenchantly opposed to the mid 1930s-1960 African peoples’ restoration-of-independence goal and therefore equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative mission in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces  “during the whole” of  the Second World War (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, p. 630, emphasis added).

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

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This Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led genocidist Nigeria and Africa

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TO UNDERSTAND the international politics of the ongoing Igbo genocide in Biafra, southwestcentral Africa, is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. The African-based perpetrator of this genocide is the Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led Nigeria.

Template

As very distressing reports today (Wednesday 11 October 2017) from many regions in (occupied) Biafra attest, genocidist Nigeria is adamant that it is prepared to tap into any degenerate constituent in the genocide template to effectuate its entrenched objective to destroy Igbo people. It has already murdered more Africans in Biafra since 1945 than the total number of Africans murdered in Africa since 1900 by all of Europe’s conqueror-powers in Africa: Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain – including the number of Africans the Germans murdered in the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa (1904-1907). 

HAUSA-FULANI/islamist-led Nigeria now rates a not-too-distant second to Belgian King Leopold II’s notorious position as Lead Génocidaire of African Peoples Since the 19th Century in the Leopold II/Belgian state’s genocide against Africans in the central regions of the Congo River basin (1878-1908).

(New York Art Quartet, “Mohawk” [personnel: John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

FOR THE RECORD ... Shocking! Even genocidist Nigeria once envisaged permanent membership of the UN security council as the following commentary in dissidentvoice.org (12 May 2005) shows: “Nigeria does not deserve UN security council seat”

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Nigeria does not deserve UN security council seat 

(originally published in dissidentvoice, 12 May 2005, and is republished here unedited as in the original)

IT NOW APPEARS very likely that Nigeria will, after all, hand over Liberian fugitive leader Charles Taylor (currently in exile in Nigeria) to the Freetown-based UN court investigating war crimes in conflicts in and around Sierra Leone. Thanks to the insistence of the US government, the Obasanjo regime is about to send Taylor to the Freetown court despite its long-held position to the contrary. The regime has until recently argued that it was against its “national honour” (whatever that means) to respond positively to the court’s request to extradite Taylor to face trial for overseeing the slaughter of 1.3 million Africans in the west central states of Liberia, Sierra Leone and southern Guinea while he was president of Liberia.

The irony is of course not lost on any keen observer of this development. Whatever may be the US’s strategic interests on this subject (possible Taylor links with al-Qaida, possible Taylor involvement in millions of dollars worth of money laundering, possible Taylor complicity in the January 2005 attempted coup in Conakry to remove the pro-American Guinean president), it has taken the intervention of a non-African power to force a disreputable African leadership to hand over the head of a fellow murderous African leadership to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million Africans – not 1.3 million non-Africans. African democrats are surely unencumbered by this irony. African leaderships have murdered 15 million Africans across the continent in the past 40 years in appalling spates of genocide. Even if the devil itself were to lecture African leaderships to stop murdering their peoples and, in the process, help prevent just one more African being annihilated by their depraved overlords, that would be readily welcome. African populations are under siege by brutal regimes replete across Africa. The peoples require unremitting support for their right to safeguard their lives and progress from wherever in the world. Not less.

If indeed the US administration has threatened to block Nigeria’s current so-called “bid” for a permanent seat on a possibly enlarged UN Security Council, if it continues to keep Taylor away from facing justice, as some press reports indicate, Washington has done very well. But the Americans shouldn’t lift their threat yet, even if Nigeria dispatches Taylor to Freetown. It is breathtakingly obscene for Nigeria to wish to be considered for a permanent seat at the Security Council given the ghastly human rights records of successive Nigerian regimes in the past 40 years including the current one where statecraft at best is run as some medieval baronial fiefdom. The US and the rest of the world should reject this “bid” out of hand. Not to do that would be to send the wrong signal to Africa – by rewarding a band of genocidist operatives who have the blood of Africans on their hands, and who have in tandem pillaged an economy whose resources alone could easily have transformed the entire continent.

Pestilence                 

IT MUSTN’T be forgotten that Nigeria inaugurated the current African “Age of Pestilence” when its leadership in 1966 embarked on the premeditated massacres of its Igbo population during a stretch of five months. One hundred thousand Igbo were killed during what emerged as the first phase of this genocide. The following year, the leadership expanded the territorial reach of this campaign into Igboland itself for the second phase. Three million Igbo, or one-quarter of the nation’s population then, were annihilated within 30 months. Most of Africa stood by and watched, hardly critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives and the sacking and plundering of community after community. As the perpetrators appeared to have got off free from any forms of sanctions from Africa (and the rest of the world) for what were clearly crimes against humanity, several leaderships elsewhere in Africa were “convinced” of the lessons that they had drawn from the escapades of their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder our peoples at will. There will be no sanctions from abroad”. As a result, the killing fields of the age stretched inexorably beyond the Nigerian frontiers: Liberia, Sierra Leone, southern Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zaïre/Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan.

In the past 40 years, Nigeria has been run by a succession of genocidist generals and other operatives (military and civilian alike) who planned, executed and sustained the Igbo genocide. The current head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo, commanded a notorious division in southern Igboland that committed indescribable atrocities as it overran cities, towns and villages. Neither he (who has been head of state for a total of nine years during the period) nor any of his colleagues (most of whom are still alive) has apologized or shown remorse for their crimes against humanity. On the contrary. In fact Yakubu Gowon, who was head of state and grand overseer of the genocide, only recently told the press in Enugu (political and cultural capital of Igboland) that he had “nothing to apologize” to the Igbo.

BEFORE he shot himself in a Berlin bunker in 1945, few would have expected Adolf Hitler to apologize or show remorse for his organized genocide of six million Jews across Europe during the Second World War. Hardly anyone, though, would wish to contemplate a Hitler traveling to Jerusalem today to address a press conference in which he would insist categorically: “I have nothing to apologize for the six million Jews my forces annihilated between 1939 and 1945. What I did was right”. That would be unimaginable monstrosity. But this was precisely what Gowon did at Enugu a fortnight ago.

Nigeria’s “bid” to join the Security Council could not have provided the world with a better opportunity to deal with the crux of contemporary Africa’s malaise: the non-accountability of African leaderships who employ genocide and mass murder as a twin-track instrument of power. No country in Africa is more appropriate for the world to enforce this accountability than where the disease emerged in the first place on the continent – Nigeria, the quintessentially failed and genocide-state.

NOW is the time for the US and the world to insist that each and every member of the Nigerian leaderships who participated in the murder of three million Africans 40 years ago, and who in effect triggered off the chain of mass killings of 12 million others elsewhere in the continent must be made to account for their action. Besides, if Nigeria is ultimately forced to hand over Taylor to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million Africans in the 1980s-1990s, then his current hosts (Obasanjo, Abubakar, Babangida, Buhari, Gowon, Danjuma and many many others) must also be apprehended for the murder of 3.1 million Africans in the 1960s-1970s.

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

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FWD: Mmuo Biafra all over the place...

(O Obusonjo: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel...”)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

That 51 years almost to the day, Olusegun Obasanjo, a particularly fiendishly ingrained Nigeria genocidist operative would be asking for Biafrans, in some meeting in Abuja (genocidist Nigeria capital), to “be begged” (Vanguard, Lagos, Thursday 25 May 2017) not to march away, exit from genocidist Nigeria on their Biafra freedom goal begun on 29 May 1966. Extraordinary...

ON 5 JUNE 1969, génocidaire Olusegun Obasanjo, then commanding a death squad in south Biafra, ordered his air force to shoot down any Red Cross planes flying in urgently-needed relief supplies to the millions of surviving but encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo. Genocidist air force pilot Gbadomosi King duly carried out Obasanjo’s orders. Gbadomosi King shut down a clearly marked, incoming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 aircraft near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew.

Génocidaire Obasanjo et al will account

Génocidaire Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this crime is grotesquely, chillingly revolting. He writes in his memoirs, appropriately entitled, My Command: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [name of the death squad Obasanjo, who subsequently becomes head of Nigeria regime for 11 years, commands] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division” (Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command, 1981: 79).

ALL THOSE WHO have been involved in this genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, including particularly génocidaire Olusegun Obasanjo, will account for their role in this crime against humanity. There are no statutes of limitation in international law for the pursuit, apprehension, prosecution, sentencing and conviction of anyone or institutions involved in genocide.

Surely, no one murders the Igbo child, the Igbo woman, the Igbo man and gets away with it. This is the punishing realisation that must have been hunting génocidaire Olusegun Obasanjo as he made his Abuja "speech" earlier today.

51 YEARS LATER, and after its murder of 3.1 million Igbo and tens of thousands more, Nigeria genocidists must quickly come to terms with the following testament: the Igbo have exited genocidist Nigeria – for ever.

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

86th birthday of Chukwuemeka Ike

(Born 28 April 1931, Ndikelionwu, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Novelist, university registrar, academic, Africa west region principal pre-college qualifying examination board (WAEC) administrator, one of the leading intellectuals in defence of the people during the Igbo genocide, phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, carried out by Britain and its Nigeria client state during which 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population are murdered in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa; Anglo-Nigeria launches phase-IV of the genocide on 13 January 1970 and this has continued unabated with tens of thousands of additional Igbo murdered; Igbo genocide is the longest, most gruesome, and most ruthless genocide in contemporary history

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Britain and the Igbo genocide – this annihilative mission, 29 May 1966-24 January 2017

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

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BRITISH SUPPORT FOR the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-Present Day, is driven principally by one factor: to “punish” Igbo people for playing the vanguard role in the mid 1930s-October 1960 to terminate 100 years of Britain’s conquest and occupation of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa that it calls Nigeria. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968/1969, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is adamant: “[I] 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 probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigerian genocidist subalterns on the ground in SWC Africa, 3140 miles away from Britain,  perform far in excess of their “massa”’s  grim target by murdering 3.1 million Igbo instead – an outcome coldly recounted in Wilson’s own memoirs where he notes that the Nigerian génocidaires, equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative mission in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces  “during the whole” of  the Second World War (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record, 1971: 630, added emphasis).

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

No invasion of the Gambia!

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

AS FAMILIES and friends and peoples heartily exchange the customary best wishes for the new year, west Africa’s most notorious Murdering Inc., genocidist Nigeria, is already putting final touches to the launch of its new year’s early bloodbath episode. But this time round, the target isn’t across the predictable borders of the contiguous state of Biafra to the south but further to its west – the Gambia, 1500 miles away.

“Elections” for head of regime were held in the Gambia last month (December 2016) in which Yahya Jammeh, the incumbent, apparently lost and conceded to opponent Adama Barrow initially but soon changed his mind because he had “since [found] irregularities in the polling” exercise. Jammeh has instead “appealed” to the country’s high court, which he invariably controls, to “rule” on the dispute.

Bellicosity

In the meantime, a 4-person representative body of ECOWAS, west Africa region’s economic organisation, of which the Gambia is a member, travelled to Banjul, the Gambia, to begin some mediation in the crisis. The delegation met both Jammeh and Barrow, separately, but was unsuccessful in resolving the contentious issues at stake. An ECOWAS summit in Abuja, Nigeria, later followed on the subject but its resulting communiqué, prompted largely by Nigeria and the organisation’s secretariat, was outlandishly bellicose.

Instead of continuing and even expanding the parameters of its representative’s mediation visit to Banjul, just begun with the very brief, mostly formal procedural sessions with the Gambian protagonists, the communiqué was surprisingly emphatic that it would “take all necessary actions to enforce the results of 1st December 2016 elections”. To underscore the gravity of this increasing bellicosity, some media organisations in the region have in the last few days been publishing images of “battle ready Nigeria” troops “awaiting orders” for “possibly invading” the Gambia to “topple”/“force” Jammeh out of office. Marcel de Souza of the ECOWAS secretariat indeed confirmed in a separate press briefing (Premier Times, Lagos, 23 December 2016) that the Abuja summit had “authorised” an ECOWAS “standby force” to invade the Gambia from staging bases in Sénégal (not explicitly stated in the communiqué) if Jammeh did not “step down” by 19 January 2017, the presumed end of “his mandate”. (Sénégal almost envelopes the Gambia land space completely, as the map above indicates, thanks to those incredulously bizarre conquest frontier lines darted out by the dual European occupying states France and Britain in the region in the 19th century.)

Scant credible election

As most people know, what passes for election across Africa is largely a farce. The murderous (European)conqueror “Berlin-state” entrenched on the continent does not require an election to function and uphold its definitive mission and as I have shown more expansively elsewhere (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Elections in Africa: the elector, the court, the outcome”, PENSAR-Revisita de Ciêcias Jurídicas,

http://www.unifor.br/images/pdfs/Pensar/v18n3_artigo6.pdf , accessed 20 March 2014), Europe’s lead-occupation powers, particularly Britain and France, have ensured that stipulated client-nations/nationalities (for instance islamist Hausa-Fulani in a Nigeria, Arabised African islamists in the Sudan) in the contrived conquest ensemble on the ground in Africa (Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Congos, the Guineas, the Sudan, whatever… ) run the “successor state” almost in perpetuity – principally to oversee and safeguard extant European World strategic and socioeconomic expropriated havens. It is in this context that Nigeria, the archetype of the deathly ensemble in place created by none other than Britain, the genocidist executioner of 3.1 million Igbo people in the most gruesome genocide in Africa since Germany’s assault on the Herero and the Nama and the Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa in the early 1900s, is tellingly the grave emergency to the peace and goodwill of contemporary west Africa; definitely not a Yahya Jammeh.

APART FROM perhaps Sénégal and to a limited extent Ghana, none other of the 16 countries of ECOWAS has had a credible election as a “Berlin-state” of Africa. A credible election in a “Berlin-state” is intrinsically a contradiction in terms. Just Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa, paradoxically, given its very familiar history, would join Sénégal and Ghana in that league of rare exceptions in Africa on this score (“Elections in Africa”).

It should be stressed, therefore, that the overwhelming majority of the heads of regime gathered in the Abuja summit on the Gambia came to power originally as military putschists or in rigged elections, often aided by judiciaries they control (“Elections in Africa”). Nigeria regime’s Muhammadu Buhari, a trooper actively involved in 50 years of the Igbo genocide, was imposed as chief of state operations in March 2015 by the then British Prime Minister Cameron, born five months after Buhari first got involved in his murder of the Igbo in phase-I of the genocide, and US President Obama, notably the first African-descent president in 233 years of the US republic. Given particularly the monstrosity of the dehumanisation of African peoples in the United States throughout the course of this epoch, Barack Obama’s support for the Igbo genocide in Africa, the land of his fathers, is an incalculable tragedy, a catastrophic legacy. Since Buhari was installed in power, 2000 Igbo have been murdered by his genocidist military and his two other adjunct forces, Boko Haram and Fulani militia – two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations. Neither Obama’s White House nor his state department nor his embassy in Nigeria has ever condemned any of these murders.

Hands off the Gambia!

Nigeria and ECOWAS must now abandon all plans to invade the Gambia. They have demonstrated woefully that they are no worthy arbiters in this dispute. The peoples in the Gambia must be allowed by essentially hostile neighbours, and the rest of the world, to sort out the problems on the “elections” and whatever else without threats and intimidations. There isn’t anything sacrosanct about the 19 January 2017 “end of mandate” date in the Gambia for protagonists to sit down and negotiate a way out of their differences. These negotiations shouldn’t have deadlines. The Gambian parties must be encouraged to discuss and discuss and discuss to resolve this crisis – however long it takes them.

Surely, the world can facilitate these intra-Gambian talks. The lead arms supplying countries to Africa, especially Britain, the US, Russia, China, the Ukraine and Pakistan should immediately ban all arms supplies to the Gambia and Nigeria as well as to the rest of the 14 ECOWAS member states. These regimes and states, with the obviously negligible manufacturing base of their own, rely heavily on the world outside for the lethal range of armaments to murder peoples and devastate communities within and without their frontiers. 

West Africa is arguably the continent’s most troubled region and another front of confrontation, this time in the Gambia, must be stopped.

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Great new week puzzle...

Which of the 51 states listed below has the following inscription etched brazenly on its coat-of-arms?:

Our lead regime cadres of genocidist and putschist sergeants and “generals” and privates and corporals are indeed recycled routinely as immanent crucibles of statecraft

1. Kiribati

2. Solomon Islands

3. Britain

4. Turkmenistan

5. Sénégal

6. São Tomé & Principe

7. Hungary

8. Estonia

9. Surinam

10. The Netherlands

11. Congo Democratic Republic

12. Kosovo

13. Canada

14. Myanmar

15. New Zealand

16. Columbia

17. Russia

18. Kenya

19. Thailand 

20. Togo

21. Venezuela

22. Saudi Arabia

23. Peru

24. St Lucia

25. Libya

26. Vanuatu

27. Brazil

28. Yemen

29. Finland

30. Laos

31. Argentina 

32. Somalia

33. Nigeria

34. Guinea-Bissau 

35. Pakistan

36. Jamaica

37. Ghana

38. Chad

39. Poland

40. Honduras

41. Australia

42. Kenya

43. Kazakhstan

44. Papua New Guinea

45. Kyrgyzstan

46. Côte d’Ivoire

47. Ukraine

48. Ecuador

49. North Korea

50. East Timor

51. Austria

(New York Art Quartet plays Charlie Parker’s composition, “Mohawk” [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Nigeria does indeed belong to a “G”!

(This commentary was first published on Thursday 16 April 2009 and is reissued here, unedited, in this season of intense reflections on the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

UNTIL A FORTNIGHT ago, 43 years to the day since the beginning of the Igbo genocide perpetrated by Nigeria and its allies, no head of regime in power in Nigeria had ever admitted, albeit unwittingly, the utter worthlessness of Nigeria in the pecking order of the countries of the world. On Nigeria’s non-invitation to the April 2009 G-20 London economic summit, regime head Umaru Yar’Adua notes mournfully: “Today is a sad day for Nigeria as a country. This is because we are not invited to a meeting of the 20 world leaders. We have the population, we have the resources and we have the potential”. Predictably, Yar’Adua refers to those hackneyed, bogus indices (“population”, “resources”, “potential”) that everyone knows obfuscate the immanent fragility, infamy and hopelessness that chart the Nigeria quagmire. In response to Yar’Adua’s pain, Kevin Ani, a commentator from the Nsibidi Press civil rights group, notes: “Even if one extends (sic) this list to G-1000, Nigeria still will not make it”.

It cannot be overstated that the Igbo genocide put paid to any Nigeria pretensions to transform itself to a serious state of global contention. Nigeria, which the Igbo had strategically led to liberate from 60 years of British occupation, collapsed, irremediably, in May 1966. This was when its troops, police, students, teachers, civil servants, community leaders, clergy, alimajiri and the like in north Nigeria planned and descended on Igbo children, women and men domiciled in the region – killing, raping, maiming, looting, destroying … A total of 100,000 Igbo were murdered between May and October (1966) in this first phase of the worst genocide in Africa since the 1900s. The Nigerians later expanded their murdering zones of operation to liquidate the Igbo by attacking the entire stretch of Igboland (from Issele-Ukwu, Agbo, Anioma, Ugwuta and Onicha in the west to Ehuugbo, Aba and Umuahia to the east; from Nsukka and Eha Amuufu in the north to Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt, Umu Ubani/Bonny and Igwe Nga/Opobo to the south) between July 1967-January 1970. A total of 3 million Igbo were murdered during this third phase. Altogether, the Igbo lost one-quarter of their population as a result of the genocide.

On the morrow of this pulverising season of murdering, the only tangible capability that the murderers had acquired was one to commit even more murders – nothing else … definitely, not the more challenging capacity to develop and transform an economy to, in turn, attract and merit the accolades and recognitions from peers elsewhere. The tragedy of the otherwise farcical so-called “rebranding” of the Nigeria state, this Malebolge, is that the current “quest” is supposedly overseen by an Igbo academic (Dora Akunyili) who presumably is unaware of the catastrophic history of her people in Nigeria or is probably biding her time to tell her employers the blunt truth of Nigeria’s inexorable cascade into irrelevance.

Group-G

Yet contrary to Yar’Adua’s angst over Nigeria’s non-membership of the G-20, Nigeria actually belongs to a “G-” grouping. It is called Group-G and Yar’Adua must know that not only does his country belong to this outfit but it also heads it as its undisputed supremo presently.

IN THIS club, the “G” stands for the beginning of that dreadful word which Nigeria has at once operationalised and institutionalised as the legacy of its vicious existence and has since exported across contemporary Africa – Genocide.

(New York Art Quartet, “Mohawk” [personnel: John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe