Mmuo Biafra a biakwa! Genocidist Nigeria abandons its desperate, contemptible drive since 1999 to erase 29 May 1966, day of its launch of the Igbo genocide, from history

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

AS I show in the essay in the following link (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2015/05/blog-post_7.html), 
genocidist Nigeria, in 1999, declared 29 May of the year its “democracy day” as an additional tool in its murderous arsenal to deny and erase 29 May 1966, day it and co-genocidist state Britain launched the Igbo genocide, from history and public consciousness. Twenty-nine years earlier, 1970, soon after its end of phases I-III of the genocide (12 January 1970), murdering 3.1 million Igbo people, the genocidists had abolished the teaching of history in its schools as the key feature of this denialist project.

Failed mission

Two reasons account for the génocidaires’ abandonment of their 29 May so-called democracy day on 6 June 2018: 

1. The indefatigably resilient tenor of the politics of the Biafra freedom movement with its heightened, pinpointed focus on the dates of 29 May and 30 May (Heroes Day) on the Biafra calendar, particularly in these last three years of the jihadist Muhammadu Buhari-led regime, has so saturated the news cycle every month of May since that it makes nonsense of the denialist theatrics of Nigeria’s 29 May “democracy day”.

2. The génocidaires high command is currently ravaged by a grave crisis not seen in at least 30 years, exacerbated, pointedly, by the devastatingly parallel murder campaigns by the jihadist terrorists Fulani militia and Boko Haram (2 of the 5 deadliest terrorist organisations in the world) in Nigeria’s northcentral, northeast and the eastcentral Benue valley regions. These terrorists are allied more ideologically to the Fulani wing of the genocidist amalgam led by Buhari. Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba, but a very influential member of the high command who crucially supported ex-US President Obama and ex-British Prime Minister Cameron’s imposition of Buhari as head of regime in March 2015, has informed Buhari that he won’t now endorse a “continuation” of the latter’s regime beyond March 2019. It was Obasanjo, as head of regime, who had decreed 29 May as “democracy day” back in 1999. Buhari’s abrogation of 19 years of regime status placed on this date is therefore an embittered response to Obasanjo’s decision not to back his post-2019 leadership ambitions.

IN yet another act in these génocidaires’ bizarre enchantment to the theatre of “democracy day”-declarations, Buhari, just as Obasanjo, has himself decreed 12 June as the latest Nigeria’s “democracy day” – a desperate, cruedly opportunistic  attempt by Buhari to appeal to the wider Yoruba population for support for 2019 as 12 June itself is a day of remembrance in Yoruba history.

(Jaki Byard Trio, “Trendsition zildjian” [personnel: Byard, piano; David Izenzon, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Prestige, New York, US, 31 October 1967])

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Condemnation of British expulsion of African peoples-from-the-Caribbean

(Amber Rudd ... British home secretary whose department/ministry is responsible for the African peoples’ deportation)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

MANY African commentators in the diaspora and at home have joined other critics elsewhere in the world to condemn the current British government’s outrageous expulsion of some of its citizens of African descent to the Caribbean. The criticisms are rightly commendable.

Yet silence…

IT IS  however most noticeable that a number of these commentators have been conspicuously silent when African peoples in African-run states are deported similarly or subjected to even worse treatment by their hosts as the following examples highlight:

1. In Lagos, west Nigeria, the regional regime has over the years deported scores of Igbo people to Biafra. In 2015, the king or oba of Lagos issued a royal edict to murder Igbo people if they did not vote for the king’s own preferred candidate for a senior political regional office.

2. In South Africa, thousands of African émigrés from southern, east and west Africa have been expelled in recent years by the state. Hundreds of these immigrants have been murdered in the country during the period and their homes and businesses destroyed by organised groups often linked to state officials.

3. Since the March 2015 imposition of Muhammadu Buhari, the genocidist islamist jihadist, as head of regime in Nigeria by ex-US President Obama and ex-British Prime Minister Cameron, the Buhari regime’s military and its adjunct Fulani militia, one of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations, have murdered 3000 Igbo people across Biafra in what has been one of the bloodiest track of phase IV of the ongoing Igbo genocide. These murders have continued unabated.

Moral rectitude
AFRICAN peoples’ lives matter. This must surely be the case wheresoever African peoples live: Biafra, Sénégal, Tanzania, Botswana, United States of America, South Africa, Barbados, Kenya, India, Côte d’Ivoire, Guyana, Canada, Britain, Surinam, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, France, Ghana, Finland, Uganda…

Few now doubt that African commentators and others in that prominent professional grouping stand to forfeit any moral rectitude if they restrict their quest to uphold African lives’ interests usually in geographical spaces marked outside Africa but exercise a predictable stone-walled silence when these same interests are assaulted, quite often more viciously, inside Africa.

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

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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]) 

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