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)

Sparks of Biafran creativity! 45th anniversary of first open heart-surgery in Biafra and southwestcentral region of Africa

(1 February 1974: operation performed, Nsukka University Teaching Hospital, Enuugwu, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

FIRST OPEN heart-surgery in Biafra/anywhere else in southwestcentral Africa including genocidist Nigeria, was performed at the Nsukka University Teaching Hospital, Enuugwu, Biafra, on 1 February 1974 – four years and just over a month to the day after the formal end of phase-III (beginning of phase-IV) of the 44-month long Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa perpetrated by the Fulani islamist/jihadist-led Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain in which 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered. 

The surgeons who worked on the surgery included CH Anyanwu, DC Nwafor, FA Udekwu and M Yacoub. In the subsequent 26 years, i.e., by 2000, a total of 102 (one hundred and two) open heart-surgeries were carried out at the Enuugwu centre.

Ethic and drive

FORTY-FIVE years since the first surgery, Africa and the rest of the world cannot wait for the triumph of the Biafra freedom movement to witness the exponential expansion of the stretch of such creative and transformational energy by Biafrans – an African people building and reconstructing on their land and on their own terms, a disposition which squarely repudiates those outrageous British presumptions on African peoples given Britain’s role as the principal architect and codifier of anti-African racism as an ideology (see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe, 2001, especially pp. 1-54) and whose involvement in the Igbo genocide is to “punish”  the Igbo for the latter’s vanguard role in terminating the British conquest and occupation of the states and peoples of this southwestcentral Africa region.

It can’t be overstated that one of the insistent factors that has fuelled the Igbo genocide in these past 53 years is the mutually shared British and Fulani Nigeria islamist leadership’s trenchant aversion to the well-known Igbo hardworking ethic and entrepreneurial drive. Consequently, this dual attribute of ethic and drive has transformed Igbo people to presently control one of Africa’s best-developed multidisciplinary humanpower conglomeration of assets which will surely be deployed in building Biafra.

BIAFRA is dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enable them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people  to create and transform. Biafra primes its people to flourish.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Sun ship” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass;  Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Impulse!, New York, US,  26 August 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is author of the recently published The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019)  

(https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2019/01/published-longest-genocide-since-29-may.html)

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

                                                                                                                                 

69th anniversary of the Enuugwu, Biafra, colliery massacre by the British occupation police

(Miners at the Enuugwu colliery, undated)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ON 18 NOVEMBER 1949, 21 coal miners at the Iva Valley colliery, Enuugwu, Biafra, were shot dead by the British occupation police in response to the miners’ peaceful, popular protest for a pay increase, improvement in working and safety mine provisions, and support for the ongoing restoration-of-independence movement, begun in the 1930s and spearheaded by the Igbo, to terminate 64 years of Britain’s conquest of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa. The murder of the coal miners constituted a new front in Britain’s 100 years war against Igboland and the variegated frames of Igbo resistance to it that parallel the very stretch of the British occupation of the states and peoples of this region of Africa it tagged “Nigeria”: especially the 1880s-1914 Ekumeku wars and resistance in Anioma, west Igboland, west of the Oshimiri River; the 1901-1902 war against the Aru in northeastcentral Igboland; the 1929 Ogu umu nwanyi Igbo/Igbo women’s resistance in Aba/Igbo eastcentral region.

The Enuugwu massacre, in addition to the organised pogroms against Igbo people in June 1945 (Jos, northcentral Nigeria) and May 1953 (Kano, north Nigeria) by the Fulani islamist/jihadist political leadership of north Nigeria, on the ground strategic client of the occupation, were dreadful precursors to the Igbo genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 (phases I-III) – in which Britain and Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo, 25 per cent of this nation’s population, in the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 

Cameron, Buhari, Obama

THE dual genocidist states have murdered tens of thousands of additional Igbo during the course of phase-IV of the genocide (launched on 13 Janauary 1970 and continuing) including the 3000 murdered by the current Muhammadu Buhari regime in Abuja since October 2015. Instrumentally, Buhari, one of the surviving vilest génocidaire-operatives who was an early recruit to this genocide campaign 52 years ago, was imposed on Nigeria as head of regime in March 2015 by the then British Prime Minister David Cameron and ex-US President Barack Obama, the first African-descent president of the United States in 233 years of the founding of the republic. Obama’s support for the Igbo genocide is the abhorrent legacy of his presidency.

(John Coltrane Quintet, “Stardust” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Wilbur Harden, fluegelhorn; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobbs, drums;  recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 11 July 1958])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Biafra Revisited (2006) and author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018)
(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Donald-Trump-great-Africa-ebook/dp/B07KFQHXKV/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1542585950&sr=8-1)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

44th anniversary of first open heart-surgery in Biafra and southwestcentral region of Africa

(1 February 1974: operation performed, Nsukka University Teaching Hospital, Enuugwu, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

FIRST OPEN heart-surgery in Biafra/southwestcentral Africa was performed at the Nsukka University Teaching Hospital, Enuugwu, Biafra, on 1 February 1974 – four years and just over a month to the day after the formal end of phase-III (beginning of phase-IV) of the 44-month long Igbo genocide, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, perpetrated by Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain in which 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered.  

The surgeons who worked on the surgery included CH Anyanwu, DC Nwafor, FA Udekwu and M Yacoub. In the subsequent 26 years, i.e., by 2000, a total of 102 (one hundred and two) open heart-surgeries were carried out at the Enuugwu centre.

FORTY-FOUR YEARS since the first surgery, Africa and the rest of the world cannot wait for the triumph of the Biafra freedom movement to witness the exponential expansion of the stretch of such creative and transformational energy by Biafrans – an African people building and reconstructing on their land and on their own terms, a disposition which surely challenges those outrageous British presumptions on African peoples given Britain’s role as the principal architect and codifier of anti-African racism as an ideology (see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe, 2001, especially pp. 1-54) and whose involvement in the Igbo genocide is to “punish”  the Igbo for the latter’s vanguard role in terminating the British conquest and occupation of the states and peoples of this southwestcentral Africa region.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Untitled original 90314” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

68th anniversary of the Enuugwu, Biafra, colliery massacre

(Miners at the Enuugwu colliery, undated)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ON 18 NOVEMBER 1949, 21 coal miners at the Iva Valley colliery, Enuugwu, Biafra, were shot dead by the British occupation police in response to the miners’ peaceful, popular protest for a pay increase, improvement in working and safety mine provisions, and support for the ongoing restoration-of-independence movement, begun in the 1930s and spearheaded by the Igbo, to terminate 64 years of Britain’s conquest of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa. 

The Enuugwu massacre, in addition to the organised pogroms against Igbo people in June 1945 (Jos, northcentral Nigeria) and May 1953 (Kano, north Nigeria) by the Hausa-Fulani/islamist political leadership of north Nigeria, strategic on the ground client of the occupation, were dreadful precursors to the Igbo genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 (phases I-III) – in which Britain and Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo, 25 per cent of this nation’s population, in the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa.

(Sam Rivers Trio, “Afflatus” [personnel: Rivers, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Steve Ellington, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, NJ, US, 17 March 1967])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Nigerian regime begins to move heavy military weaponry into Igboland from the north (Thursday 7 September 2017)

By A Correspondent, Enuugwu, 1952HRS, September 7, 2017

TODAY September 7, 2017, the genocidist Nigerian regime, headed by ailing genocidist trooper Muhammadu Buhari, moved in more than ten pieces of heavy motorized military hardware and weaponry from the Caliphate north into Igboland. The motorized trailer convoy bearing the weapons and hardware and soldier escorts were sighted as they snaked their way into the regional capital, Enuugwu at around 5:45pm. The convoy which came on the Makurdi-Nsukka-Enuugwu trunk road followed back streets into the city.

They were sighted as they made their entry when dusk was already descending on the city on a rain-drenched day. The timing is probably intentional to avoid many eye witnesses in the bustling city.

The convoy then made its way to the part of Abakaliki Road where the army’s 82 Division formation outpost is located, where it parked alongside the road in line and waited. The escorts fanned out along it and kept close watch. It is still there at about 6:45pm when this correspondent took leave of the place to file this report after driving past it a number of times.

Since the convoy did not drive right into the sprawling grounds of the outpost that lays on the opposite sides of that portion of Abakaliki Road, the likelihood is that the weaponry and hardware will continue its journey later this night to the parts of the Igbo heartland where they will be deployed.

THIS CORRESPONDENT was alarmed by one of the soldier-escorts who jumped down when the convoy got to the junction of the back street and Abakaliki Road and lifted his assault rifle and aimed it at motorists driving on the opposite direction. Although his intention was clearly to stop traffic to make way for his convoy to join the main highway, the tactic of aiming his assault rifle at motorists is not only frightening. It was also indicative of the wanton bestial disregard of the Igbo by elements of the Hausa-Fulani dominated Nigeria military.

Poor visibility due to the descending dusk incapacitated efforts by this correspondent to capture clear video and still pictures of the convoy on a telephony device.

IT IS ON record that upon his return from an extended medical tourism in the UK, Buhari gave the military specific orders to crush the ongoing agitation for the actualization of the Republic of Biafra in the southeast in a referendum

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]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

42 years on, iconoclastic columnist Agwu Okpanku looms large or Biafra now dominates the news cycle in southwestcentral Africa

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IN FEBRUARY  1975, 42 years ago, Agwu Okpanku, the celebrated cerebral Igbo columnist at the Enuugwu-based weekly, Sunday Renaissance, was detained by the genocidist Nigeria Yakubu Gowon junta occupying Biafra for publishing his high-profile essay entitled, “Killing Biafra”. Okpanku had unequivocally condemned the occupation regime’s fake cartographers and their British advisors for expunging the name Biafra from this strategic south coast’s complete historic Bight of Biafra name configuration. This was part of the regime’s carefully orchestrated expansive schema at denial of the 44 months-old Anglo-Nigerian perpetration of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. Britain and Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of this nation’s population in what remains Africa’s most gruesome and devastating genocide of the contemporary age.

 

Okpanku’s “Killing Biafra” couldn’t be more engaging and appositely pedagogic for the feeble minds of genocidist operatives deeply riled by the vortex of a virulent anti-Biafra psychosis advanced by none other but a singular, critical cause: their staggering inability to come to terms with the fact that Biafra and its people Biafrans had existed several centuries before a debased British chief conqueror-couple in the early 1900s cavalierly coined the grotesque word “Nigeria” – from the root-word of an offensively racist slur on the African humanity, to so designate the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral African region recently overrun by a rampaging British military.

 

As the self-assured columnist was led away to the Enuugwu detention cell after “Killing Biafra” hit the newsstands, it must have dawned on his gaolers, right through the chain of the genocidist high command in Lagos, that the great Okpanku had already secured the right to have the last word on this focus on the Land of the Rising Sun. Forty-two years later, is it any surprise the subject Biafra dominates the news cycle in Biafra and genocidist Nigeria right from conceptualisation, through content, and operationalisation… Agwu Okpanku, the thinker, projects!

(The New York Contemporary Five plays Don Cherry’s composition, “Consequences” [personnel: Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Don Moore, bass; JC Moses, drums; recorded: live, Jazzhus Montmarte, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 November 1963])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

 

 

43rd anniversary of first open heart-surgery in Biafra/southwestcentral Africa

(1 February 1974: operation performed, Nsukka University Teaching Hospital, Enuugwu, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

FIRST OPEN heart-surgery in Biafra/southwestcentral Africa was performed at the Nsukka University Teaching Hospital, Enuugwu, Biafra, on 1 February 1974 – four years and just over a month to the day after the formal end of phase-III (beginning of phase-IV) of the 44-month long Igbo genocide, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, perpetrated by Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain in which 3.1 million Igbo or  25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered.

The surgeons who worked on the surgery included CH Anyanwu, DC Nwafor, FA Udekwu and M Yacoub. In the subsequent 26 years, i.e., by 2000, a total of 102 (one hundred and two) open heart-surgeries were carried out at the Enuugwu centre.

Forty-three years since the first surgery, Africa and the rest of the world cannot wait for the triumph of the Biafra freedom movement to witness the expansion of the stretch of such creative and transformational energy by Biafrans  – an African people building and reconstructing on their land and on their own terms; definitely not an engagement and process seen in Africa for ages... Here, it is indeed “Morning Yet On Creation Day” as the Father of African Literature reminds us.

(Thelonious Monk Quintet, “Brilliant corners” – personnel: Monk, piano; Ernie Henry, alto saxophone; Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Riverside studio, New York, US, 15 October 1956)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

FWD: Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo, “Buhari, python dance and the Biafra Question”

Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo***** (unedited, originally published on Marvelous Nnatu’s Facebook Wall)

JUST LIKE THE birth pangs of a woman in labour heralds the innocent cry of a new-born baby, so do the travails and committed struggles of any oppressed people herald the dawn of their freedom. This is the natural sequence of events in the integral calculus that create freedom. History cannot afford me any parallel where a nation has emerged from the womb of oppression into freedom without bitter struggle and sacrifice. In the entire history of mankind it has been a constant war between the lord and the serf; between the oppressed and the oppressor and between death and life. If we bring home this truism to Africa, when it is not the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya, it will be the Maji-Maji uprising in Tanganyika. In all these battles for freedom, men have had to die that others will live.

The fate of Ndigbo in Nigeria is not different from the dynamics that signal the end of an era and the birth of a new dawn. As a people, our lives would be worse than the lives of dogs in a manger if we fail to rise up and say to the Nigerian establishment “enough is enough”. If as a people, we should ever fail to pursue our legitimate demands and condemn the serial atrocities against the Igbo nation, we would cease to have meaning. The contradictions of the Nigerian state have compelled Ndigbo into coordinated demand for the state of Biafra and with each passing day, stakes keep getting higher.

The emergence of nations like Eritrea, South Sudan, Croatia, Czech Republic and the many independent Baltic States followed this pattern. Even more instructive was the emergence of the State of Israel in 1948. Time was in the history of Israel when King David, one of the most outstanding and successful kings of Israel asked a very rhetorical question. Faced with the conspiracy of the Gentiles David, in the second chapter of the Book of Psalms, asked: “Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying: Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us”. In verse 4 of the same chapter, David declares the response of such plotters against the Lord’s people. According to David, “He (God) that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them (those plotters) in derision”. But even after the Holocaust and with renewed anti-Semitism, the State of Israel had to chose between actions that pull down the Temple of Humanity itself rather than surrender even a single member of the Jewish family to the oppressors.

Ndigbo, like the Jews, have risen to say that we will no longer tolerate the continued cold-blooded murder of harmless and innocent Igbo sons and daughters by the Nigerian state under any guise or excuse. From 1966 to 1970, Ndigbo had to endure a genocidal pogrom orchestrated by hate and jealousy. If any person or group in Nigeria thinks that in 2016, we will sit idly by and watch a re-enactment of the macabre dance of 1966 in Igboland, that person or group must have his or their heads examined.

I say this because presently virtually every part of South-east and South-south has been taken over by combat-ready Nigerian troops. From Onitsha, to Enugu, Abakaliki, Umuahia, Aba, Owerri, Port-Harcourt, Calabar and other south-eastern cities, the swarm of these fierce-looking soldiers can be seen. This policy of military occupation of our political space has been code-named “Operation Python Dance” by the Buhari administration. The reason, I am told, is to forestall any break down of law and order an account of the continued incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPoB). While the sinister intention of this operation is not in doubt, what is curious is why the government has chosen the Yuletide to execute such infamy. Our political space has been significantly militarized by the Nigerian occupying forces. This has led to heightened tension in the southeast and south-south and crippled commercial and other economic activities.

According to the Deputy Director, Army Public Relations, 82 Division of the Nigerian Army Enugu, Colonel Sagir Musa, “the prevalent security issues such as armed robbery, kidnapping, abduction, herdsmen-farmers’ clashes, communal clashes and violent secessionist attacks among others…” are the reasons driving “Operation Python Dance”. I consider these reasons naïve and pedantic. There is more to “Operation Python Dance” than meets the ordinary eye. The code name of this operation is in itself very ominous. It has both spiritual and physical implications.

On several occasions, I have had to state that there is a calculated attempt to Islamize this country despite our secularist pretensions. At each turn, apologists of the core northern establishment have dismissed such fears with a wave of the hand; whereas in reality this project is truly alive and well and is being systematically implemented. If this is not so, I want somebody to explain to me why the motto of the Nigerian Army is written in Arabic, which when translated into English means “Victory is from God alone”? Arabic inscriptions, the official and acceptable language of Islam, can be conspicuously seen on our N200, N500 and N1000 naira notes in a country that is supposed to be a secular state.

For us to fully appreciate the spiritual import of “Operation Python Dance”, it is important that we understand the significance of snakes in the Islamic faith. The Islamic understanding of the spiritual significance of snakes is directly linked to a bizarre and ridiculous assumption that snakes are evil incarnation of morphed jinn. In Islamic theology, jinn are regarded as free-willed creatures made by Allah from smokeless fire. A variant of these jinn known as Iblis disobeyed Allah when they refused to bow to Adam as Allah commanded. Consequently, Allah expelled Iblis from Paradise and called him Satan. Snakes are Iblis and representative of unbelievers or infidels. Large volumes of the Moslem Hadith declare Prophet Mohammad’s instruction to warn snakes three times and then kill them if they refuse to go away. Muhammad had commanded the killing of all snakes because they are “the devil” and the emissaries of Satan.

Since snakes are representatives of infidels in Islam, they are to be treated like infidels according to the Qur’an wherever they are found. Our people are regarded as Iblis among the Moslems and therefore should be eliminated on sight. This elimination, since the brutal genocidal pogrom against our people, has continued unabated in the north. For instance, in northern Nigeria, we have had instances where Moslems slaughtered and beheaded our people, the latest one being the beheading of an Igbo woman few months ago in Kano. These brutalities and bestiality in the name of religion have never ceased appalling the sensibilities of civilization and one wonders why people should behave in this grisly manner. The answer, I dare say, can be found in the Qur’an. Surah 47:4 (Ali Translation) enjoins Moslems thus: “When you meet the unbelievers, smite at their necks; at length, when you have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them…”

It is in this context that “Operation Python Dance” should be understood. The people of southeast and south-south are regarded as snakes, that is, unbelievers and therefore must be eliminated. In recent history we read of the desire of the core north to dip the Qur’an into the Atlantic Ocean. If you take this as the imaginations of the mind, I urge you to think twice. My age and national standing impels me to warn our people of the impending journey to Golgotha. The emergence of this Buhari presidency is seen by the north as the only opportunity to implement this agenda because there could, and indeed will not be any other opportunity.

It is indeed worrisome that since caming to power in 2015, over 3,000 thousand people of southeast and south-south extraction have been murdered in cold blood for no other reason than peacefully demanding an independent state of Biafra or at least for a renegotiated and restructured Nigeria where our people would have unfettered freedom to externalize their God-given faculties. The latest militarization of the southeast and south-south by the Nigerian military has once more demonstrated the naivety of the Buhari government and its penchant to shed the blood of our people. In truth, Buhari’s brutal military assault on the southeast and south-south code-named “Operation Python Dance’’ can best be described as criminal and a full declaration of war against our people. This suffocating military operation has been programmed to last till January 2017. Until then, the southeast and south-south would remain in a state of siege by the Nigerian military, which has effectively transformed itself into an occupying force.

This military onslaught is the latest in the litany of atrocities so far unleashed on the people of the south-east and south-south in this country and a continuation of the northern establishment resolve to over-run our political space by force and impose Sharia law on our people. This evil imposition did not start today. It is rooted in history. But what is also rooted in history is that, as a people, we have weathered these storms. There is no doubt that in the present circumstances, we will overcome because that is our heritage as the sons and daughters of the living God. In the 19th century, the brutality and high-handedness of the Royal Niger Company (RNC) was vehemently resisted by our people especially during the Akassa war of that period. In 1929, our woman courageously fought against the draconian British tax regime. From times past, our people have always shown tremendous resolve to resist suppression and oppression from the enemies.

There is no doubt that the Nigerian establishment, over the years, has initiated several strategies to route us of our homeland to no avail. The events of the Nigerian civil war, doubtless presented the Nigerian establishment the rare opportunity to wipe us out in a planned genocidal program. Buhari was part and parcel of that genocidal pogrom. His brutality and cold efficiency in prosecuting the war against our people has been recorded on the pristine walls of time. Even after the civil war, we were further subjected to economic and physical genocide. Concerted and official attempts have been made to cannibalize demographic strength and present us as minority ethnic group. At each turn, we have come forth like pure gold. But let it be known to all the forces of darkness in this country, that time is coming, and now it is, when the scroll of the mindless iniquities committed against our people will be unfolded and all the persons who dealt with us treacherously will be judged.

It is the height of leadership idiocy for anybody to think that in 2016 the government could fiddle with the idea of re-inventing the earth-scorch policy of old, which was deployed to devastating effect in a choreographed plot to annihilate our people. General Muhammadu Buhari should be told in clear language that as his forebears failed woefully, so also he will fail miserably. I am not surprised with what Boko Haram is doing in the far-north. Irrespective of the interpretation anyone may adopt in explaining the bloodletting in the region of the country, I am persuaded that Boko Haram is God’s own judgment in avenging the gruesome killing of our people in Nigeria. The blood of our people which the Nigerian soil has drunk is crying out to God for vengeance. God’s ears are not closed nor His hands too short to redeem His people. The tide of this Divine judgment cannot be reversed by using “Operation Python Dance’’ to intimidate our people and cripple our economy.

That the present Buhari government has not been able to read that hand writing on the wall is a sign of the tragedy that awaits this country. Just like the handwriting appeared in the time of Belshazzar to pass judgment on Babylon, the same handwriting has appeared on the walls of Nigeria to proclaim that Nigeria has been weight in the balance and found wanting, and very soon the country would be divided among her ethnic nationalities. This is the truth starring us in the face. Yes! The blindness and revulsion against our people may not allow the present leadership to see or appreciate this imminent reality; but it is the reality all the same.

The truth is that you cannot force a woman to remain in a marriage that has brought her nothing but pain and misery; a marriage that has daily threatened her very existence and a marriage where all the pillars of trust have been destroyed. Even God Almighty himself permits divorce in matters of infidelity and lack of trust in any marriage. There is no denying the fact that the Nigerian contraption is a marriage of convenience; an “arranged marriage” package and delivered by British colonialism in the most treacherous circumstance is a settled historical truth. Though our people initially felt that in the course of time, some of level trust and confidence would be established, time and time again we have been led to the slaughter slab in a most unconscionable manner. We have watched our commonwealth lay to waste and our faith repudiate. We have known nothing than treachery in this marriage and therefore have come to the point of asking out. This divorce is sanctioned by the provisions of self-determination and international law.

The divorce papers have been signed and execution will soon follow. Not even a thousand “Operation Python Dance” can abort the new dawn so patiently waiting to be born. The Biafra agitation is not only legitimate; it is also active and well; and the coming referendum in the form of BIAFRA-EXIT, will signify a new beginning for our people. Let no one be in doubt of this.

*****Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo is a prolific exponent-of-freedom scholar, chair and publisher of Fourth Dimension Publishing, Enuugwu, Biafra, Africa’s most enduring and successful independent publishing organisation

(The New York Contemporary Five plays “Sound barrier” [personnel: Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Don Moore, bass; JC Moses, drums; recorded: live, Jazzus Montmarte, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 November 1963]) 

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