Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
... 60 per cent [of the population in Nigeria] are the youth below the age
of 30. In the North [region] … most have not attended school or they abandoned
halfway ... [M]ost of them have no job, just idling away…
Murderers incorporated
BY FOCUSING on this north Nigeria data though, Buhari has highlighted, albeit unwittingly, a grippingly salient socioeconomic insight of this region in which all but two heads of
regime in Nigeria since 1966, all
genocidist operatives in the genocide of Igbo
people of Biafra, foundational genocide of post-European conquest Africa, 29
May 1966-present day, have come from; this region in which 70 per cent of all
genocidist Nigeria personnel recruited and deployed to murder Igbo people in
the past 52 years of the Igbo genocide come from; this region which is the recruiting ground of terrorists Boko
Haram and Fulani militia, two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations in operation presently; this region which is at the epicentre of genocidist Nigeria’s unenviable roleas the “country” that has murdered more Africans in Biafra since
1945 than the total
number of Africans murdered across 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…
(Mal Waldron Quartet, “Hymn from the inferno” [personnel: Waldron, piano;Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Vanguard Studios, New York, US, 15 August 1981])
IT IS INDEED a sickening and cruel joke by UN
Secretary General António Guteress to have “appointed” genocidist Nigeria’s
Olusegun Obasanjo as UN envoy to Liberia to “support the transfer of power peacefully
to a democratically-elected government”. Unbelievably dreadful! Does Guteress
really believe that Olusegun Obasanjo would recognise peace if he sees it?
What “peace envoy”?
Guteress may have just taken the cue from his
predecessor in making this irresponsible appointment of Obasanjo as “peace
envoy” to Liberia. In 2008, Ban Ki-moon, then UN secretary-general, did not
find it outrageous to appoint Obasanjo UN “peace envoy” to the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. This was despite Obasanjo’s rigging of three previous
head-of-regime elections in Nigeria (including, particularly, the April 2007
“poll” which Obasanjo codenamed “Operation Do-or-Die” [Vanguard,
Lagos, 11 February 2007] and had, on its eve, imported the following range of
weaponry fit to equip a small army to effectuate his vicious “electoral” coup
d’état: 40,000 AK-47 rifles with 20 million rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition,
30,000 K2 rifles with 10 million rounds of 5.5 x 45 ammunition, 10,000 Beretta
pistols with four million rounds of .9mm ammunition [nigeriavillagesquare.com,
7 March 2007, accessed 29 December 2017]), despite Obasanjo’s egregious moral
turpitude, despite Obasanjo’s desperately-engineered attempt to extend his own
second-term tenure as Nigeria’s head of regime before the April 2007 “election”,
despite Obasanjo’s appalling human rights record and corruption during 11 years
as Nigeria’s head of regime, and, most gravely of all, despite Obasanjo’s role
as one of the most notorious genocidist officers in the Nigeria military whilst
the latter waged the genocide (phases I-III) against Igbo people of Biafra in the
1960s. Obasanjo commanded a monstrous brigade in south Biafra that murdered
tens of thousands of Igbo people during the period. Between 29 May 1966 and 12
January 1970, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo
population in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. The
Igbo genocide is the continent’s most gruesome genocide since Belgian King
Leopold II/Belgian state-perpetrated genocide against African peoples in the
Congo Basin, central Africa, 1878-1908.
OLUSEGUN OBASANJO shows no remorse, whatsoever,
in his principal role in the perpetration of this heinous crime against
humanity, so categorised, definitively, by the United Nations itself in 1948 (see UN, Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948, https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf, accessed 29 December 2017). On the contrary, Obasanjo boasts of his
involvement in the Igbo genocide as he
reminds the world in My Command
(London and Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981: 79), his memoirs of the time, of ordering the
shooting down of a clearly-marked, relief-bearing International Committee of
the Red Cross DC-7 aircraft bound for the Igbo whose country was then being
blockaded and bombarded by the genocidists. The 3-person crew in this plane
perished as a result of this crime.
(DC-7 aircraft:...similar to the ICRC relief-carrying plane shot down over south Biafra by genocidist Nigeria military on the orders of commander Olusegun Obasanjo)
WHAT in fact is at stake here is that the UN
has been quite prepared to “receive” and “fraternise” with personages such as
Olusegun Obasanjo, in spite of their past, in ways and means that would have
been unthinkable if they were a European or Asian or Arab people, for instance,
or if the target of their despicable mission on Igbo people and Biafra in
1966-1970, and subsequently, was directed at some European or Asian or Arab
people, for example. Would Guteress, conceivably, appoint a Serb genocidist
commander as his peace envoy to say, Chechnya?, or a Cambodian genocidist
commander to say, the Philippines or Myanmar? (It is significant to cite Myanmar
here given that this is the country that U Thant, the UN secretary general that
had laid the foundation of UN complicity in the Igbo genocide, right from the
outset, came from. It is fascinating to speculate what U Thant’s position would
be today on the raging crisis of the Rohingya people in Myanmar...)
UN: facilitating agency
How does anyone realistically expect an
Olusegun Obasanjo to recognise what peace is if he sees one?! In the same
breadth, in 2007, Andrew Young, an African American who once served his country
as ambassador to the UN and later made a huge, personal fortune in his business
interests in Nigeria, thanks to Obasanjo’s patronage during the latter’s first
tenure as head of regime, campaigned for Obasanjo to be “awarded” the Nobel
Peace Prize. One can’t but recall that as Young marched across the United
States with the venerable Martin Luther King and others, defending and demanding
universal societal recognition of African American freedom quest, the
genocidist brigades of his latter-day unlikely pal and business partner were
engrossed in the orgy of firebombing Igbo towns and villages east of the
Atlantic.
THIS GROTESQUE Wilsonic-dimunition of African life and wellbeing (from British
Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s infamous, “would accept half a million dead
Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to
the genocide – proclaimed at the 1968/69 apogee of the Igbo genocide [see Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American
Foreign Policy, 1977: 122]) which has undoubtedly given the impetus to the UN “receptibility” and
“fraternisation” that the Olusegun Obasanjos of Africa have “enjoyed”, so
uncritically, is a major contributing factor to the glaring tragedy of
contemporary Africa. That the very leadership of the United Nations, since the
launch of the Igbo genocide in May 1966, is a facilitating
agency to this tragedy is indeed a troubling fact that African peoples and
the rest of the world can no longer ignore.
(Mal Waldron Quartet, “Hymn from the inferno” [personnel: Waldron, piano;Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Vanguard Studios, New York, US, 15 August 1981])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).