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On this day, 24 July 2013, Raji Fashola, head of the Lagos region regime in Nigeria, deports 72 Igbo, including several children and older people some of whom have disabilities, fromLagosto Onicha, the Igbo Oshimili delta city, 230 miles away – both this deportation and the earlier Igbo Lagos expulsion, carried out on 22 September 2012 by Fashola, constitute a dreadful precursor to the April 2015 royal edict by Rilwan Akiolu, the king or oba of Lagos, in which the monarch calls for the murder of Igbo people domiciled in this Lagos region (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/c.html, accessed 23 July 2015).
(Raji Fashola)
The following link carries a commentary on this 24 July 2013 deportation:
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe On Wednesday 24 July 2013, Nigeria’s
Lagos region regime, headed by Raji Fashola,
deported 72 Igbo people from Lagos
to Onicha, the Igbo Oshimili delta city, 230 miles away. This is the
second such deportation that Fashola has embarked upon within a year. On 18
September 2012, Fashola deported “hundreds” of Igbo people from Lagos to Onicha. The
deportees had all been earlier detained in “warehouses” in Lagos and some in the neighbouring Ogun
region for months before their deportation to Igboland, Biafra. Many of the deportees
are children and older people and some have disabilities.
(Raji Fashola)
Raji Fashola is a lawyer, a member of the Nigerian bar and he is
in fact categorised as “senior advocate”. The world will note that these
deportations contravene articles 2 (b) and (c) of the UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to which Nigeria is a
signatory. The deportations do indeed fit into the overarching architecture of
phase-IV of the Igbo genocide, initiated principally by Obafemi Awolowo,
another lawyer, another “senior advocate” of the Nigerian bar, who was then
deputy to the genocide prosecuting junta (prime minister) as well as head of
the finance ministry and “chief theorist” of the campaign.
(Obafemi Awolowo)
This phase’s strategic objective is to dismantle/degrade the
pre-genocide Igbo economy, Africa’s most
resourceful and dynamic, in perpetuity. The Awolowoist/Awolowoid expectation is
that millions of Igbo would be “forced” out of a “stagnant” homeland-economy with
an ever-deteriorating infrastructure to be domiciled elsewhere in the world,
with Nigeria envisaged as “main destination” where they would primarily labour
in the local industry and services – quite clearly, a form of deportation and
this one is straight out of a nazification textbook. What Fashola has tried his
hands on twice, within the past 10 months, is the beginning of the reverse
trend in deportation. And this can only become more virulently pursued
subsequently – again, out of a nazification textbook.
None of the usually visible and shrilling human rights
practitioners (individuals or institutions) in and around Lagos has condemned this outrage. If the
governor of the state of New York, the US “equivalent” to Raji Fashola, were,
for instance, to have deported 72 African Americans to, say, Georgia or
Louisiana last week’s Wednesday, the Lagos practitioners would have since been
working their phones and pounding their keyboards on calls to the BBC and other
broadcasters and website outlets denouncing (rightly) such an act for the
record! The hapless New Yorker would probably have lost their job by now, due
to the predictable outcry against such repugnant behaviour from both domestic
and international audiences. This outrage is another reminder which often
affronts the sensibilities of the African democrat in the African World,
outside Africa, that continental African heads of regime currently murder
and/or inflict greater levels of damage on the African public than any other
agency in the world and more often than not walk away free.
It is instructive to note that as the nondescript but ubiquitous
Boko Haram cells murder Igbo people (and some others) in their north region
homes, businesses, places of worship and recreation and force survivors and the
maimed and the bereaved racing back to Igboland with the remains of loved ones,
Raji Fashola-operatives, traceable and in uniform, abduct the Igbo from the
streets and highways of Lagos, dump them in secured “warehouses” for
disorientation for months and then “upload” them on trailers for the journey
east to be “offloaded” at Onicha at dawn – usually between 2 and 3. The latter
is no doubt a variation on the ultimate goal of the former as both play out in
sync to Nigeria’s current thinking on waging this protracted genocide:
intensify the murder of the Igbo in the north and begin to challenge Igbo
businesses elsewhere, especially in the Lagos district, despite or rather
because of the well-known fact that Igbo capital and industriousness have
played a key role in building up Lagos for about a century now. These dual
vectors of genocide do clearly point the Igbo to one direction only: the east,
the Igbo homeland.
It should now be evident to all that Igbo deportation is at the
crux of Nigeria’s
sustenance of the Igbo genocide, the engine that fires it on. The deportation
at stake here is of course the Awolowo-original, not the Raji
Fashola-modulation even though the latter has brought this savagery to a head.
The Igbo have no greater opportunity since January 1970 than today, now, to
begin to deal with and overcome this evil permanently. To confront this
deportation with dispatch is to begin the termination of this longest genocide
of the contemporary epoch. No one else will accomplish this feat for them.
Disinvestment and boycott
For the Igbo, the long march to re-take Igboland, re-claim
Igboland, Biafra, their homeland, for
themselves, and consequently end the deportation of 43 years and phase-IV of
the genocide begins now. Aimé Césaire would deftly put it this way: “quest to
reconquer something, our name (sic), our country …
ourselves”. And Lagos, pivotally, where
Igbo investments and assets are worth billions of US dollars, is where this
march begins. Here lies the key to Igbo freedom. Igbo should now embark to disinvest in Lagosand transfer their gargantuan assets to Biafra – move your companies and stocks and shares out of Lagos to Biafra. Business cannot strive in
a fascist stockade. Or would it? The contrast of the democratic redoubts of Biafra couldn’t be more welcoming.
Begin anew and invest and invest and invest in Biafra. The
specifics, vitality and range abound for the choices of the investor, inventor,
scientist, plumber, innovator, thinker, carpenter, analyst, surgeon, builder,
artist, composer, mechanic, estate developer, researcher, chef, sportsperson, manufacturer, trader,
architect, nurse, entertainer, banker, distributor, painter, teacher, insurer, lawyer, fisherperson, musician, engineer,
trucker, producer, sculptor, hotelier, physician, draughtsperson, director, writer, decorator, academic … All
conceivable cutting-edge fields in ideas, science and technology are here to be
worked at – researched on, understood, adapted, reworked, invented,
manufactured, distributed… Biafra will resume the quest towards establishing
the high-powered global-oriented economic enterprise interrupted catastrophically
by the genocide.
Igbo entrepreneurs are therefore thrust with the challenge to turn Biafra into the workshop that serves its people and competes actively with
the rest of the world. The world will surely respond accordingly by
establishing crisscrossing routes of communication to Igboland to enhance
cooperation and exchange. The investment and transformational opportunities
emplaced within the population of 50 million throughout the 200-mile
north-south stretch of highlands and escarpments and forestlands and grasslands and valleys and waterfalls and lakes and assorted reserves of
mineralogical and agricultural resources from the Nsukka plateau (north) to
Azumini, Igwe Nga/Opobo, Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt, Umu Ubani/Bonny, Umuebelengwu
and Ahoada of the Igbo Atlantic (south) and the 100 mile-panhandle from Ugwuta,
Onicha and Anioma west to the Abakaleke/Ehugbo/Bende/Arochukwu east are
breathtakingly immense for the imaginative and industrious investor.
To complement Igbo disinvestment of Lagos
over the deportation, Igbo must also begin to boycott all goods and services
made in and for Lagos.
The Lagos brand is henceforth toxic: “Don’t buy
‘Made in Lagos’”.
The frequently commuting Igbo should cancel all ticket reservations on flights
in and out of Lagos and bookings in Lagos hotels. They should
use other airports en route to Biafra such as Enuugwu, Owere, Asaba, Igwe
Ocha and those in Calabar and Uyo. New airports should be built to cope with
the fast changing situation. A Lagos boycott will only soon force airlines to
route directly to hitherto un-used facilities (with the necessary upgrades of
course!) such as Enuugwu and Owere, for instance, as ultimately, as everyone
knows, successful business orients to the client’s preferences. There is no reason
why the overwhelming majority of Igbo travellers should not fly straight to
their Biafran destinations in a few months as the boycott of Lagos intensifies. No more Lagos business conferences: don’t plan one
there; don’t attend one there – just skip it as “unimportant”! Finally, the
Igbo importers and exporters who command a dominant space in the Lagos district
ports’ activities should move their businesses elsewhere: Igwe Ocha, Calabar,
Warri, Sapele, Burutu and, soon, Igbo entrepreneurs and engineers will add to
these capacities new outlays in Azumini, Onicha and elsewhere and the bridging
up of the Aba-Igwe Ocha conurbation to further diversify enterprise and
opportunities.
The return of the Igbo has indeed begun.
(Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Turnaround” [personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Red Mitchell, bass; Shelly Manne, drums; recorded: Contemporary’s Studio, Los Angeles, US, 23 February 1959])
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).
