In the last few days some members of regions outside the East of Nigeria have had opportunity to ventilate their frustrations and angers over the incessant agitations, sometimes violent protests, by Igbo people of Nigeria for them to be allowed a country of their own – Biafra. The Igbo had been vocal in expression of hate and incitement even supported by a former Minister of Aviation from Western region side Femi Fani-Kayode and Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose of the same region, both People’s Democratic Party (PDP) members said to have questions to answer over their alleged corruption with regard to Arms Money spend for PDP’s campaigns ahead of 2015 presidential elections, who have chosen the IPOB/MASSOB course as tools for showing their disrespect to the Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives’ Change Regime. This piece responding to an Igbo outburst, by Basirat Shittu, picked from NAIJ.COM comment side on Thursday June 22, 2017, represents some of these angers the authors call their ventilated factsheet to the Igbo. The DEFENDER‘s interest in this is to evoke a path to solution whereby claims and counter-claims that arise from some of these comments will be summarised and used to advice government on way to go. Excerpts:
Sometimes it can be amusing that many Igbo people don’t always see reasons. Peter Ejirika, Austin Texas, United States of America, what does your comment on “pogrom, genocide, and holocaust against the Ibos” mean? Tell us about fire and not about smoke. That is where I feel sorry for you people sometimes when you speak. If some of us keep silence and not talking, you should know that it is not because we know that you ever had any truth to speak but because we are not interested in your immature, unpolite, never patriotic way of arguing. But now that one feels to talk, it is better to educate you.
There was nothing like holocaust against the Igbo. There was Igbo working against itself. Do you even think that we don’t know why you guys are agitating? You are agitating not because of anything but because you just hate to see any Northerner in power. It gets worse when it is Buhari and Buhari is not any problem to you but the corrupt and criminal people he is fighting are mainly from your part of the country and so they must sponsor the agitations that we see coming only from your race. Is it not time you guys sit back and ponder asking yourselves, “Why are we the only race that the rest of Nigerians point accusing fingers to as problem of Nigeria? Is it true?” Yes, it is true you are the problem of Nigeria. Even the South Southerners, once a truce is arrived at, they cease to agitate. But you guys in the East, your hate has no respect for truce neither has it a time bound. Your problem is just that you love money and whatever means it comes from, be it ritual, criminal, corruption, does not matter to you. It is business.
I must however give credit to the fact that it was an Igbo who was used by President Olusegun Obasanjo during his time to quench the “death merchandise in pharmaceuticals” engaged in by the Igbo dealing in drugs manufacturing. Imagine the rate at which Nigerians were dying at that time just because some people were simply producing poisons calling them tablets. That person used by Obasanjo was my great woman of substance – Madam Dora Akunyili, who looked not at your race as the same with hers or your tongue as the same with hers and dealt you a big blow to ensure that you were forced to drop those evils that you called businesses.
Don’t also forget that you people have been accused as the ones who introduced violent crimes into our public lives in Nigeria. The other day you said you, Igbo, were the controllers of Lagos economy. We then asked you questions: How are Igbo controllers of Lagos economy? And you replied: We bring in containers and pay taxes to the economy. And we replied you with another set of questions: You bring in containers and pay taxes? What manner of containers? The containers of contraband through which you have been injecting our country through Lagos with devilish items such as expired tyres, pump actions (guns)? Paying taxes? How do you pay taxes when you already have defrauded the country through Lagos by underdeclaration of consignments? You bring in a 2017 model of car and you declare it as 2002 model to shortchange the country. Sometimes you do more even prefer to bribe some corrupt customs officials to evade customs inspections and just come out of Ports with all of the evil items of mass destruction that you import into the country.
Buhari and his Col. Hameed Ali fighting these evils you call import and paying taxes have turned both men of integrity to your ardent enemies. This is one of your reason for agitations. If not, why was it only in Anambra that “Hameed Ali Must Go” protest was staged while your most senior government official, Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, was asked to preside on plenary of Senate, hitting Ali hard to wear uniform to address Nigeria through their Red Chamber over a customs policy on importation of cars by land borders. Ali, your one most hated Northerner, proved more smarter and brilliant than all your plots and pranks. With support of other well meaning Nigerians, he never fell to your traps.
Recall the expired tyres you imported through Lagos is one of the reasons Nigeria lost a Minister of State for Labour and Employment in Ocholi and his wife to a very painful road accident along Abuja-Kaduna expressway. How do you explain that a minister’s car tyre got burst while on speed? Meaning that he had no money to buy new tyres? No. All the tyres under his High Car were new. It took an interception of a 40-foot container of over 500 expired but looking like new High (Jeep) Car tyres, arrested on the order of Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) Maritime Police Command Headquarters, Alhaji Mohammed Umar Katsina to discover the possibility of how “new tyres” of a minister’s high car could just get burst while on high speed on high way.
So, Peter Ejirika, my from Igbo Land who always love to tell us story of which he has no knowledge, can you tell us what more you have not contributed as a race to our misfortune as Nigerian people? We don’t however begrudge you over all these. What we will never take and we would like our security agencies take note of, is the agitations that you will then stage to tell us how you are the persecuted whereas you are the persecutors who have always made a nightmare of our life system in Nigeria. You want met to tell you more how?
Fellow Nigerians! Sit back and read on.
My dear Editor, I will appreciate that you allow this my piece, no matter how long, to scale through into the readership of the global public that read your articles. I want to tell Peter Ejirika, his co-Igbo people of Nigeria and the rest of us to know what they either do not know about how they are the persecutors and not the persecuted in the Estate of our fatherland called Nigeria.
If you go deeper into history, you will be told by great Nigerians of the past how Igbo had planned to do their first coup in 1960 at a time the Colonial Master were planning to allow Nigeria go on independence. Some of the officers they tried to co-opt into what could have become the First Igbo Coup (pre-Independence) scuttled the plan by reporting the Igbo officers in the plot to the colonial masters, who invited all Nigerian military officers and warned them against such as anybody found in doing any such coup would be mercilessly dealt with. They stopped the plan to overthrow the Colonial Masters from Seat of Power of the already amalgamated but they came back six years after in 1966 and the rest is now history.
Funny enough, you Igbo guys keep blaming the North for wanting to continue to be in power. But you lied because the North have not been the only rulers of Nigeria. Of all others that have done it, only from your own race we have had unpleasant experience. You now go on public media to talk about holocaust by North against the Igbo. You did not tell us why, upon return to the coup plot six years after independence, soldiers from your race (and you tried to say Yoruba officers too were part of it but you lied) killed all Northerners in power and killed another Yoruba man/Premier of Western Region, Chief SLA Akintola. Of all the people that were killed during that 1966 Coup, there was no single Igbo man or leader killed but majorly it was all Northerners. We even got to know that Akintola’s death was not even because he was a Yoruba man but because one way or the other he had something to do with Northern politicians.
How could a race like yours be so hateful, mindless, heartless and merciless, causing misfortunes to other people and still pretend not to know. You then love to stage agitations saying you are marginalized. In which society in the world can such race be allowed to live? But Nigeria has continued to allow your race to live despite your never-do-well to the entity. That went on into the Civil War and it was the Northerner in Power who defeated you in the War who said, “No victor no vanquished.” What else would you expect to have?
Recall that Tafawa Balewa’s Ministers including Richard Akinjide, Shehu Shagari, Yusuf Maitama Sule, Daphcheripha and others had resolved, after it dawned on them the reality of death – by your Major Ifeajuna (Igbo officer) – of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and Okotie-Eboh, his finance minister, whose bodies were found decaying in Ifo, Ogun State, those Ministers resolved to continue with the civil rule and invited your General Aguiyi-Ironsi to a meeting to inform him of what the cabinet members had discussed. Ironsi went to that meeting with Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon then Commanding Officer of Ikeja Battalion or so but did not allow him enter into the meeting with him. Gowon stayed outside and upon emerging from the meeting, Ironsi told him the cabinet members had asked him to go and form a new government. What Ironsi told Gowon was a direct opposite of what he was actually told in the meeting. General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo officer, had the opportunity of being the most senior officer in the Nigerian military at that time but what impression did he create in the minds of other Nigerians with that? He formed the government and went straight to attack the Nigeria’s six-year-old True Federalism by turning our constitutional system to a Unitary System. It favoured the Igbo at that time and so they didn’t complain.
The General liked to his Lt. Col. Gowon, and by military respect, Gowon believed him he (Gowon) and other Northern officers later discovered that Ironsi lied and that was analytically merged with circumstances that led to the First Coup by Igbo officers, which now exposed to the Northern officers the truth of the Igbo actions – to wipe the North out of power that was willingly transferred to them by the British for reasons best known to them – and that led to the Second Coup which was never denied to be Northern Coup, otherwise known as Revenge Coup, which consumed the then (self-imposed) Nigeria’s first Military Head of State during his visit to Western Region’s Government House in Ibadan.
The sacrifice the Yoruba Military Governor of Western Region at that time, Lt. Col. Adekunle Fayuiyi, made should be a great lesson to the Igbo of this country. When the soldiers came for Head of State Aguiyi-Ironsi who was his visitor at Ibadan, they told him this man must die! But Col. Fajuiyi said, and it continues to make me feel sober, if you must kill him, then you must also kill me. They killed both of them. And Gowon was pushed forward as third independent Nigerian Leader after (Nnamdi Azikiwe/Tafawa Balewa leadership) and second Nigeria’s Military Head of State after Igbo Head of State in Ironsi.
But the Igbo never stopped. They triggered the war and Nigeria under Yakubu Gowon went after them. Recall that all that were part of the success that Nigeria recorded in that war remain avowed enemies of Igbo till today: particularly Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Or who want to remind us the content of the hate contained in THERE WAS A COUNTRY by a major Igbo professor and prolific writer Chinua Achebe? That was the last work he did and then he died shortly after. Supported by already grown officers like Olusegun Obasanjo, Muhammadu Buhari, Scorpion – Adekunle, etc, and fresh officers just coming from the College like Tajudeen Olanrewaju and many others, General Gowon prosecuted the war against the Igbo and still ended up with a spirit full of mercy saying “no victor no vanquished.”
That was why Gowon, asked to react to Achebe’s “There was a Country” which blamed him and Awolowo for Igbo misfortune, angrily told a reporter that I know so well that, “I am surprised that 40 years after the Civil War, some people still bring up this matter. Do they think I didn’t know what I was doing when I said ‘no victor no vanquished?’”
When Jonathan was there, it is on record many other parts of the country complained that when for instance a Yoruba man was sacked from office, he replaced him with either an Igbo or a person from Niger Delta. Igbo did not agitate that time because they enjoyed to the detriment of others. Niger Delta militants did not bomb oil installations because they were in charge. The moment Buhari won election on March 28, 2015 they started remembering that Jonathan government was held back from performing because “of Buhari” and so vowed to make Nigeria ungovernable for him. That is the truth of what they have done with bombing of oil installations and agitations for Biafra. No other reason.
I, like other Nigerian sane person, am therefore miffed that somebody would come on a medium’s comment side to tell us about a smoke without a fire like Peter Ejirika did on NAIJ.COM this morning of Thursday June 22, 2017 telling us about holocaust by North against the Igbo.
Peter Ejirika · Austin, Texas responding to a report by PDP factional leader, Ahmed Makarfi’s denouncing the approach of Nnamdi Kano’s agitation for Biafra, had written: “PDP, what about the pogrom, genocide, and holocaust against the Ibos? These are the undlying reasons for Biafra and nobody who did not experience these horrors can ask those who experienced them to forget about these horrors. What we should be concerned with, at this time, according to late Moumar Gaddafi is to constitute a panel that would divide the joint assets of Nigeria equitably. From the outcome of the Sit-home Civil Disobedience, Nigeria should have known that 90 Percent of the Ibos are not interested in One Nigeria, regardless of the magnitude of war threats Nigeria imposes on Biafrans.”
This aforementioned being my reaction to him because he and his cohorts know not and they need to be told. They will also need to tell us, despite their abundant opportunities to own land and houses in other lands such as Northern Nigeria and Western Nigeria, why is it that nobody from outside Igbo Land can be allowed to buy a land not to talk of owning a house in any part of Eastern Nigeria? These guys are the most intolerant occupiers, persecutors of the Nigerian Nation yet they present themselves to the world as if they are the most untolerated, most persecuted. To me, there is no amount of truce evoked, Igbo will always be Igbo. But, like President Buhari said that he has the military background and age contributing to this regime while Osinbajo has wisdom and scholarship contributing and that both are contributing blessings to Nigeria at the moment. On this understanding, I will implore the Acting President and the entire team of the Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government not to play politics in addressing these Igbo excesses at this time that the Arewa Youths have opened upon on it. I want the Federal Government to be as frank as the Northern Elders Forum (NEF)’s spokesman, Prof. Ango Abullahi, and tell Igbo to their faces what they are doing wrongly as members of Nigeria and ask them to change.
