I reject Buhari’s One Nigeria; THIS ONE NIGERIA IS A FRAUD NOT WHAT WE FOUGHT FOR -vanguardnewsupdate
http://www.thebiafratelegraph.....co/2016/07/i-reject-
UNLESS YOU ARE ONE OF THE BENEFACTOR OF ONE-NIGERIA, IF NOT THIS ARTICLE MAY GET YOU THINKING ABOUT THE FRAUD CALLED ONE-NIGERIA,WHAT IT STAND FOR AND WHAT IT HAS DONE TO RUIN YOUR LIFE.
THIS MAY ALSO GIVE YOU REASONS WHY PEOPLE LIKE #HITLERBUHARI WANT ONE-NIGERIA AT ALL COST BUT NOTHING THEY CAN DO AT THIS STAGE BECAUSE #Biafra NATION MUST SEPARATE FROM EVIL NIGERIA.
Read....I reject Buhari’s One Nigeria; THIS ONE NIGERIA IS A FRAUD NOT WHAT WE FOUGHT FOR
We are now concentrating on the militants to know how many they are, especially in terms of groupings, leadership and to plead with them to try and give Nigeria a chance.
“I assure them that the saying by Gen. Yakubu Gowon that ‘to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done’ still stands. In those days we never thought of oil all we were concerned about was one Nigeria.
“So please pass this message to the militants, that one Nigeria is not negotiable and they had better accept it. The Nigerian Constitution is clear as to what they should get and I assure them, there will be justice.” – President Muhammadu Buhari, to some residents of Abuja who paid him Sallah homage recently.
President Buhari’s off-the-cuff statement above provides an opportunity for us to pick the mindsets of Nigerians on what they really mean by the concept of “One Nigeria”. It is obvious that “One Nigeria” does not have a single meaning for all of us; going by the way we carry on, especially when we find ourselves in positions of power as Buhari currently does.
Let me describe my own idea of One Nigeria. It is a crossbreed between the Zikist and Awoist visions of the unity of Nigeria. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the father of African Nationalism and foremost exponent of Nigeria’s independence, believed in a Nigeria where all citizens would share one vision and national aspiration, irrespective of their tribes, tongues, regions, religions, majority or minority status. That is the kind of nationalism practised in Ghana, a country whose foremost independence proponent and Pan-Africanist, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, was inspired by the Great Zik.
In Ghana, tribe, region and religion are no impediments to national unity. That is why the longest-ruling head of state, John Jerry Rawlings (a minority), was able to seize power and sanitise Ghana. He laid a solid foundation for today’s success story. Contrast this with Nigeria, where an earlier attempt by Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and his colleagues ended up being given an ethno-religious and regional toga. It resulted in a civil war at the end of which Nigeria became a colonial booty of Arewa (the Muslim North).
The Awoist version of One Nigeria recognised the differences between the various groups and sought to establish a structure in which all these groups could live within their geopolitical enclaves and aspire competitively for the greatness of a united nation. Nobody’s ethnic, religious or cultural hang-ups would slow down the progress of others who do not share these hang-ups, and yet all would belong equally and equitably to one nation in spite of their complex diversity. This arrangement is often described as “true federalism”.
So, in this Nigeria of my dreams, those who want to practice Islamic Sharia in their home zone can go ahead. Those who want to cut off the hands of their thieves and overpopulate their home zones with illiterate citizens will not be an impediment to my section which wants to exercise population control, give good education to the young people and offer them a modern, civilised lifestyle comparable to the best in the world. You use what you produce to cater for your people but pay rents to the Federal Government to maintain the common services that bind us together as people of One Nigeria. But you do not use your landmass and population to parasite upon and terrorise others and suck their resources dry in the name of “One Nigeria” which, you insist, is “non-negotiable”.
Buhari made reference to what General Gowon told them as young soldiers during the civil war, which was that, “to keep Nigeria one is a task must be done”. Gowon’s charge to his soldiers was meant to bring back the former Eastern Region which was forced by injustice and insecurity within Nigeria to seek safety in a breakaway Republic of Biafra. Majority of Nigerians (not just Northern Nigerians of Arewa extraction) eagerly participated in enforcing the unity of Nigeria through that war.
The question we must ask ourselves is: why is it that 46 years after, those who fought in the war and are now in their seventies and eighties are still in charge running the country with their archaic and retrogressive mentalities? Why are they still putting a gun on the heads of Nigerians, threatening that to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done? Is there any country in the world apart from Nigeria that maintains “national unity” at gunpoint? Why is it that more and more groups are copycatting Biafra with either secession or self-determination bids if, indeed, the civil war kept Nigeria one?
In any case, is it indeed true that Nigeria’s unity is “non-negotiable” as Buhari says? For me, it an old lie told a million times by people who do not even take time to check what they are saying. The truth is that the negotiation of the unity of Nigeria is constantly ongoing and (unfortunately) never-ending. The Aburi Accord was a product of negotiation of Nigeria’s unity. All the constitutional talks after the civil war in 1977/78, 1989, 1994, 2006 and 2014 were acts of negotiation of Nigeria’s unity.
After the annulment of Moshood Abiola’s victory in 1993, the North negotiated among themselves and gave up the presidency to the Yoruba people to entice them to remain with the Nigerian project. They banned Northerners from contesting the presidency, and overwhelmingly gave their votes to Olusegun Obasanjo.
The Yar’ Adua regime negotiated with the Niger Delta militants to drop their arms and accept “amnesty” and some lollipops in return. Nigeria has been begging to negotiate with Boko Haram since the days of President Goodluck Jonathan till date, and even Buhari himself is still on his knees begging the Niger Delta Avengers for negotiation and offering to do “justice” (the same justice he has refused to do since he was elected a year ago!).
All these negotiations were efforts to wrest some justice, fairness and equity for people who are not happy with Nigeria. They were thwarted because Nigerians are very easily fooled by cosmetic red herrings, such as concession of the presidency, creation of more states, granting of “amnesty” to aggrieved agitators, appointment of a few of your people to glamorous government offices and flashing of cash to shut up noisy mouths. It also comes in the form of intimidation, persecution by prosecution, freezing of accounts, detention and (in extreme cases) outright elimination of recalcitrant opposition.
Even when you thought that seventeen years of renascent democracy had gradually moved Nigeria towards some semblance of geopolitical equalisation, a forgotten fossil of the Nigerian civil war, General Muhammadu Buhari, is brought back to power. He relaunches the worst form of extreme nepotism which even a Northern reactionary commentator, such as Junaidu Mohammed, recently openly condemned. Who would have, in their wildest dream, believed that 46 years after the civil war, it would be possible to have a Federal Government in which the kinsmen and religious acolytes of a sitting President would so predominate in total defiance of the Federal Character principle enshrined in our Constitution?
And this is Buhari’s idea of One Nigeria which he vows to maintain? He can count me out of that! This is not the One Nigeria that the people of the North Central, South-South and South West fought for, and certainly not the One Nigeria which the ex-Biafrans looked forward to when they returned in 1970. This is not the One Nigeria which the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) prescribes because it does not give me a feeling of belonging. I reject Muhammadu Buhari’s lopsided One Nigeria!
http://www.vanguardnewsupdate.....com/i-reject-buharis
STIMULATING CAREFUL CONSIDERATION ARTICLE:
#BiafrExit: Indigenous people of Biafra wont settle for anything less than total exit from zoo called Nigeria.
Sam Omatseye’s piece in the Nation, “The Ghost of Biafra,” this past week adds to the growing discussion on the inevitable impact of the new secessionist movement in important ways. The kernel of that column is that Nigeria as a nation runs in vain from its obligation to effect closure on the Biafran experience. Omatseye, of course skirts certain issues, and fudges a few, including the important question he raises: “how could a people knowing that they did not have the arms still plunge to war against an overwhelming armed opponent
In other words, why did the leaders of the East fight, when they knew they were outgunned? The simple answer is that
(a) The East fought to survive. They did not levy war against Nigeria. War was levied on the East when the federal side reneged on the terms of peace arrived at in Aburi. The Federal Government initiated the war on July 6, 1967, by opening two fronts from the North: the Nsukka front and the Gakem front. Ojukwu evacuated Enugu, and responded with a defensive strategy;
(b) as a means of easing the pressure of attack from the North, Biafra’s Liberation Army led by Brigadier Victor Banjo and Colonel Emma Ifeajuna as his Chief of Staff opened the Midwest corridor to foreclose the attack formation already planned from Jebba by the Federal forces, through the Midwest using the Military Division already established for that purpose led by Murtala Muhammed, circumventing Benin through Auchi, moving through Agbor to the East. The movement of the Biafran forces on August 9, into the Midwest, ruptured that plan.
The Liberation Army would have arrived Ibadan and secured Lagos, and the tides of the war would have been dramatically turned, but for the extraordinary meeting between Banjo, Ifeajuna, and Mr. Bell, the Deputy British High Commissioner in Benin City as the Biafrans moved in a claw formation from Warri through Benin and through Auchi towards the West. Banjo’s dilemma, regarding the threat to bomb Lagos from the sea by the British frigate and turn the West into a theatre of war, and the threat to wipe out Banjo’s family still in Lagos left him with very little choices, other than to stymie the Liberation Army in the Midwest, order a haphazard withdrawal, and the rest is now history.
As a matter of fact, one of the key actors in that event, the playwright and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, already waiting in Ibadan with a “reception party,” has written about this in two of his very important memoirs, The Man Died and You Must Set Forth at Dawn. But Nigerians hardly read these days, except for religious tracts.
But Omatseye is right: War is a messy business. The after effects linger and take doggone time and supreme effort to heal. Nigeria has not healed from the last major war. It is that war that is the ghost that haunts Nigeria.
That war is also the spectre rearing up today in the self-determination movements that are now challenging the basis of Nigerian nationhood. The IPOB/MASSOB and the Niger Delta Avengers are now raising the question of a “Biafraexit” – the call for a referendum on Biafra to constitutionally determine whether Biafra should be allowed to exit Nigeria as a separate nation. The Separatist movement has been gathering momentum since 1999, and has been recently fueled by President Buhari’s adversarial, isolationist, discriminatory and conquistadorial domestic policies.
It does now seem that the greatest threat to the continued survival of Nigeria is the president of Nigeria himself who seems bent on pursuing a narrow revanchist agenda, as well as the use of coercion to stop the secessionist movement which has grown as a counter force to his revanchism. Recently, the president declared that Nigeria’s “unity” was “not negotiable.” Happily many people, including Wole Soyinka, have told him that Nigerian unity is in fact negotiable. The president of course is not talking about real “unity.” He is talking about the unity which the late Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu once described as like the relationship between Jonah and the Belly of the whale. Unity cannot be legislated.
Unity is the product of a felt sense of shared destiny and values. And this is the point that the Biafran secessionists are making. I’d like to say this: every Nigerian must support the right of the Biafrans to seek self-determination through the plebiscitory process. The Biafrans must have their referendum, as permitted in International Law, on the question of “Biafrexit.” In 1964, the founding father of the modern Nigerian nation, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, wrote in the US Foreign Policy magazine, warning that though he preferred an organic nation, it might yet be better for the leaders of Nigeria to meet, and sit, and negotiate how “we will all go our separate ways peacefully” rather than push Nigeria, then lurching towards a bloodfest, to the ultimate evil of a civil war that would claim millions of Nigerian lives. Azikiwe was prescient in 1964, and I stand with the great Zik on this. It is important to settle this question of Biafra’s secession once and for all by peaceful means through a referendum.
To that end, I think that those calling for secession should do the right thing: they should collect the required signatures and write the National Assembly to initiate the referendum, with a copy forwarded to the United Nations. Thereafter they should campaign for support. Here is what the Biafrans are arguing: they are arguing for a restructuring of Nigeria because Nigeria in its current formation is oppressive to their interest and survival; if Nigeria does not want to restructure constitutionally, they are arguing for peaceful exit through referendum. They are arguing that the federal government failed to meet its own obligation under the truce called “No Victor, No vanquished” by not fulfilling the promised three R’s in the old East, and by launching policies that have discriminated against, and isolated the East, especially the Igbo people, since the end of the war.
They have argued that the Federal government has repeatedly failed to protect Igbo lives and property from the indiscriminate attack nation-wide, and therefore they no longer trust the government of Nigeria to secure their lives. They have argued that as republican people, they have nothing in common, culturally, with the rest of Nigeria, and that they reserve the right to pursue their separate destiny, and redeem their society from underdevelopment and poverty using their talents and energy freed from the inherent draw-backs of a Nigeria with feudal and monarchical traditions and tendencies that squelches the Igbo spirit, and the spirit of their Biafran neighbors with long, cherished republican and democratic traditions. And they have also argued about the criminal exploitation and expropriation of resources from their oil rich region which has left the region very impoverished and ecologically devastated and they want the right of self-determination in order to have the power to restore the ecological balance of the delta. These are very powerful arguments, and I am quit
Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/07/biafrexit/
STIMULATING CAREFUL CONSIDERATION ARTICLE:
#BiafrExit: Indigenous people of Biafra wont settle for anything less than total exit from zoo called Nigeria.
Sam Omatseye’s piece in the Nation, “The Ghost of Biafra,” this past week adds to the growing discussion on the inevitable impact of the new secessionist movement in important ways. The kernel of that column is that Nigeria as a nation runs in vain from its obligation to effect closure on the Biafran experience. Omatseye, of course skirts certain issues, and fudges a few, including the important question he raises: “how could a people knowing that they did not have the arms still plunge to war against an overwhelming armed opponent
In other words, why did the leaders of the East fight, when they knew they were outgunned? The simple answer is that
(a) The East fought to survive. They did not levy war against Nigeria. War was levied on the East when the federal side reneged on the terms of peace arrived at in Aburi. The Federal Government initiated the war on July 6, 1967, by opening two fronts from the North: the Nsukka front and the Gakem front. Ojukwu evacuated Enugu, and responded with a defensive strategy;
(b) as a means of easing the pressure of attack from the North, Biafra’s Liberation Army led by Brigadier Victor Banjo and Colonel Emma Ifeajuna as his Chief of Staff opened the Midwest corridor to foreclose the attack formation already planned from Jebba by the Federal forces, through the Midwest using the Military Division already established for that purpose led by Murtala Muhammed, circumventing Benin through Auchi, moving through Agbor to the East. The movement of the Biafran forces on August 9, into the Midwest, ruptured that plan.
The Liberation Army would have arrived Ibadan and secured Lagos, and the tides of the war would have been dramatically turned, but for the extraordinary meeting between Banjo, Ifeajuna, and Mr. Bell, the Deputy British High Commissioner in Benin City as the Biafrans moved in a claw formation from Warri through Benin and through Auchi towards the West. Banjo’s dilemma, regarding the threat to bomb Lagos from the sea by the British frigate and turn the West into a theatre of war, and the threat to wipe out Banjo’s family still in Lagos left him with very little choices, other than to stymie the Liberation Army in the Midwest, order a haphazard withdrawal, and the rest is now history.
As a matter of fact, one of the key actors in that event, the playwright and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, already waiting in Ibadan with a “reception party,” has written about this in two of his very important memoirs, The Man Died and You Must Set Forth at Dawn. But Nigerians hardly read these days, except for religious tracts.
But Omatseye is right: War is a messy business. The after effects linger and take doggone time and supreme effort to heal. Nigeria has not healed from the last major war. It is that war that is the ghost that haunts Nigeria.
That war is also the spectre rearing up today in the self-determination movements that are now challenging the basis of Nigerian nationhood. The IPOB/MASSOB and the Niger Delta Avengers are now raising the question of a “Biafraexit” – the call for a referendum on Biafra to constitutionally determine whether Biafra should be allowed to exit Nigeria as a separate nation. The Separatist movement has been gathering momentum since 1999, and has been recently fueled by President Buhari’s adversarial, isolationist, discriminatory and conquistadorial domestic policies.
It does now seem that the greatest threat to the continued survival of Nigeria is the president of Nigeria himself who seems bent on pursuing a narrow revanchist agenda, as well as the use of coercion to stop the secessionist movement which has grown as a counter force to his revanchism. Recently, the president declared that Nigeria’s “unity” was “not negotiable.” Happily many people, including Wole Soyinka, have told him that Nigerian unity is in fact negotiable. The president of course is not talking about real “unity.” He is talking about the unity which the late Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu once described as like the relationship between Jonah and the Belly of the whale. Unity cannot be legislated.
Unity is the product of a felt sense of shared destiny and values. And this is the point that the Biafran secessionists are making. I’d like to say this: every Nigerian must support the right of the Biafrans to seek self-determination through the plebiscitory process. The Biafrans must have their referendum, as permitted in International Law, on the question of “Biafrexit.” In 1964, the founding father of the modern Nigerian nation, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, wrote in the US Foreign Policy magazine, warning that though he preferred an organic nation, it might yet be better for the leaders of Nigeria to meet, and sit, and negotiate how “we will all go our separate ways peacefully” rather than push Nigeria, then lurching towards a bloodfest, to the ultimate evil of a civil war that would claim millions of Nigerian lives. Azikiwe was prescient in 1964, and I stand with the great Zik on this. It is important to settle this question of Biafra’s secession once and for all by peaceful means through a referendum.
To that end, I think that those calling for secession should do the right thing: they should collect the required signatures and write the National Assembly to initiate the referendum, with a copy forwarded to the United Nations. Thereafter they should campaign for support. Here is what the Biafrans are arguing: they are arguing for a restructuring of Nigeria because Nigeria in its current formation is oppressive to their interest and survival; if Nigeria does not want to restructure constitutionally, they are arguing for peaceful exit through referendum. They are arguing that the federal government failed to meet its own obligation under the truce called “No Victor, No vanquished” by not fulfilling the promised three R’s in the old East, and by launching policies that have discriminated against, and isolated the East, especially the Igbo people, since the end of the war.
They have argued that the Federal government has repeatedly failed to protect Igbo lives and property from the indiscriminate attack nation-wide, and therefore they no longer trust the government of Nigeria to secure their lives. They have argued that as republican people, they have nothing in common, culturally, with the rest of Nigeria, and that they reserve the right to pursue their separate destiny, and redeem their society from underdevelopment and poverty using their talents and energy freed from the inherent draw-backs of a Nigeria with feudal and monarchical traditions and tendencies that squelches the Igbo spirit, and the spirit of their Biafran neighbors with long, cherished republican and democratic traditions. And they have also argued about the criminal exploitation and expropriation of resources from their oil rich region which has left the region very impoverished and ecologically devastated and they want the right of self-determination in order to have the power to restore the ecological balance of the delta. These are very powerful arguments, and I am quit
Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/07/biafrexit/
Welcome to my page friends. I am a Biafran. I love my dear nation Biafra dearly. I will commit anything within my disposal for the uplifting of my nation.
Right now my energy is dedicated to the restoration of Biafra under the leadership of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. Mind you i wont be posting things that will always agree with your views so if you are here be ready.
If you cant deal with my fanaticism about Biafra i advice you keep off my page because its all about Biafra here.
Thanks
Signed: Emma Nnaji
BIAFRA TELEGRAPH: Biafra: Investigate May 30 massacre of Biafrans, United Nations urged
Society for Threatened Peoples yesterday invited the United Nations (UN) office to investigate the alleged massacre of 35 members of the Indigenous People of Biafra IPOB in South-East on May 30, 2016.
The Society wondered why innocent, unarmed people should be shot during their anniversary celebration this year at various locations and the world appears to turn a blind eye on it.
The group in a statement made available to The AUTHORITY on Saturday reads in part: “An independent commission must investigate the escalating violence in Nigeria. After the violent death of at least 35 Biafrans in southeastern Nigeria, who died during the repression of IPOB heroes day by the Nigerian Police and the Army on Monday, May 30, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has called for the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry.
“We must therefore independently clarify who is responsible for the use of heavy ammunition and why it was decided to shoot at Biafran peaceful and unarmed protesters. If the government of Nigeria is not prepared to carry out investigation, we will ask the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations to clarify the reasons behind the escalation of violence by the Buhari-led administration. Impunity will only feed more violence in Biafra.
“The mass killing of innocent Biafrans is unjustifiable. Background of the rally was the celebration for the 49th anniversary of the declaration of the independence of Biafra from Nigeria on May 30, 1967.”
The activists called for an investigation into the killing of Biafrans who had gathered in prayer meetings in churches and public events, even the killing of IPOB members in the National High School, Aba, Abia State on the 9th of February, 2016 and the killing of unarmed civilians during their evangelism on the 30th August, 2015 at Onitsha. The Nigerian security forces also penetrated the churches, arrested and killed some Biafrans while they were sleeping.
“The most serious incidents occurred in the city of Onitsha in Anambra State. There, at least 30 people were killed. And to stop the incessant kidnapping and arrest of Biafra agitators and those suspected to be members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPO in their respective homes and detain them in their respective cells in Nigeria, this must stop.”
The statement concluded: “After this new escalation of violence, the perpetrators, the Nigeria security forces must not remain unpunished otherwise the entire southeast of Nigeria is likely to fall in violence in 2017, when they will be remembering the 50th anniversary of the start of the genocide in Biafra against the Biafrans’’.
http://www.thebiafratelegraph.....co/2016/07/biafra-in
