By Dr Austin Orette
“Everyone should be called to account. Let us go door to door to ask about what we did here. If the father is gone, let us ask the sons about the sins of their fathers “Anonymous
As I research into this series of uneasy neighbors, I am astounded by what Nigerians have glossed over in order to appease the Biafrans. Private Citizens showed their fidelity by giving the Igbo people back the rent they collected from the houses they left. There is nowhere in the world where a rebel faction of a nation has been thoroughly reintegrated and rehabilitated like we have done for the Igbo people who returned from Biafra.
Nigeria gave assistance to the Igbo people. Nigeria reinstated all the Biafra soldiers who fought against the Nigeria side and paid them arrears of three years. This means while they were fighting against Nigeria, we were bankrolling their insurgency. This means Nigeria actually paid the Biafran soldiers who invaded, killed and destroyed properties in the Midwest Region. They were officially reinstated and their salaries and pensions paid.
Did Nigeria consider any payment to the family of those that were killed and maimed by the unjustified invasion of the Midwest Region by the Biafrans? What did we do to warrant the invasion and occupation of the Midwest region that led to the Biafra invasion? What did we do to the invasion that caused a lot of destruction and loss of lives and properties? All the civil servants in the East were paid their arrears. No person who organized this revolt was punished because Nigeria wanted to hold up to the spirit of No victor, no vanquished.
The Midwest understood this as the price they have to pay for Nigeria’s unity. No one compensated us and we were left to bury our own dead. We did not ask for war. Biafra brought war to our doorstep and we bled and no one helped us to tend to our wounded and we buried our dead alone.
If you ask the Igbo about their rapid re-entry, they will tell you that it is due to their hard work and Igbo ingenuity. If the opposite happened or they experienced a setback, they will say the Nigerian system is rigged against the Igbo man
I am yet to come across any Igbo who shows gratitude for the opportunity of renewal and revaluation that Nigeria gave them. They are angry when they succeed and when they lose, they look for someone to blame. They always tell us the Nigerian factor was designed to stop the Igbo man.
Nigerians are patient people. I am beginning to see that the patience of Nigerians is running out as they are finding out that the Igbo people lack calibration of hubris and they are no longer tolerating the bully tactics of the Igbo people. Nigeria does not belong to them. They can go to Biafra and bellyache but I worry about the geography.
Great America never extended this kind of olive branch to the south that initiated and lost the American civil war. It took America about a hundred years to elect a president from the South in the name of LB. Johnson. His election was accidental after the assassination of JFK. The officers of the Confederacy were made to sign an oath of allegiance before their citizenship could be restored.
Robert Lee who was the President of the confederacy could not restore his citizenship before he died. The reason was that he misplaced his documents for the oath of allegiance and could not find the papers before he fell sick. He died in October 1870. His citizenship was restored posthumously by President Gerald Ford in 1975, almost a hundred years after he died.
What about the breakaway region of Chechnya in Russia? Did the Russians get into appeasement politics with that breakaway Republic? The answer is no. Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda, the authors of the Rwanda genocide of 1994 are still being prosecuted. Can any Hutu person justify the genocide and start a movement for genocide?
This show of civility by Nigerians to Igbo has been misconstrued by them as signs of weakness. Instead of nurturing good neighborliness, we have inadvertently turned them into bullies in the Nigerian landscape.
Nnamdi Kanu by his actions is telling us we were wrong for the war that was started by his Igbo brother. This is the action of a bully. Nothing can placate a bully. As a Nigerian, I refuse to be bullied. Enough is enough. Gradually, he is rewriting the story of the Nigerian civil war where the Nigerian is the villain and the Igbo people are innocent victims. Ojukwu is his hero. The Igbo telling us we hate them is a psychological projection of the hate they have for Nigeria and the good people of this great country. They have no sense of history. The lack of any punishment makes the Igbo people think that the declaration of Biafra is a trivial issue.
Nothing was asked of the Igbo people after the war. They came back into Nigeria as if nothing happened and they have handed revisionist history to their children who want to carry out the same scenarios because nothing happened to the likes of Ojukwu. Is our sovereignty a joke? No person’s compass should point to Biafra when he is making his billions in Nigeria.
Nigeria elected an Igbo to the vice presidency in the person of Dr Alex Ekwueme in 1979, just ten years after the Nigerian civil war. Four years later, the leader of the rebellion was pardoned and immediately ran for the senate. If he was not defeated by his own people, he would have become a senator in a country he was dismembering less than 15 years prior. Nothing was asked of him. He never spent a day in jail. A writer spent more than three years in jail, but the architect of the blood bath paraded Nigeria as a hero. This is abnormal and the Igbo people think that this abnormal situation warrants the concept of abnormal citizenship by having double allegiance, one to Biafra and another to Nigeria.
His main antagonist in his campaign was Chief Christian Cukwuma Onoh, a renowned Enugu lawyer. He promised to bury Ojukwu because he knew where all the skeletons were buried. There is nothing greater that can stand between two antagonists than a beautiful woman. Bianca Ojukwu is CC Onoh’s daughter. Both men buried the hatchet and Bianca Ojukwu is a celebrated Nigerian ambassador today. She has represented Nigeria very well.
The Igbo people were re-assimilated so quickly that we all heaved a sigh of relief that we as a people, we are healing and we are on the move with our usual aches and pains. Nothing was asked of them. No one asked them about rededication of their allegiance to Nigeria. This is why they think their crime against Nigeria is trivial. Due to lack of strict entry rules such as Nigeria citizenship, the Biafrans have taken Nigerians’ generosity as weakness and folly. They will not let the wounds of war heal. They are always picking at the scab. They took advantage of the Biafran propaganda machine that was not dismantled after the war. Gradually, subterranean complaints of marginalization were being murmured. We were under the military and there was strife everywhere.
Just after four years of that civilian dispensation, the civilian government was overthrown and we were back to square one, listening to guttural orders from semi illiterate soldiers whose only claim to fame is the ability to shoot a gun. Nigerians recoiled back into their dark room to witness another decade of military misrule. When the Nation reverted back to representative democracy, we had another military general with no clue at the helm. We did not know we had a constitution. He wanted a third term and made any one who opposed disappear. People like Okadigbo were victims. Okadigbo dared to challenge Mr. Obasanjo for killing anything that moves in the village of Odi in the Niger Delta. An Igbo man shed tears for those of us in the Niger Delta who have always borne the brutality of Caesar’s whip and oppression.
What happened to the Okadigbos of Igbo land ? Our agitation continued and Yar’Adua became president. For the first time, someone looked into the plight of our communities in the Niger Delta and started a process that will rehabilitate the youths and curb the environmental degradation. There was amnesty and the youth laid down their arms to participate in finding solutions to the perennial neglect of the Niger Delta. I thought my nation would eventually heal if dialogue is pursued and adhoc military solutions are jettisoned. I can say there is progress in the Niger Delta today but we have a long way to go. Unfortunately Mr YarAdua died and Jonathan became the inheritor of the throne. He paid attention to the amnesty but since it wasn’t his original design, a lot of funds were frittered away. The administration of Goodluck Jonathan was different in one regard. About 75 % of the cabinet of Goodluck Jonathan was Igbo people. They were eminently qualified and he was good to the South-East. They even renamed him Azikiwe. At this time, we thought our neighbors were our brothers. There was no agitation for Biafra and there was no revisionist history of Biafra. There was an individual running a Biafra money raising stint at the time. His grift was paying off very well and he had no need to increase his amplitude and become confrontational as he was making enough for his keep. Then Buhari came and suddenly those of us in the Niger Delta became the frontal states that prevented Biafra.
We have seen signs of this before but the kaleidoscopic mirage of the Sani Abacha years did not give us the room to analyze the insults that were poured on Ken Saro Wiwa . We thought we all agreed to “no victor, no vanquished “. An individual who was pardoned for heading a rebellion openly derided the relatives of Ken Saro Wiwa that they made their bed and they should lay on it. This was a bridge too far and the hate is real. From then on, there was a catalogue of scenarios in which new proponents of Biafra started using our position during the war as a barometer of their cooperation with us. If there is a pipeline fire accident that incinerates a village in the Niger Delta, there is schadenfreude in Biafra.
our present Palouse position, where we have become pariahs everywhere. There was no push back. Before we knew it, Nnamdi Kanu had raised an army that punishes anyone in Igbo land who will say anything contrary to his phantom stories. He formed Biafra chapters all over the World. He actually told his followers to influence the politics of world powers. He told his people to donate and vote for the racist president of America, Donald Trump. The M15 and Mossad started aping up their activities in Nigeria. Suddenly Israel originally denied that the Igbo people are not the lost tribe of Israel tried to reverse their tune in order to use these Biafrans as their foot hold in Nigeria and Africa when they were denied admission to the AU. He created more unrest in the South East. He was arrested. The rest of the story is still unfolding. Throughout his activities, his main theme is that the Igbo man is oppressed in Nigeria. There was no singular Igbo leader that opposed his ridiculous assertions. Even Senators from the South East started quoting him. When you ask them why they think the Igbo man is oppressed, they will tell you, it is because no Igbo man has been made president. If this were not true, it would be laughable. Prominent Igbo politicians will mount the rostrum and say that only Igbo people can unite Nigeria. What arrant nonsense. These are people who could not unite with their minority neighbours for common values of coexistence telling us they have the elixir of unity. When was the last time you saw an Igbo people unite with anyone who is not Igbo? Wherever they are, there is no peace? They tell us Nigerians who are wary of them are Igbophobic. Are South Africans Igbophobic? Are Ghanaians Igbophobic? What about the American in Dallas who threw out an Igbo organization from his hotel and perpetually banned them from doing business with his hotel? Is the man Igbophobic? For three years, the hotel has hosted them. There is no year where those meetings didn’t end without a fight and the police called. He had had enough and told them never again. Not all money is good money. You be the judge.
We should restructure Nigeria. This should be our priority. The Igbo people are going to continue to be unruly neighbors since they have misinformed their people about the history that brought Nigeria to this precipice. Their actions are beginning to tear at the seams of civilized conduct. They want to resolve every misunderstanding with subterfuge that tears down the glue of fellowship.
The Niger Delta is very capable of being on our own. No one should blackmail us into surrendering leadership to those whose actions have betrayed the very nation they want to lead. This is very confusing. Nigerians are no fools. We cannot surrender the leadership of Nigeria to any group of people who are ambivalent about their citizenship of this great country. I want these agitations to stop so we can continue the work of nation building which is being made very difficult by these hostile neighbors called Biafra. I don’t want a war. Sooner or later, we may be forced to push Biafra out. You cannot be Biafran and aspire to lead Nigeria in any capacity. This emotional blackmail and revisionist history must stop. No group of people has the right to predicate their Nigerian citizenship to the president being a member of their tribe. We must punish people who commit treason against Nigeria. The failure to punish Ojukwu and other leaders of the Biafran Rebellion is what has given the impetus to people like Nnamdi Kanu to imitate Ojukwu and carry out another rebellion. Lack of enforcement of our laws shows we are not serious with our sovereignty.
Let us restructure Nigeria as a matter of urgency so that those who want to exit the federation like the Igbo people can leave. Our building of a nation must go beyond infantile tantrums.
Take the case of the Republic of Texas. Texas gained independence from Mexico in 1836. It was a country of its own until 1845 when it joined the Union as the 28th state of the United States. Due to its peculiar history, Texas is actually run like a country and a lot of Texans have nostalgia for their old country. They have their anthems and their coins and other memorabilia they are very proud of. The annual budget of Texas is about 340 billion. They have their own flag and they have a bicameral legislature which comprises a Senate and a House of Representatives. Due to this wealth, a lot of Texas feels it will be better to secede from the US instead of remaining in the union and continue subsidizing nonproductive states. This is their running joke until 1995 when Mr. McLaren with his separatist group declared the Republic of Texas in 1995 , in Rural west Texas and started collecting Taxes and extorting the citizens in those areas.
Just like Nnamdi was doing in Igbo land. Mr. McLaren and his accomplice were arrested and tried. They were sentenced to 99 years in jail without parole. This is how serious other societies deal with the subject of treason. There are no tribal people going to plead on behalf of McLaren. Those pleading leniency for Nnamdi Kanu because of his tribal affiliations have violated the sacred duty of a citizen. They have no loyalty to Nigeria. This is how I see the Biafran Agitation. For the people agitating for another country to think they can at the same time run for the highest office in Nigeria is beyond pardon. Give them their Biafra and they can all go to Biafra and become president. We are Nigerians.
Dr Austin Orette Writes from Houston, Texas
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