Nigeria: Biafra - FG Unnecessarily Making NNAMDI KALU A LEGEND - IKOKWU

Nnamdi Kanu.

By fidelity michael

Second Republic politician and Anambra State Chairman of the defunct Nigeria Peoples Party, NPP, Chief Guy Ikokwu, has urged the Federal Government to release without delay the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB, Mr. Nnamdi Kanu because his continued incarceration is not in the best interest of the country.

Ikokwu, a lawyer of over 50 years and a chieftain of the defunct National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, attributed the raging clamour for Republic of Biafra to the refusal of Nigeria's leaders to restructure the country, which he argued is hindering the nation's socio-economic growth.

Nigeria, Igbo must not go for second civil war

Asked his take on the raging agitation for the Republic of Biafra, Ikokwu, who fought the civil war on the side of Biafra, said: "Generally speaking and in line with what Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was the first leader of Biafra said, our people should not go for a second civil war. It is in public domain. It is on Youtube and video. Anybody can play it and listen to what he said.

In saying that, he said history should be a lesson not only for Nigeria but also for Igbo people and that the grave implications of a civil war are such that the initiators do not normally know where it would end and who and who would suffer. In the first civil war, the majority of those who suffered were the innocent people.

More than a million people died and they were not the ones who started the war or were fighting the war. He said a second civil is not in the best interest of Nigeria, that Nigeria should learn its own lesson and understand that the Igbo always add value to anywhere they go. To any situation they are called upon, they add value.

They never go anywhere to deteriorate the existing situation. Not only that they are so flexible that they can change their culture - language and dressing that they and the natives will almost look alike; that the main thing Nigeria should do is to restructure the country into fiscal federalism as our founding fathers - Herbert Macauley, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, Dennis Osadebey, MI Okpara , etc, who agitated and got. They fought for a federal structure and this is embedded in our national anthem - in diversity we stand, there is unity in diversity.

Need for justice equity, fairplay

"That is where the Igbo stand. There should be unity in diversity. We should use the diverse abilities of each group. The Yoruba have where they excel.

Six zonal structure

The Urhobo, Hausa, Fulani, Tiv, Nupe, Kanuri, etc, each have where they excel. Use all these diversifications to promote a united front so that on the whole, the whole nation will rise up and be better for it. That is where we stand. There should be justice, equity and fair-play.

Once these three things are given, you will not find any more resentment or demonstration by youths. At the moment, majority of Nigerians believe in the six zonal structure.

Leading Nigerians from all parts of the country like Emeka Anyaoku, Wole Soyinka, Kayode Fayemi, Bolaji Akinyemi, etc have said a thousand times: Give these geo-political zones federating powers so that they can become the federating units. Each federating unit can take care of certain things in its area.

It can take care of its youths, hospitals, infrastructure and even local councils. If a federating unit wants one million local governments, let it create them and pay them from its own resources. It is these federating units that will now engender the issue of diversification, which economic wise, the present Federal Government has been told: with falling oil prices, you don't have enough federal revenues again, the economy should be diversified so that each unit will contribute what it has in its area.

For instance, the South-East has oil palm, the North can produce groundnut, cotton. The South-South has rubber, oil palm. The South-West has cocoa. If we diversify the economy, Nigeria will be stronger and richer.

Biafra: Agitators renew hope for reconciliation

How Nnamdi Kanu, Uwazuruike, Uchenna Madu turn enemies fighting same cause
From OKEY SAMPSON, Aba; GEORGE ONYEJIUWA,Owerri;JEFF AMECHI AGBODO, Onitsha
MANY who hear about Biafra today often associate it with the late Igbo leader, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumeg­wu Ojukwu, who led the Biafrans in the civil war from 1967 to 1970. Actu­ally, the name has its own origin.
That notwithstanding, after the civil war, Ojukwu had continued in his quest to defend the cause of the Igbo man always. However, he did not embrace the Movement for the Actu­alization of the Sovereign State of Bi­afra (MASSOB) when the movement made its debut in 1999.
At that time, the late Biafran war­lord was skeptical about the survival of MASSOB, having seen blood during the civil war. Reason? Ojukwu did not want to get involved in anything that would lead to bloodletting.
It was when the leader of MASSOB, Chief Ralph Uwazuruike assured him that the new movement would be non-violent that Ojukwu threw his weight behind the group.
But following the death of Ojukwu in 2011, MASSOB began to have se­rious problems as Ojukwu who used to intervene in times of crisis was no more. Many of the members therefore, pulled out to form splinter groups.
Meanwhile, leaders of the groups who spoke to Saturday Sun recently still believe they can achieve the sov­ereign state of Biafra despite their dif­ferences.
In the beginning
Prior to 1967 when the civil war broke out, what sparingly became known as Biafra was an area in the South Hemisphere, within the Gulf of Guinea, known as the Bight of Biafra.
The name became more pro­nounced when the then military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the area a sovereign state and called it the Republic of Biafra.
The fratricidal civil war which fol­lowed later ended that initial struggle, but like the beetle, the name did not die.
In 1999, a not-too-well known law­yer, Chief Ralph Uwazuruike, from Okwe in Onuimo Local Government Area of Imo State, appeared on the horizon to begin what could be tagged the second phase of the struggle with the formation of MASSOB.
Uwazuruike who began the new struggle from his remote Agunlejika, Lagos residence took the country by storm even as many people wrote him off initially. But the MASSOB found­er went into the struggle, applying the doctrine of non-violence.
Genesis of the MASSOB struggle
Leading Saturday Sun into how MASSOB began the struggle, its new leader, Mr Solomon Chukwu said the struggle, which he says was an off­shoot of the one started by Ojukwu, was on account of the alleged margin­alisation of the Igbo people in the pol­ity which Ojukwu took up as a challenge.
According to Chukwu, what Ojukwu began at the time culminated in the peace accord in Aburi, Ghana. Among the agreements reached at the meeting ac­cording to him, was that the area known as Biafra should be allowed to control her resources and pay little to the centre.
He regretted that after signing the ac­cord, General Yakubu Gowon (rtd), based on the advice from Britain, re­neged on the agreement which led to the civil war.
“After the civil war ended in 1970, in 1999, we started the struggle again but on a different plane. It was non-violence. We are not carrying guns or knives, but we are telling Nigeria and the whole world that we want our freedom; we need to be on our own,” he said.
Successes so far
The new MASSOB leader was quick in admitting that his group has pulled the string of successes since it started the struggle.
“Yes, I can say that we have re­corded successes so far. If not for any other thing, from 1999 till now, Biafra has once again become a household name. Before this time, whenever you mentioned Biafra, you could be stoned to death, butit is not so again. This success of a thing is a gradual process when tak­ing into cognisance our non-violent approach. We want to follow Ma­hatma Ghandi’s way of actualising the dream so that we will achieve it at the end. At least, Biafra, for now is being heard all over the world and we will get there in no distant time,” he said.
Chukwu expressed the view that what made the successes recorded so far possible were the commit­ment of the leadership and all the other members of MASSOB who he said have sacrificed a lot for the struggle.
He also mentioned the organiza­tion’s non-violent approach as an­other milestone in its success story.
How dissension crept into MASSOB
Chukwu said it was the selfish de­sire of some of the prime actors to deviate from the non-violent posture of the struggle but go violent was the major reason that led to the splinter groups.
Hear him: “From my own personal investigation, those people that left MASSOB did so because they believe that we cannot achieve our aim with­out violence, they want ed to use vio­lence in getting it. Chief Ralph Uwa­zuruike is still saying no, MASSOB is still saying no.The Bill of Right that we signed with the world body was based on non-violence and there is no way we can change that for now, we will continue with the non-violence until we get there.
“Many people like the Zionists which is being headed by a lawyer. What about Captain Jumbo’s group and others who broke away, trying to actualize the Biafran state through violence? It has not been possible. By our approach which involves dialogue, peaceful protests and round-table dis­cussions, I think we are getting to the end of it.
“Some of the persons who believe they can achieve the state of Biafra through violence are Uchenna Madu and his group, the Zionists, Ekwenche and others. They broke away from MASSOB thinking they will get it through violence, but I don’t think it is possible. MASSOB does not believe in that, we still remain non-violent, we are not going to carry knives, we are not going to carry guns, but we will get to the end of our struggle”.
MASSOB not threatened by splinter groups
MASSOB, according to Chukwu, is not in any way threatened by the splin­ters’ followership which is not even enough and which to him informed why they are failing.
“The same people who said they were Zionists some years ago are the same people who have turned into the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). By the next two or three years, you will see they will change their name into another thing in the name of achieving Biafra through violence, but it is not possible,” Chukwu said.
Possibility of coming together again
Notwithstanding the gulf that ap­pears to stand between Uchenna Madu-led faction of MASSOB on one hand and MASSOB led by Uwa­zuruike’s Chukwu on the other hand, the new MASSOB leader still believes that they can overcome their differenc­es and come together to work for the common goal of achieving the state of Biafra.
However, one thing must be done; the returnees so to say, must remove the toga of violence in them.
“Despite what these people are do­ing, MASSOB is still one and will re­main one entity. If you want to know whether what I’m telling you is the truth, we have our days of meeting, I can invite you, and you come and see things for yourself. We have struc­tures all over the country, even abroad. MASSOB is still strong as it was at the initial time; we are even getting stron­ger and stronger.
Our population has increased. Without sounding immodest, within the South-East and South-South, we have a population that if I tell you, you will marvel, we are really not moving back, we are forging ahead. But that notwithstanding, we are ready to ac­cept our brothers in the struggle back and work with them if they are ready to change from their violent posture,” Chukwu said.
The new Biafran leader strongly be­lieved that the little crack in the walls of MASSOB could not have been if the Nigeria blood was not still running riot in some of the characters.
“Anybody who wants to overthrow his father will give all sorts of reasons. Any bad son who wants to sleep with his father’s wife will always tell you he did that because the woman walked in front of him naked. If not that, Chief Uwazuruike is open to everybody; the bank accounts of MASSOB were not opened in Uwazuruike’s name.
“Let me tell you something, Uchenna Madu was our Director of Information. Before that, he was a regional adminis­trator. Every regional administrator has his own account which he controls. The little paid to the centre is managed by a committee which is using it to build our central secretariat at Owerri. So, if he is accusing Uwazuruike of embezzle­ment, go to Okwe his home town and see what the struggle has done to his fa­ther’s compound. All the buildings were destroyed, the one he has in Owerri was destroyed. All his vehicles, most of them are now in police stations all in the name of the struggle. I wouldn’t know how he should be accused of embezzle­ment when where he is staying in Ow­erri now is MASSOB building, the sec­retariat we are building is MASSOB’s. The vehicles you see him use were given by some people who believe in the struggle and they are MASSOB’s, not Uwazurike’s. Uchenna Madu as the then Director of Information, had right over the vehicles as Uwazuruike as he was always allowed to carry one and use as he liked. Uwazuruike is not a greedy man. The only thing as I said earlier is that he abhorred violence and many of his traducers did not like that,” he said.
Despite all these, Chukwu said MAS­SOB leadership holds nothing against Uchenna Madu and others who broke away, stating that they are still regarded as MASSOB members, but insisted they should retrieve their steps and key into the non-violence stance which he said MASSOB is known for.
MASSOB has all it takes to actualise Biafra
Not minding the olive branch Chuk­wu extended to the leadership of other splinter groups so that they can work together for the common goal, he how­ever, said that MASSOB has all it takes to carry on with the journey alone.
“Why not? Everybody from the for­mer Eastern Region is a Biafran man, but all of them are not MASSOB mem­bers. If you believe you have grown and can go on with the struggle on your own, fine, stay on your own. MASSOB has grown past the level some people are thinking, we have offices in all the parts of the former Eastern Region and even beyond. Where are the offices of the so-called splinter groups, where are they coming from? So, we are firmly on ground and have all it takes to actualize the state of Biafra without looking the direction of the splinter groups,” he said.
Ateke Tom claim that MASSOB does not exist in the Niger Delta
On the statement by Ateke Tom that MASSOB does not exist in the Niger Delta, Chukwu said that Ateke Tom never made such a statement.
“He did not say so because I’m a true son of Ikwerre, I came from the heart of Rivers State. If you come to Rivers State and ask about MASSOB, nobody will tell you it does not exist, MAS­SOB is all over, go to Ikoku, the heart of Port Harcourt, all the traders there are members of MASSOB, go to Bayelsa, Delta and other states in the Niger Delta, MASSOB is firmly rooted. Our enlight­ened brothers like Asari Dokubo people like Captain Jumbo, other big boys in this area know that MASSOB exists,” Chukwu pointed out.
The groups reunite
For Chukwu, it will take good spirit for that to be done.
He was of the view that those who had left should come back to say they were sorry.
He stressed that when that was done, the splinter groups should drop their violent posture and straight away they would accept them back and they would have nothing to lose and they would work together to actualize Biafra.
Our grouse with Uwazuruike – Uchenna Madu
But Uchenna Madu, the former Na­tional Director of Information and a founding member of MASSOB and now the leader of a splinter group has a different opinion as he said that they re­volted when Uwazuruike deviated from the original cause of the struggle.
He pointed out that Uwazuruike was expelled from the MASSOB for alleg­edly defrauding the members of the movement.
He told Saturday Sun that in 1999 when MASSOB was formed that the founding members had unanimously chosen Chief Ralph Uwazuruike to be their leader because of his then passion for the cause of Ndigbo.
His words: “Actually the primary aim of establishing MASSOB was to salvage the Igbo nation from Nige­ria’s political and economic slavery which has become an extant policy of successive Nigeria government since the end of the Nigeria/ Biafra civil war.
“So, the then MASSOB under Uwazuruike was designed, articu­lated and established to fight the genuine Igbo interest with self-de­termined spirit of Biafranism, that’s why Igbo youths, elders and women joined in their thousands hoping that Uwazuruike will take Biafrans to their Promised Land, but he openly, consciously, willingly and shame­lessly derailed, and in the process setback the Biafran struggle which has now been revived and reformed by IPOB and the new MASSOB led by my humble self”.
MASSOB, IPOB join efforts
Madu pointed out that the cur­rent leadership of MASSOB led by him and IPOB, led by Mazi Nnamdi Kanu who is being detained would continue the genuine struggle to ac­tualize the Biafra state.
“IPOB with MASSOB have re­corded tremendous successes in the last few years. IPOB has succeeded in internationalizing the Biafran struggle, and the arrest and detention of Nnamdi Kanu has further brought our struggle before the international community who are now discussing the issues,” he claimed.
Madu who was clamped into detention for over two years with Uwazuruike said that the cause of the dissension in the movement was as a result of Uwazuruike’s deviation from the Biafra struggle.
He alleged that the former leader was openly romancing with the op­pressors of Ndigbo for selfish rea­sons.
Hear him: “Uwazuruike was us­ing the MASSOB platform for cheap political and monetary gains, and entering into an accord with the Hausa-Fulani-led by Alhaji Hamza Mustapha for unity of Nigeria which was contrary to the objectives of MASSOB and IPOB and that was a total deviation and that was the major reason that we had to expel him from the mainstream MASSOB. Again he introduced the Biafra International Passport, vehicle license/plate num­ber, income tax which he used to dupe the members”.
He maintained that while Uwa­zuruike has ceased to be part of the struggle that led to the detention of the IPOB leader, Kanu, Tony Nnadi of Lower Niger Congress and him­self are those who have remained in the struggle and have the support of the majority of the people, including those in the Diaspora.
“Every genuine Biafran group has regards and respect for each other. We are already working together as a team to actualise our dream.
“It’s quite open that IPOB and MASSOB are seriously, consistently working and relating together for the actualizatiion of Biafra with non-vi­olence. Those in the genuine groups have no differences, suspicion, dis­trust unlike Ralph Uwazuruike, for­mer leader of MASSOB now leader of BIM. BIM is a continuation of Uwazuruike’s alleged fraud,” Madu alleged.
IPOB not contending with any other group- Iroanya
Also the Coordinator of Coordina­tors of Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), Dr. Clifford Chukwuemeka Iroanya, told Saturday Sun that his group is not contending with any oth­er group nor seeking any relevance from any quarters.
Iroanya claimed that there are no deviations or disharmony amongst Biafrans who have rallied around the leader of IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, say­ing that IPOB welcomes plurality of ideas and strategies.
He maintained that IPOB was not in any competition with any other organization that is interested in the restoration of the nation of Biafra in truth and honesty.
He said that the objective and mis­sion of the restoration of the nation of Biafra is very much on course through the efforts of IPOB, noting that the IPOB is a mass movement of Biafrans with a single objective which is the restoration of a sover­eign state of Biafra.
According to him, “the IPOB is not a local organization nor is it an Igbo-leaning entity, rather the move­ment is officially registered in over 88 countries and recognized by those governments with the only excep­tion being that of Nigeria. Therefore, IPOB has a global outlook.
“In the history of freedom fight­ing, there has never been any mass movement with such footprints as the IPOB. The international uproar that has and continues to follow the illegal abduction and detention of the leader of IPOB is a clear example of the reach and popularity of IPOB and its leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.
“Up to this moment and well into the future, there will be regular peaceful protests against the illegal and unconstitutional detention of the leader of IPOB as well as the quest for the restoration of the nation of Bi­afra. This has never happened for any other person leading any agitation for the restoration of the nation of Biafra.
“The house of Biafra is not di­vided against itself, those that point to the divergent or different ideolo­gies and methodologies of the vari­ous groups do not understand history. Even the brutal fight for the restora­tion of the State of Israel is no differ­ent to what we have today.
There was Haganah and Ergun, both groups rarely saw eye to eye. David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin seldom agreed on approach but both were pursuing the same thing. Biafra is a divine project and only the very pure at heart can last the distance.”

JAMB Score Below 150 In 2016 UTME - Your Next Step

This thread is for candidates who scored below 150 in the 2016 Unified tertiary Matriculation Examination.

You may have concluded that no admission is coming forth for you this year considering your score. However, the saying that there is no problem without a solution stands true even in this case.

We want to use this medium to guide you on the next step to take.

One thing I need you to know before I continue is that JAMB UTME is not the only gateway to a higher institution. Since the 2016 UTME wasn’t favourable to you, you may need to consider other alternatives to securing admission.

There are four alternatives you need to consider now, namely; pre-degree programmes (Universities), Evening Programmes (polytechnics), Part-time programmes (universities and polytechnics) and Interim Joint Matriculation Board (IJMB).

The Pre-Degree Programme is offered by many universities and is designed to support candidates who did not meet certain requirements for admission. The candidates are usually admitted into a degree programme of their choice after completing the pre-degree programme which usually lasts for a year. You can always check on here for updates on school pre-degree programmes.

Candidates who apply for part-time and evening progammes get admitted directly to 100 level just like UTME candidates, the only difference here is you are likely going to spend one additional year. That is 5 years for a course a UTME candidate would have spent 4 years on. Also the tuition fees are usually high.

IJMB means Interim Joint Matriculation Board, while IJMBE is the "Examination" itself. IJMB is an Advanced-Level (A-Level) Course, which you take for 9 months, after which you take a final exam that gives you a certificate.

IJMB seems to be the best alternative because the certificate obtained at the end of the programme can be used to apply for 200 Level Admission into institutions like UNILAG, ABU, UNILORIN, UNIPORT.

However, if all these options do not suit you, you have one other last option. That is, TRYING AGAIN.
That you did not succeed this year does not mean you will not succeed next year.

I wish you all the best as you make your decisions. You can use this medium to interact among yourselves and share valuable information that will help one another.

You can use this medium to interact among yourselves and share valuable information that will help one another.

Biafra: A People Betrayed

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by Kurt Vonnegut

From Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, 1979

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THERE is a "Kingdom of Biafra" on some old maps which were made by early white explorers of the west coast of Africa. Nobody is now sure what that kingdom was, what its laws and arts and tools were like. No tales survive of the kings and queens.

As for the "Republic of Biafra" we know a great deal. It was a nation with more citizens than Ireland and Norway combined. It proclaimed itself an independent republic on May 30, 1967. On January 17 of 1970, it surrendered unconditionally to Nigeria, the nation from which it had tried to secede. It had few friends in this world, and among its active enemies were Russia and Great Britain. Its enemies were pleased to call it a "tribe."

Some tribe.

The Biafrans were mainly Christians and they spoke English melodiously, and their economy was this one: small-town free enterprise. The worthless Biafran currency was gravely honored to the end.

The tune of Biafra's national anthem was Finlandia, by Jan Sibelius. The equatorial Biafrans admired the arctic Finns because the Finns won and kept their freedom in spite of ghastly odds.

Biafra lost its freedom, of course, and I was in the middle of it as all its fronts were collapsing. I flew in from Gabon on the night of January 3, with bags of corn, beans, and powdered milk, aboard a blacked out DC6 chartered by Caritas, the Roman Catholic relief organization. I flew out six nights later on an empty DC4 chartered by the French Red Cross. It was the last plane to leave Biafra that was not fired upon.

While in Biafra, I saw a play which expressed the spiritual condition of the Biafrans at the end. It was set in ancient times, in the home of a medicine man. The moon had not been seen for many months, and the crops had failed. There was nothing to eat anymore. A sacrifice was made to a goddess of fertility, and the sacrifice was refused. The goddess gave the reason: The people were not sufficiently unselfish and brave.

Before the drama began, the national anthem was played on an ancient marimba. It seems likely that similar marimbas were heard in the court of the Kingdom of Biafra. The black man who played the marimba was naked to the waist. He squatted on the stage. He was a composer. He also held a doctor's degree from the London School of Economics.

Some tribe.

I went to Biafra with another novelist, my old friend Vance Bourjaily, and with Miss Miriam Reik, who would be our guide. She was head of a pro-Biafran committee that had already flown several American writers into Biafra. She would pay our way.

I met her for the first time at Kennedy Airport. We were about to take off for Paris together. It was New Year's Day. I bought her a drink, though she protested that her committee should pay, and I learned that she had a doctor's degree in English literature. She was also a pianist and a daughter of Theodor Reik, the famous psychoanalyst.

Her father had died three days before.

I told Miriam how sorry I was about her father, said how much I'd liked the one book of his I had read, which was Listening with the Third Ear.

He was a gentle Jew, who got out of Austria while the getting was good. Another well-known book of his was Masochism in Modern Man.

And I asked her to tell me more about her committee, whose beneficiary I was, and she confessed that she was it: It was a committee of one. She is a tall, good-looking woman, by the way, thirty-two years old. She said she founded her own committee because she grew sick of other American organizations that were helping Biafra. Those organizations teemed with people 'who were kinky with guilt', she said. They were trying to dump some of that guilt by being maudlinly charitable. As for herself; she said, it was the greatness of the Biafran people, not their pitifulness that turned her on.

She hoped the Biafrans would get more weapons from somebody, the very latest in killing machines. She was going into Biafra for the third time in a year. She wasn't afraid of anything. Some committee.

I admire Miriam, though I am not grateful for the trip she gave me. It was like a free trip to Auschwitz when the ovens were still going full blast. I now feel lousy all the time.

I will follow Miriam's example as best I can. My main aim will not be to move readers to voluptuous tears with tales about innocent black children dying like flies, about rape and looting and murder and all that. I will tell instead about an admirable nation that lived for less than three years.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Say nothing but good of the dead.

I asked a Biafran how long his nation had existed so far, and he replied, "Three Christmases, and a little bit more." He wasn't a hungry baby. He was a hungry man. He was a living skeleton, but he walked like a man.

Miriam Reik and I picked up Vance Bouijaily in Paris, and we flew down to Gabon and then into Biafra. The only way to get into Biafra was at night by air. There were only eight passenger seats at the rear of the cabin. The rest of the cabin was heaped with bags of food. The food was from America.

We flew over water, there were Russian trawlers below. They were monitoring every plane that came into Biafra. The Russians were helpful in a lot of ways: They gave the Nigerians Ilyushin bombers and MIGs and heavy artillery. And the British gave the Nigerians artillery too and advisers, and tanks and armored cars, and machine guns and mortars and all that, and endless ammunition.

America was neutral.

When we got close to the one remaining Biafran airport, which was a stretch of highway, its lights came on. It was a secret. Its lights resembled two rows of glowworms. The moment our wheels touched the runway, the runway lights went out and our plane's headlights came on. Our plane slowed down, pulled off the runway, killed its lights, and then everything was pitch black again. There were only two white faces in the crowd around our plane. One was a Holy Ghost Father. The other was a doctor from the French Red Cross. The doctor ran a hospital for the children who were suffering from kwashiorkor, the pitiful children who had no protein.

Father.

Doctor.

As I write, Nigeria has arrested all the Holy Ghost Fathers, who stayed to the end with their people in Biafra.

The priests were mostly Irishmen. They were beloved. Whenever they built a church, they also built a school. Children and simple men and women thought all white men were priests, so they would often beam at Vance or me and say, "Hello, Father." The Fathers are now being deported forever. Their crime: compassion in time of war. We were taken to the Frenchman's hospital the next morning, in a chauffeur-driven Peugeot. The name of the village itself sounded like the wail of a child: AwoOmama.

I said to an educated Biafran, "Americans may not know much about Biafra, but they know about the children."' We're grateful," he replied, "but I wish they knew more than that. They think we're a dying nation. We aren't. We're an energetic, modern nation that is being born! We have doctors. We have hospitals. We have public-health programs. If we have so much sickness, it is because our enemies have designed every diplomatic and military move with one end in mind — that we starve to death."

About kwashiorkor: It is a rare disease, caused by a lack of protein. Its cure has been easy, until the blockading of Biafra.

The worst sufferers there were the children of refugees, driven from their homes, then driven off the roads and into the bush by MIGs and armored columns. The Biafrans weren't jungle people. They were village people—farmers and professionals and clerks and businessmen. They had no weapons to hunt with. Back in the bush, they fed their children whatever roots and fruit they were lucky enough to find. At the end, a very common diet was water and thin air. So the children came down with kwashiorkor, no longer a rare disease. The child's hair turned red. His skin split like the skin of a ripe tomato. His rectum protruded. His arms and legs were like lollipop sticks.

Vance and Miriam and I waded through shoals of children like those at Awo-Omama. We discovered that if we let our hands dangle down among the children, a child would grasp each finger or thumb—five children to a hand. A finger from a stranger, miraculously, would allow a child to stop crying for a while.

A MIG came over, fired a few rounds, didn't hit anything this time, though the hospital had been hit often before. Our guide guessed that the pilot was an Egyptian or an East German.

I asked a Biafran nurse what sort of supplies the hospital was most in need of.

Her answer: "Food."

Biafra had a George Washington — for three Christmases and a little bit more. He was and is Odumegwu Ojukwu. Like George Washington, General Ojukwu was one of the most prosperous men of his place and time. He was a graduate of Sandhurst, Britain's West Point. The three of us spent an hour with him. He shook our hands at the end. He thanked us for coming. "If we go forward, we die," he said. "If we go backward, we die. So we go forward." He was ten years younger than Vance and me. I found him perfectly enchanting. Many people mock him now. They think he should have died with his troops.

Maybe so.

If he had died, he would have been one more corpse in millions.

He was a calm, heavy man when we met him. He chainsmoked. Cigarettes were worth a blue million in Biafra. He wore a camouflage jacket, though he was sitting in a cool living room in a velveteen easy chair. "I should warn you," he said, "we are in range of their artillery." His humor was gallows humor, since everything was falling apart around his charisma and air of quiet confidence. His humor was superb. Later, when we met his second-in-command, General Philip Effiong, he, too, turned out to be a gallows humorist. Vance said this: "Effiong should be the Number two man. He's the second funniest man in Biafra."

Jokes.

Miriam was annoyed by my conversation at one point, and she said scornfully, "You won't open your mouth unless you can make a joke." It was true. Joking was my response to misery I couldn't do anything about. The jokes of Ojukwu and Effiong had to do with the crime for which the Biafrans were being punished so hideously by so many nations. The crime: They were attempting to become a nation themselves. "They call us a dot on the map," said General Ojukwu, "and nobody's sure quite where." Inside that dot were 700 lawyers, 500 physicians, 300 engineers, 8 million poets, 2 novelists of the first rank, and God only knows what else -- about one-third of all the black intellectuals in Africa. Some dot. Those intellectuals had once fanned out all over Nigeria, where they had been envied and lynched and massacred. So they retreated to their homeland, to the dot. The dot has now vanished. Hey, presto.

When we met General Ojukwu, his soldiers were going into battle with thirty-five rounds of rifle ammunition. There was no more where that came from. For weeks before that, they had been living on one cup of gari a day. The recipe for gari is this: Add water to pulverized cassava root. Now the soldiers didn't even have gari anymore. General Ojukwu described a typical Nigerian attack for us: "They pound a position with artillery for twenty-four hours, then they send forward one armored car. If anybody shoots at it, it retreats, and another twenty-four hours of bombardment begins. When the infantry moves forward, they drive a screen of refugees before them."

We asked him what was becoming of the refugees now in Nigerian hands. He had no jokes on this subject. He said leadenly that the men, women, and children were formed into three groups, which were led away separately. "Your guess is as good as mine," he said, "as to what happens after that," and he paused. Then he finished the sentence: "To the men and the women and the children." We were given private rooms and baths in what had been a teachers' college in Owerri, the capital of Biafra. The town had been captured by the Nigerians, and then, in the one great Biafran victory of the war, recaptured by the Biafrans. We were taken to a training camp near Owerri. The soldiers had no live ammunition. In mock attacks, the riflemen shouted, "Bang!" The machine gunners shouted, "Bup-bup-bup!"And the officer who showed us around, also a graduate of Sandhurst, said, "There wouldn't be all this fuss, you know, if it weren't for the petroleum." He was speaking of the vast oil field beneath our feet. We asked him who owned the oil, and I expected him to say ringingly that it was the property of the Biafran people now. But he didn't.

"We never nationalized it," he said. "It still belongs to British Petroleum and Shell." He wasn't bitter. I never met a bitter Biafran. General Ojukwu gave us a clue, I think, as to why the Biafrans were able to endure so much so long without bitterness: They all had the emotional and spiritual strength that an enormous family can give. We asked the general to tell us about his family, and he answered that it was three thousand members strong. He knew every member of it by face, by name, and by reputation. A more typical Biafran family might consist of a few hundred souls. And there were no orphanages, no old people's homes, no public charities and, early in the war, there weren't even schemes for taking care of refugees. The families took care of their own, perfectly naturally. The families were rooted in land. There was no Biafran so poor that he did not own a garden.

Lovely.

Families met often, men and women alike, to vote on family matters. When war came, there was no conscription. The families decided who should go. In happier times, the families voted on who should go to college to study what and where. Then everybody chipped in for clothes and transportation and tuition. The first person from the area to be sponsored by his family all the way through graduate school was a physician, who received his doctor's degree in 1938. Thus began a mania for higher education of all kinds. This mania probably did more to doom the Biafrans than any quantity of petroleum. When Nigeria became a nation in 1960, formed from two British colonies, Biafra was part of it----and Biafrans got the best jobs in industry and the civil service and the hospitals and the schools, because they were so well educated. They were hated for that—perfectly naturally. It was peaceful in Owerri at first. It took us a few days to catch on: Not only Owerri but all of Biafra was about to fall. Even as we arrived, government offices nearby were preparing to move. I learned something: Capitals can fall almost silently. Nobody warned us. Everybody we talked to smiled. And the smile we saw most frequently belonged to Dr. B. N. Unachukwu, the chief of protocol in the Ministry of Affairs. Think of that: Biafra was so poor in allies at the end that the chief of protocol had nothing better to do than woo two novelists and an English teacher, He made lists of appointments we had with ministers and writers and educators and so on. He sent around a car each morning, with a chauffeur and guide. And then we caught on: His smile and everybody's smile was becoming slightly sicker with each passing day. On our fifth day in Biafra, there was no Dr. Unachukwu, no chauffeur, and no guide.

We waited and waited on our porches. Chinua Achebe, the young novelist, came by. We asked him if he had any news. He said he didn't listen to news anymore. He didn't smile. He seemed to be listening to something melancholy and maybe beautiful, far far away. I had a novel of his, Things Fall Apart He autographed it for me. "I would invite you to my house," he said, "but we don't have anything." A truck went by, loaded with office furniture. All the trucks had names painted on their sides. The name of that one was Slow to Anger. "There must be some news," I insisted.

"News?" he echoed. He thought. Then he said dreamily, "They have just found a mass grave outside the prison wall." There had been a rumor, he explained, that the Nigerians had shot a lot of civilians while they'd held Owerri. Now the graves had been found. "Graves," said Chinua Achebe. He found them uninteresting.

"What are you writing now?" said Miriam.

"Writing?" he said. It was obvious that he wasn't writing anything, that he was simply waiting for the end. "A dirge in Ibo," he said. Ibo was his native tongue.

An extraordinarily pretty girl named Rosemary Egonsu Ezirim came over to introduce herself. She was a zoologist. She had been working on a project that hoped to turn the streams into fish hatcheries. "The project has been suspended temporarily," she said, "so I am writing poems."

"All projects have been suspended temporarily," said Chinua, "so we are all writing poems."

Leonard Hall, of the Manchester Guardian, stopped by. He said, "You know, the closest parallel to what Biafra is going through was the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto." He was right. The Jews of Warsaw understood that they were going to get killed, no matter what they did, so they died fighting.

The Biafrans kept telling the outside world that Nigeria wanted to kill them all, but the outside world was unimpressed.

"It's hard to prove genocide," said Hall. "If some Biafrans survive, then genocide hasn't been committed. If no Biafrans survive, who will complain?"

A male refugee came up to us, rubbed his belly with one hand, begged with the other. He rolled his eyes.

"No chop," we said. That meant, "No food." That was what one said to beggars. Then a healthy girl offered us a quart of honey for three pounds., As I've already said, the economy was free enterprise to the end.

It was a lazy day.

We asked Rosemary about a round, bright-orange button she was wearing. "Daughters of Biafra," it said. "Wake! March!" In the middle was a picture of a rifle.

Rosemary explained that Daughters of Biafra supported the troops in various ways, comforted the wounded, and practiced guerrilla warfare. "We go up into the front lines when we can," she said. "We bring the men small presents. If they haven't been doing well, we scold them, and they promise to do better. We tell them that they will know when things are really bad, because the women will come into the trenches to fight. Women are much stronger and braver than men."

Maybe so.

"Chinua, what can we send you when we get back home?" said Vance.

And Chinua said, "Books."

"Rosemary," I said, "where do you live?"

"In a dormitory room not far from here. Would you like to see it?" she said.

So Vance and I walked over there with her, to stretch our legs. On the way, we marveled at a squash court built of cement block—built, no doubt, in colonial times. It had been turned into a Swiss cheese by armor-piercing cannon shells. There was a naked child in the doorway, and her hair was red. She seemed very sleepy, and the light hurt her eyes.

"Hello, Father," she said.

All of Owerri seemed out for a walk on either side of the street in single file. The files moved in opposite directions and circulated about the town. There was no place in particular for most of us to go. We were simply the restless center of the dot on the map called Biafra, and the dot, was growing smaller all the time.

We strolled past a row of neat bungalows. Civil servants lived there. Each house had a car out front, a VW, an Opel, a Peugeot.

There was plenty of gasoline, because the Biafrans had built cunning refineries in the bush. There weren't many storage batteries, though. Most private cars had to be started by pushing.

Outside one bungalow was an Opel station wagon with its back full of parcels and with a bed and a baby carriage tied on top. The man of the house was testing the knots he'd tied, while his wife stood by with the baby in her arms. They were going on a family trip to nowhere. We gave them a push.

A soldier awarded Vance and me a salute and a dazzling smile. "Comment ça pa?" he said. He supposed we were Frenchmen. He liked us for that. France had slipped a few weapons to Biafra. So had Rhodesia and South Africa, and so had Israel, I suspect.

"We will accept help from anyone," General Ojukwu told us, "no matter what their reasons are for giving it. Wouldn't you?"

Rosemary lived in a twelve-by-twelve dormitory room with her five younger brothers and sisters, who had come to see her over the Christmas holidays. Rosemary and her seventeen-year-old sister had the bed. The rest slept on mats on the floor, and everybody was having an awfully good time.

There was plenty to eat. There were about twenty pounds of yams piled on the windowsill. There was a quart of palm oil for frying yams. Palm oil, incidentally, was one of two commodities that had induced white men to colonize the area so long ago. The other commodity was even more valuable than palm oil. It was human slaves.

Think of that: slaves.

We asked Rosemary's sister how long it took her to fix her hair and whether she could do it without assistance. She had about fourteen pigtails sticking straight out from her head. Not only that, but her scalp was crisscrossed by bare strips, which formed diamonds—strips around the hair in the pigtails. Her head was splendidly complicated, like a Russian Easter egg.

"Oh, no, I could never do it alone," she said. Her relatives did it for her every morning. It took them an hour, she said.

Relatives.

She was an innocent, pretty dumpling in a metropolis for the first time. Her village hadn't been overrun yet. Her big, cozy family hadn't been scattered to the winds. There were peace and plenty there.

"I think we must be the luckiest people in Biafra," she said.

Rosemary's sister still had her baby fat.

And now, as I write, I hear from my radio that there was a lot of raping when the Nigerian army came through, that one woman who resisted was drenched with gasoline and then set on fire.

I have cried only once about Biafra. I did it three days after I got home, at two o'clock in the morning. I made grotesque little barking sounds for about a minute and a half, and that was that.

Miriam tells me that she hasn't cried yet. She's tough about the ways of the world.

Vance cried at least once, while we were still in Biafra. When little children took hold of his fingers and stopped crying, Vance burst into tears.

Wounded soldiers were living in Rosemary's dormitory, too. As I left her room, I tripped on her doorsill, and a wounded soldier in the corridor said brightly, "Sorry, sah" This was a form of politeness I had never encountered outside Biafra. Whenever I did something clumsy or unlucky, a Biafran was sure to say that: "Sorry, sah!" He would be genuinely sorry. He was on my side, and against a bloody trapped universe.

Vance came into the corridor, dropped the lens cap of his camera. "Sorry, sah! said the soldier again, We asked him if life has been terrible at the front. "Yes, sah!"he said. "But you remind yourself that you are a brave Biafran soldier, sah, and you stay."

A dinner party was given in our honor that night by Dr. Ifegwu Eke, the commissioner for education, and his wife. They had been married four days. He had a doctor's degree from Harvard. She had a doctor's degree from Columbia. There were five other guests. They all had doctor' degrees. We were inside a bungalow. The draperies were drawn.

There was a Danish modern sideboard on which primitive African carvings were displayed. There was a stereo phonic phonograph as big as a boxcar. It was playing the music of Mantovani. One of the syrupy melodies, remember, was "Born Free."

There were canapes. There was a sip of brandy to loosen our tongues. There was a buffet dinner, which included bits of meat from a small native antelope. It was dreadful in the way so many parties are dreadful: Everybody talked about everything except what was really on his mind.

The guest to my right was Dr. S. I. S. Cookey, who had taken his degree at Oxford and who was now provincial administrator for Opobo Province. He was exhausted. His eyes were red. Opobo Province had fallen to the Nigerians months ago. Others were chatting prettily, so I ransacked my mind for items that might encourage Dr. Cookey and me to bubble, too. But all I could think of were gruesome realities of the most immediate sort. It occurred to me to ask him, for instance, if there was a chance that one thing that had killed so many Biafrans was the arrogance of Biafra's intellectuals. My mind was eager to ask him, too, if I had been a fool to be charmed by General Ojukwu. Was he yet another great leader who would never surrender, who became holier and more radiant as his people died for him?

So I turned to cement. I remained cement through the rest of the evening, and so did Dr. Cookey; Vance and Miriam and I had a drink in Miriam's room after the party. Owerri's diesel generator had gone off for the night, so we lit a candle.

Miriam commented on my behavior at the party.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't come to Biafra for canapes.

What did we eat in Biafra? As guests of the government, we had meat and yams and soups and fruit. It was embarrassing. Whenever we told a cadaverous beggar "No chop," it wasn't really true. We had plenty of chop, but it was all m our bellies. There was a knock on Miriam's door that night. Three men came in. We were astonished. One of them was General Philip Effiong, the second funniest man in Biafra. He had a tremblingly devoted aide with him, who saluted him ten times a minute, though the general begged him not to. The third man was a suave and dapper civilian in white pants and sandals and a crimson dashiki. He was Mike Ikenze, personal press secretary to General Ojukwu.

The young general was boisterous, wry, swashbuckling, high as a kite on incredibly awful news from the fronts. Why did he come to see us? Here is my guess: He couldn't tell his own people how bad things were, and he had somebody. We were the only foreigners around. He talked for three hours. The Nigerians had broken through everywhere. They were fanning out fast, slicing the Biafran dot into dozens of littler ones. Inside some of these littler dots, hiding in the bush, were tens of sands of Biafrans who had not eaten anything for weeks and more. What had become of the brave Biafran soldiers? They were woozy with hunger. They were palsied by shock. They had left their holes. They were wandering.

General Effiong threw up his hands. "It's over!" he cried, and he gave a laugh that was ghoulish and broken.

He was wrong, of course. The world is about as un-shockable as a self-sealing gas tank.

We didn't hear guns until the next afternoon. At five o'clock sharp there were four quick peals of thunder to the south. The thunder was manmade. No shells came our way.

The birds stopped talking. Five minutes went by, and they began talking again.'

The government offices were all empty. So were the bungalows. We were waiting for Dr. Unachukwu to take us to Uli Airport, the only way out. The common people had stayed to the last, buying and selling and begging— doing each other's hair.

They, too, stopped talking when they heard the guns. We could see many of them from our porches. They did not start talking again. They gathered together their property, which they put on their heads. They walked out of Owerri wordlessly, away from the guns.

Dr. Unachukwu, our official host, did not come, and did not call. It was spooky in Owerri. We were now the only people there. We didn't hear the guns again. Their words to the wise were sufficient.

Owerri's diesel generator was still running. That was another thing I learned about a city falling silently: To fool the enemy for a little while, you leave the lights on.

Dr. Unachukwu came. He was frantic to be on his way, but he smiled and smiled. He was at the wheel of his own Mercedes. The back of it was crammed with boxes and suitcases. On top of the freight lay his eight year-old son.

I have written all this quickly. I find that I have betrayed my promise to speak of the greatness rather than the pitifulness of the Biafran people. I have mourned the children copiously. I have told of a woman who was drenched in gasoline.

As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death.

The Biafrans had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again.

They will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again.

Peace.

My neighbors ask me what they can do for Biafra at this late date, or what they should have done for Biafra at some earlier date.

I tell them this: "Nothing. It was and is an internal Nigerian matter, which you can merely deplore."

Some wonder whether they, in order to be up to date, should hate Nigerians now.

I tell them, "no."

A Call to Boycott Buhari and British-Nigeria

Petition by Ndubuisi Anukwuem

To be delivered to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Society for Threatened People, Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, Dr. Ben Carson, Presidential Candidate and 11 others.

The Indigenious People of Biafra (IPOB) are hounded, harrassed, massacred, and incarcerated in violation of their civil and United Nations rights of Indigenous People to agitate for self determination. Buhari is breaking international law by harassing and killing the beleaguered and marginalized peoples of Biafra in British-Nigeria.

There are currently 31,566 signatures. NEW goal - We need 40,000 signatures! 

 

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Petition Background

We, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), under the leadership of Nnamdi Kanu, are compelled to call for a total boycott of British-Nigeria and her murderous president Muhammadu Buhari because British-Nigeria is a rogue terrorist state that tramples on every conceivable human rights, particularly, the rights of the beleaguered people of Biafra and IPOB—the organization of Biafrans agitating for freedom from the wicked British-Nigeria contraption and edifice of genocide.

Buhari is an avowed Islamist, genocidist, tribalist, and unabashed Boko Haramist. Buhari is terrorizing Biafrans—an indigenous people forced against their wish to remain in British-Nigeria—because they are exercising their United Nations Rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination. He has been killing, terrorizing, and mounting roadblocks; abducting, beating, shooting and incarcerating unarmed Biafrans who are peaceably agitating to be free from marginalization and genocide; thus, breaking International Law and violating the United Nations Charter on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of which British-Nigeria is a co-signatory.

Buhari has committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and ought not to be embraced by other world leaders. He should be at International Criminal Court (ICC) and not at United Nations. We call on the civilized nations of the world to Boycott President Muhammadu Buhari and British-Nigeria before it is too late.
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WE HAVE AGREED TO CANCEL JAMB 2016 – DIBU OJERINDE

                                                              Dibu Ojerinde

The jamb registrar Dibu Ojerinde speaking to an unidentified source on March 25, 2016 has disclosed that the 2016 jamb which has been criticized fatally by the candidates might be cancelled only if the candidates who took part in the protest could come out publicly to rewrite their exams. “if those protesters could come out and rewrite their exams and were marked higher than their initial score, then I will agree that jamb 2016 was deception as has been tagged by candidates”. Some candidates have disclosed that jamb registrar Dibu Ojerinde is a perplexed man and not competent to remain in the office. Many have described him as scam, while others say he’s a fraudster in a legal way and some others tag him iniquitous.