Since the colonial era, a phobia has been haunting Nigeria: the phobia of Igbo domination - Biko Agozino.
Igbophobia is one side of the coin while the other side is extreme Igbophile. In recorded history of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe joined the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) in 1938 after the movement, for the first time since 1922, had won all the three seats to the Legislative Council in Lagos which until then had been won by the NNDP led by Herbert Macaulay. Nnamdi Azikiwe was welcomed into the NYM by Akinola Maja, Kofo Abayomi, Ernest Ikoli and others. The leadership role that Azikiwe wanted for himself, but which he could not achieve in the NYM, made him to scuttle the Movement which he left in 1942.
In 1943, Nnamdi Azikiwe formed the first tribal union in Nigeria called Ibo Federal Union and installed himself as its President. The name of the Union was later changed to Ibo state Union. In his Presidential address delivered at the Ibo State Assembly held at Aba on Saturday, June 25, 1949, Azikiwe said among other things, "... It would appear that the God of Africa has specially created the Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of ages.... The martial prowess of the Ibo nation at all stages of human history has enabled them NOT ONLY TO CONQUER OTHERS BUT ALSO TO ADAPT THEMSELVES TO THE ROLE OF PRESERVER." Earlier in 1948, a member of Ibo state Union and a member of the Legislative Council, Charles Onyeama, had declared that the DOMINATION OF NIGERIA BY THE IBOS IS A QUESTION OF TIME. That same 1948, EGBE OMO ODUDUWA, a Yoruba cultural organisation, and JAMIYYAR MUTANEN AREWA (Northern People's Congress) were formed to counter the chauvinistic and dominating political and economic ideology of the IBO STATE UNION. Earlier on in 1943, Eyo Ita had formed Ibibio Federal Union which was changed later to Ibibio State Union. For daring to emulate Azikwe in forming similar tribal union Azikiwe said, "It was not until twenty-five years later, when he came all out to advocate the cause of the CALABAR-OGOJA STATE MOVEMENT AND TO BEAT THE TOM-TOM DRUMS OF ALLEGED IBO DOMINATION THAT MR. ITA'S SECRET ANTAGONISM AGAINST CERTAIN TRIBES BECAME OBVIOUS (p. 307, ZIK : Selected Speeches of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe)." Remarkably, it was after the civil war that the people of Southeast agreed that the alphabet 'G' was missing in the spelling of the name of their tribe which thenceforth transformed to IGBO instead of IBO.
In spite of the above facts, Biko Agozino distorted fact by asserting that Arewa Youths issued threats to the Igbo to quite the North or risk being ethnically cleansed by force and thereafter asked if the Arewa youths were not crying out for help? Due to incessant IPOB/MASSOB's cries of victimization, persecution, oppression and marginalization of the Igbo in Nigeria and their demand for an Igbo Republic called Biafra, the Arewa Youths had asked Igbo living in the North to return to their ancestral home within three months, while Hausa/Fulani living in the Southeast should return to the North within the same period. That is not a threat to the Igbo but a mutually agreed ethnic restructure to guarantee, in the first place none persecution, victimisation, oppression and marginalisation of the Igbo, at least, in the North. Reasonably, Arewa youths cannot be dismissed as Igbophobes for acceding to IPOB/MASSOB's incessant demand for a sovereign state of Biafra which no Igbo leader has ever condemned. Biko Agozino claimed further that the Arewa youths were raised with the supremacist ideology that the rest of Nigeria was conquered by their fathers for them to rule uninterrupted. He then concluded that Igbo is the only group that has challenged "this mythology of Arewa Supremacy." Yet, at no time in the chequered history of Nigeria has Northerners ruled Nigeria without the collaboration of Southerners and mostly, the Igbo. Supremacists should have ruled alone.
The Igbo are in every nook and cranny of the country helping to provide services that may be hard to access if they were to leave; Those that were defeated in a genocidal war appear to be DOMINANT IN ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE except the presidency of the country and the armed forces - Biko Agozino.
Admitting that the Igbo are everywhere in Nigeria and dominating in all aspects of life is a proof that the civil war was not genocidal and it was not a war against the Igbo as a people. Fighting to keep Nigeria one, has favoured the Igbo to leave and prosper anywhere in Nigeria. In fact, the demand and outcry for a sovereign state of Biafra is a misplaced priority, when we should be holding those who claim to dominate the economy of Nigeria accountable. Nigerians should be told who are the oil block owners and what qualifies them to be oil well owners when the constitution of Nigeria says that the natural resources of Nigeria belong to all Nigerians and that the Federal government is only empowered to manage them for the befit of all Nigerians. We want to know, who issued licenses for importation of household generators into Nigeria and to who were the licenses issued. We want to know what happened to the fifty billion dollars appropriated for and spent on thermal plants and transformers, between 1999 and 2015, for the purpose of generating adequate electricity for household and industrial utilization in Nigeria that were never delivered. Why are Nigerian crude oil refineries not able to refine crude oil? Who are the oil importers and who are the collectors of subsidies for unsupplied fuel? Who are the Judges collecting bribes to discharge and acquit looters of our national patrimony? If, as all Nigerians now complain, Nigerian economy is worse than anytime in recorded history, would it not be reasonable to blame those who dominate the economy of the country as saboteurs?
Finally, I challenge Biko Agozino to produce evidence that genocide was committed against the Igbo before, during and after the declaration of Biafra. He should also supply evidence, as he claimed to know, that the genocide against the Igbo was led by Yoruba and Middle Belt military officers.
S. Kadiri
Dear Biko Agozino,
On reading your evidence in support of your claim that not only Northerners, but Yoruba and Middle Belt military officers, committed genocide against the Igbo before, during and after the declaration of Biafra, I was forced to check the calendar to ensure that it was not first of April, a day for deceitful jokes.
So, your evidence for genocidal war against the Igbo is the compiled 'ESTIMATED DEATHS FROM STARVATION BY ONE DR. MIDDLECOOP.'
Here is some evidence of genocide 'BY EYE-WITNESSES' based on the number of people that they were burying everyday, you wrote. Your eye-witnesses turned out to be only one Dr. Middlecoop and I wonder why he was estimating when he should be giving the exact figure of corpses he was burying daily. Dr. Middlecoop failed to corroborate your statement that besides Northerners, Yoruba and Middle-belt military officers led genocide against the Igbo. Besides, he did not say that deaths from starvation was genocide and if it were he did not say who committed the genocide against the Igbo.
S. Kadiri
Dear Biko Agozino,
From my 'illiterate' standing, my innate intelligence tells me that whether it is declared a weapon of war or not, starvation is an inevitable consequence of war anywhere in the globe. No one has declared starvation as a weapon of war in the Northeast of Nigeria where hundreds of people are now reported dying daily of starvation. In Somalia and South Sudan, starvation is also reported to be taking many lives, most especially children and the old aged. While it is regrettable that many people starved to death inside Biafra, extreme caution must be observed in apportioning blame to Nigeria or the Federal Government. In declaring the sovereign state of Biafra, Ojukwu said that it was the only way to guarantee security of life for the Igbo. It was Ojukwu's responsibility to provide citizens under his government with food without which there could be no security of life. Had Gowon not declared 'No victor, No vanquished' Ojukwu and a host of his collaborators would have be tried for war crimes at the end of the war in 1970. Why?
By September of 1968, Ojukwu's Biafra had been reduced to a small enclave into which he had forcibly evacuated people from all the big towns liberated by the Federal forces after convincing them that they would be killed if they remained behind. Ojukwu could not even feed his soldiers not to talk of people in his refugee camps (p.210, Chinua Achebe's There was a country). When the news of starvation inside Biafra reached the outside world in the Autumn of 1968, General Gowon offered to open up land routes from Port Harcourt for internationally supervised transport of relief supplies to civilians in Biafra. Ojukwu's reaction was recorded by Chinua Achebe thus, "To the consternation of Gowon, Ojukwu opted out of land routes in favour of increased airlifts of food from São Tomé by international relief agencies p. 211)." Ojukwu's action in obstructing relief supplies to civilians through land corridors supervised by international agencies was a war crime. The so-called international relief agencies had no rights whatsoever to violate the airspace, and in fact the sovereignty, of Nigeria. However, Gowon's regime turned blind eyes to the violation of the Nigerian airspace until when Count Carl Gustav von Rosen, who had previously flown Scandinavian Churches' relief supplies into Biafra, flew MINICON planes to bomb Nigerian military positions in Port Harcourt, Benin, Enugu and Ughelli, in May 1969. Consequently, Nigeria issued order that all relief aircrafts flying into Biafra should first land for inspection in Port Harcourt before flying into Biafra. When that order was despised by a DC-7 marked Swedish Red Cross flying into Biafra on June 1, 1969, it was shot down and it was exposed of carrying arms and not relief supplies. If according to you, Biko, deaths by starvation is genocide, the person who caused starvation in Biafra was Ojukwu and his war cabinet. In fact, in the history of warfare, Nigeria is the only country in the world that has ever invited a team of international observers (from the UN, OAU, Sweden, Canada, Britain and Poland) to trail behind its forces at the war front and to report on their conducts. The international observers' reports exonerated Nigeria from genocidal crime in her prosecution of the civil war.
My dear brother, Biko Agozino, I do not need, in this regard, to read the book you referenced since I believed that you had no need to falsify the contents of what you have read and reproduced. This is what you wrote, "Here is some evidence of genocide by eye-witnesses based on the number of people that they were burying every day." Thereafter you reproduced a cable to the UN by WCC thus, "FOR SECRETARY GENERAL UN FROM WCC REFUGEE RELIEF BIAFRA. DEAR MR. THANT, ESTIMATED DEATH FROM STARVATION IN MONTH OF JULY 6,000 PER DAY, AUGUST 10, 000 PER DAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 000 PER DAY..." Only a literate oaf would convert the figures in the WCC's cable to evidence of genocide and eye-witnesses account on the number of people that they were burying everyday. An eye-witness to the number of people starved to death and buried everyday should reasonably not be estimating the number of people starved to death that he had really witnessed buried!! You can forecast/predict the future by guessing, estimating and approximating but you cannot do that with the past. An eye-witness to the rain that fell yesterday cannot say today, perhaps/probably rain fell yesterday.
The music of Biafra war stopped in 1970 but, unfortunately, some deaf persons have not stopped dancing to Biafra war music.
S.Kadiri