Thought For Today

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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Sep 29, 2021, 4:24:41 PM9/29/21
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Time was when every fracas on any Nigerian university campus was blamed on a certain Confraternity.

The Confraternity kept denying have hands in these fracas.

The allegations kept coming.

The Confraternity then devised strategies to stop the allegations.

The Confraternity stopped operating on campuses.

Then there was complete rebranding (changing of logo, etc).

Afterwards, the allegations stopped.

If people begin to accuse your organization of having hands in every criminality that occures, it is not enough to keep denying, it is time to rebrand and change strategies.

-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)


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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet and Founder/Publisher of; PublicInformationProjects (www.publicinformationprojects.org)

DR SIKIRU ENIOLA

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Sep 29, 2021, 6:55:33 PM9/29/21
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This goes to IPOB.  They recent denials might be a strategy but it is a very weak strategy. The mindless violence has reached a terrifying degree and this late night denial strategy is not going to work.

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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Sep 30, 2021, 7:28:30 PM9/30/21
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Immediately after the Biafra-Nigeria civil war ended in 1970, following the negotiated surrender of Biafra, all agreements reached that necessitated the surrender were abandoned by the Federal Government of Nigeria.

The "no victor, no vanquished" declared became a mere slogan. Everything was done by the Federal Government of Nigeria to show to the world that there is a victor and a vanquished. The Biafra side was and still is the vanquished.

Political and economic policies were formulated and enunciated to make sure that the "stubborn Igbos", who form the majority and most active citizenry of the defunct Biafra, "do not become threats again in Nigeria".

By 1974, four years after the civil war, the Igbos have rebuilt their economic dominance through trading. Aba, Onitsha, Nnewi and others have regained their positions as prominent trading posts in West Africa (Nay, Africa).

On October 1st 1979, Nine years after the civil war, Dr. Alexander Ekwueme, an Igbo from Anambra state became the Vice-president of Nigeria.

The arrowhead of the civil war, late Chief Emeka Ojukwu returned home from exile in 1982 and joined national politics. In every forum where he spoke, he called for national reintegration of the Igbos and expressed belief in an equitable one Nigeria.

Late Chief Emeka Ojukwu was to be buried with full national honours as a retired military officer of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The Igbos in spite of the marginalizations thrown at them since after the civil war have made tremendous progress as a result of their doggedness, resourcefulness and a disposition to live in peace, even with hostile compatriots.

The current violence in Igboland in the name of whatever, would erode the tremendous progress made by Igbos so far and send the region back to the 1970-1973 era.

Thank you all for your time.

Salimonu Kadiri

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Oct 2, 2021, 12:51:40 PM10/2/21
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​If there were negotiated agreements for the surrender of Biafra in 1970, can Chidi Anthony Opara share with us the contents of the agreements or copies of the agreements, between Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria?

Biafra side was and is still vanquished - Chidi Anthony Opara.
In what way was, and is, Biafra side still vanquished? As far as we know, the present day Bayelsa State belonged to the Eastern Region which was a part of Biafra as declared by Ojukwu on May 30, 1967. It is undeniable that the Biafran side has produced a President of Nigeria after the end of the war as personified by Goodluck Ebelechukwu Jonathan. Mr. Opara's assertion would imply that Biafra was solely an Igbo republic and that it constitutes vanquishment of the Igbo not to have elected one of them President of Nigeria after the war as an entitlement. However, an Igbo, out of over two hundred Nigerian tribes that have never waged war for disintegration of Nigeria, had been Vice President of Nigeria; not less than four Igbo had been President of the Nigerian Senate; there had been Igbo Deputy President of the Senate; and Nigeria has had Igbo Speaker of the House of Reps. Post civil war Nigerian masses have been vanquished and the vanquishers are all from the major ethnic groups.

The Igbos in spite of the marginalization thrown at them since after the civil war have made tremendous progress as a result of their doggedness, resourcefulness and a disposition to live in peace, even with hostile compatriots - Chidi Anthony Opara.

Since Igbo political elites, public servants and business men and women are of the same DNA as their counterparts in other ethnic groups in Nigeria, it is absolute nonsense to claim that the Igbos have been marginalized since after the war. On the contrary, Arthur Ezenukpo said a while ago, "I went to the North, they didn't know who I was. They gave me $12 million for the construction of Kano TV in 1980. I didn't have one naira then. It was the same thing in Katsina, Borno and Kaduna. Then they put me in oil business. They didn't care where I came from. Tell me any Igbo man who can do that." ​https://punchng.com/only-god-can-make-igbo-man-president-arthur-eze/ 
Tony Okafor, Awka. Billionaire oil magnate, Prince Arthur Eze, has said it will take God for an Igbo man to become Nigeria’s President. According to him, the Igbo people do not love another and ...
​Arthur Ezenukpo said that he was put in oil business, by northerners who are supposed to be in the forefront of vanquishing and relegating the Igbo, but he didn't say how. Arthur Eze, as he is popularly known, is a dollar billionaire after he was dashed an Oil Block, OML 109, located just 12 miles off the shores of Nigeria that encompassed some 773 square kilometres with estimated 2.2 billion barrels of crude oil. This doggedness and resourcefulness among Nigeria's political/business class in appropriating to themselves wealth that belongs to all of us is cross ethnic and not limited to the Igbo alone. And the idea of the Igbo living in peace with hostile compatriots is contradicted by the former Governor of Imo State, Rochas Anayo Ethelbert Okorocha, when he appeared in Online Weekly Trust of Saturday, 2 July 2011. He stated, "I will always say I am a Northerner and I'm very proud of it. The East gave birth to me, the North gave me life and the West empowered me financially- The North gave me life and made me who I am today and there is no reason why I should forget that. They are everything to me."  One cannot say that the Igbo, since 1974, have rebuilt their economic dominance of Nigeria and yet claim that the Igbo as an ethnic group is marginalised. If we want to be truthful, the masses of Nigeria have been marginalised by the minority ethnic elites across the country.
S. Kadiri   

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: 30 September 2021 22:34
To: USA African Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today
 
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 2, 2021, 1:24:43 PM10/2/21
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Achebe made a similar point as Chidi.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is referenced as making a similar claim.

It would be informative to read the justifications of these claims.

I don't have an opinion on these claims.

Thanks Chidi for the analysis on the evil potential of the current horror in the SE.

I suspect the fed govt and its terrorist alliance as being behind it.

thanks

toyin



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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 2, 2021, 2:35:19 PM10/2/21
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Toyin Adepoju.

What are the justifications for these claims if you have read them?

Where did Sanusi Lamido make the claims?

Substantiate your claims even if you have no opinions.


OAA


Vote for majority rule at the centre come 2023.



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Date: 02/10/2021 18:37 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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Achebe made a similar point as Chidi.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is referenced as making a similar claim.

It would be informative to read the justifications of these claims.

I don't have an opinion on these claims.

Thanks Chidi for the analysis on the evil potential of the current horror in the SE.

I suspect the fed govt and its terrorist alliance as being behind it.

thanks

toyin



On Sat, 2 Oct 2021 at 17:51, Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com> wrote:

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 2, 2021, 2:43:04 PM10/2/21
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Alagba Kadiri.

Thanks once again for the painstaking elucidation.

An Igbo a few weeks ago stated the Igbo recreated their wealth without contracts from government but through self help.  Arthur Eze and such honest Igbo proved him a shameless liar.

Why dont we have more of such Igbo on our listserv telling such as CAO that they are economical with the truth?  Do they not read history?  Do they not read the same newspapers as Baba Kadiri does? Does Baba Kadiri publish his own newspapers in his bedroom and they are unavailable to others?  What can we do without Baba Kadiri' incisive probe, especially the voluntary amnesiac intellectuals? (including yours truly)


OAA

End the travesty of democracy in Nigeria.  Enshrine majority rule at the centre in the Constitution for the 2023 elections.





Sent from my Galaxy

-------- Original message --------
From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>
Date: 02/10/2021 18:06 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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​If there were negotiated agreements for the surrender of Biafra in 1970, can Chidi Anthony Opara share with us the contents of the agreements or copies of the agreements, between Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria?

Biafra side was and is still vanquished - Chidi Anthony Opara.
In what way was, and is, Biafra side still vanquished? As far as we know, the present day Bayelsa State belonged to the Eastern Region which was a part of Biafra as declared by Ojukwu on May 30, 1967. It is undeniable that the Biafran side has produced a President of Nigeria after the end of the war as personified by Goodluck Ebelechukwu Jonathan. Mr. Opara's assertion would imply that Biafra was solely an Igbo republic and that it constitutes vanquishment of the Igbo not to have elected one of them President of Nigeria after the war as an entitlement. However, an Igbo, out of over two hundred Nigerian tribes that have never waged war for disintegration of Nigeria, had been Vice President of Nigeria; not less than four Igbo had been President of the Nigerian Senate; there had been Igbo Deputy President of the Senate; and Nigeria has had Igbo Speaker of the House of Reps. Post civil war Nigerian masses have been vanquished and the vanquishers are all from the major ethnic groups.

The Igbos in spite of the marginalization thrown at them since after the civil war have made tremendous progress as a result of their doggedness, resourcefulness and a disposition to live in peace, even with hostile compatriots - Chidi Anthony Opara.

Since Igbo political elites, public servants and business men and women are of the same DNA as their counterparts in other ethnic groups in Nigeria, it is absolute nonsense to claim that the Igbos have been marginalized since after the war. On the contrary, Arthur Ezenukpo said a while ago, "I went to the North, they didn't know who I was. They gave me $12 million for the construction of Kano TV in 1980. I didn't have one naira then. It was the same thing in Katsina, Borno and Kaduna. Then they put me in oil business. They didn't care where I came from. Tell me any Igbo man who can do that." ​https://punchng.com/only-god-can-make-igbo-man-president-arthur-eze/ 
Tony Okafor, Awka. Billionaire oil magnate, Prince Arthur Eze, has said it will take God for an Igbo man to become Nigeria’s President. According to him, the Igbo people do not love another and ...
​Arthur Ezenukpo said that he was put in oil business, by northerners who are supposed to be in the forefront of vanquishing and relegating the Igbo, but he didn't say how. Arthur Eze, as he is popularly known, is a dollar billionaire after he was dashed an Oil Block, OML 109, located just 12 miles off the shores of Nigeria that encompassed some 773 square kilometres with estimated 2.2 billion barrels of crude oil. This doggedness and resourcefulness among Nigeria's political/business class in appropriating to themselves wealth that belongs to all of us is cross ethnic and not limited to the Igbo alone. And the idea of the Igbo living in peace with hostile compatriots is contradicted by the former Governor of Imo State, Rochas Anayo Ethelbert Okorocha, when he appeared in Online Weekly Trust of Saturday, 2 July 2011. He stated, "I will always say I am a Northerner and I'm very proud of it. The East gave birth to me, the North gave me life and the West empowered me financially- The North gave me life and made me who I am today and there is no reason why I should forget that. They are everything to me."  One cannot say that the Igbo, since 1974, have rebuilt their economic dominance of Nigeria and yet claim that the Igbo as an ethnic group is marginalised. If we want to be truthful, the masses of Nigeria have been marginalised by the minority ethnic elites across the country.
S. Kadiri   

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: 30 September 2021 22:34
To: USA African Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today
 
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 2, 2021, 4:13:39 PM10/2/21
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thanks OAA.

It seems to be quite a rich literature, but one i dont have precise memory about,

so I Googled ''sanusi on igbo marginalisation''  and got 32, 200 results.

Most signicant from page one of the search are

a discussion from the forum Nairaland

See What Emir Sanusi Lamido S. Said About The Igbo's



and other results


"Igbo marginalisation": What Emir Sanusi said ... - The ScoopNG



'Marginalising The Igbos Could Lead To A 2nd Civil War ...




Biafra/Yoruba Nation: Nnamdi Kanu, Igboho, other agitators ...



This seems to be the URL of what might be Achebe's last article where he made those claims but this article is no longer at the site 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB29824D21B4D9441D696F16B0A6AC9%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 2, 2021, 5:08:12 PM10/2/21
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but...

are the two examples of igbos given by kadiri representative?

were igbo people not largely economically comatose after the war?

how far could they go with the 20 pound ex gratia award by the nigerian govt?

when companies were naturalised  shortly after the war, would they have had the capital to participate in that process, a situation  referenced by Adichie in relation to the same subject of igbo disadvantaging? 

with such scope of devastation as igboland suffered during the war, im keen on knowing how they recovered from the horror.

perhaps greater acknowledgement needs to be given to nigeria, though,  for reconciliation efforts after the civil war.

Biafra had a powerful technology unit, famous for weapons fabrication. 

an article written by a former member of that unit described how the fed govt staffed a research centre with venerans from that unit, but the glories achieved  in biafra were not replicated, if i recall that article clearly enough.

gordian ezekwe, another veteran of that unit, if i recall his name well, later became nigerian minister of science and technology, if i recall the post correctly. he was looked up to to help replicate in nigeria the biafra technological miracle.

a news medium, perhaps newswatch, carried a powerful interview with ezekwe in which he explained the conditions for technological development, one of which is a culture oriented to such growth, if i recall correctly. 

obododimma oha has a powerful blog post describing how the nigerian govt went round confiscating biafran memorabilia but later came pound trying to collect the same kinds of items for the war museum at umuahia, if i recall that post clearly enough, centred, i think, on his grandfather's walking stick. 

one could appreciate the govt's turn around after seeing the light and trying to do the needful.

the museum is located in ojukwu's old bunker and showcases  both sides of the war.

thanks

toyin



Salimonu Kadiri

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Oct 3, 2021, 2:04:01 PM10/3/21
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​My response to Chidi Anthony Opara's *Thought For Today* was based on his claim that after the civil war, Nigeria vs Biafra, that ended January 15, 1970, and despite the declaration by Yakubu Gowon's led Federal Military Government of no victor, no vanquished, the Igbo has since be treated, and are still being treated as vanquished in Nigeria. Despite marginalisation and hostile compatriots, Mr. Opara concluded that the Igbo had, since 1974, rebuilt their economic dominance of Nigeria through trade. Since Mr. Opara appeared to be inflicting false sense of victimisation on the Igbo people of Nigeria I pointed to the fact that the Nigerian masses of all ethnic groups are the real victims of the few ethnic elites (including the Igbo elites) in power. I substantiated my assertion with two Igbo millionaires, out of many, to illustrate how some Igbo elites join hands with other ethnic elites to impoverish Nigerian masses. Then, as if I was presenting a statistical probability, you queried if the two Igbo examples of millionaires I gave could be representative for all Igbo millionaires. As energetic as you are, I don't think it will be a problem for you to compile a list of all Nigerian millionaires, not of Igbos alone, and to verify what they produced and sold to become wealthy.

With such devastation as Igboland suffered during the war, I'm keen on knowing how they (Igbo) recovered from the horror - Adepoju. It is requisite that for the Igbo to overcome the horror of war, the rest of Nigeria must treat them as equal citizens and not as vanquished. Awakening out of your confusion, you attributed the recovery of the Igbo from the horror of war thus, "Perhaps greater acknowledgement needs to be given to Nigeria, though, for reconciliation efforts after the war."  If you are aware that there were reconciliation efforts with the Igbos after the war, then there is nothing left for you to know about how the Igbo recovered from the horror of the civil war.
S. Kadiri

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: 02 October 2021 22:29

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 4, 2021, 2:39:24 PM10/4/21
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Toyin Adepoju.


Thank you for your efforts. But like you I could not locate the articles.

It is best not to cite articles you have not saved as files and hence cannot reproduce based on their headlines, particularly if you cannot as you state recall the details.

Let me state again that there is a lot of people out there bastardising the ethos of journalism by floating headlines without verifiable substance to pursue their foregone political agenda.  We've been here before.

Try and rise above the narrow motivations of such characters so you will not be classified as one of them.

By now you should consider yourself more learned than them and aspire to be judged on your own merit and not theirs.

Your subscription to views is what people use to judge your own critical thinking standards.


OAA



Nigeria is now ripe for majority rule at the centre as standard. If you believe in majority rule as the cornerstone of modern democracies work with others to bring this about at the centre in Nigeria come 2023, and ALWAYS!



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Date: 02/10/2021 21:24 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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thanks OAA.

It seems to be quite a rich literature, but one i dont have precise memory about,

so I Googled ''sanusi on igbo marginalisation''  and got 32, 200 results.

Most signicant from page one of the search are

a discussion from the forum Nairaland

See What Emir Sanusi Lamido S. Said About The Igbo's



and other results


"Igbo marginalisation": What Emir Sanusi said ... - The ScoopNG



'Marginalising The Igbos Could Lead To A 2nd Civil War ...




Biafra/Yoruba Nation: Nnamdi Kanu, Igboho, other agitators ...



This seems to be the URL of what might be Achebe's last article where he made those claims but this article is no longer at the site 

On Sat, 2 Oct 2021 at 19:35, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

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Ibukunolu A Babajide

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Oct 4, 2021, 2:39:56 PM10/4/21
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Chidi,

I know that what you wrote here was just to lift up your personal morale.  There was no negotiated surrender.  It was a rout.  Ojukwu has run away with his tail between his hind legs from the Uli airstrip.  The war fronts had collapsed and hunger was rife all over the shrinking enclave of Biafra.  It was a complete capitulation.

So as your initial paragraph below is a false premise, all that you built of it falls with it.

"Immediately after the Biafra-Nigeria civil war ended in 1970, following the negotiated surrender of Biafra, all agreements reached that necessitated the surrender were abandoned by the Federal Government of Nigeria."

Nothing was negotiated.  Nothing was agreed.  Therefore nothing was abandoned.  The bedraglled Efiong and his defeated co-travellers were frogmarched to Lagos for a photo opportunity with Jack Yakubu Gowon. 

Cheers.

IBK

_________________________
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide (IBK)

AN ENGLISH NURSERY RHYME

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose

 

The law demands that we atone

When we take things that we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine

 

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law

 

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back

 -        Anonymous (circa 1764)



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Harrow, Kenneth

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Oct 4, 2021, 3:41:09 PM10/4/21
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dear ibk, i love that nursery rhyme. it is amazing
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 4, 2021 2:21 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 4, 2021, 4:56:08 PM10/4/21
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I'm puzzled OAA.

What "articles" could I not find?

I gave the links to various news reports on Sanusi's statement and to debates based on those reports.

The one article  unavailable was the Achebe article and I provided the link that showed the article was published but was no longer at the URL of first publication.

The URL is clear on the article being a discussion of Achebe's views on Ndigbo in relation to mediocrity in Nigeria.

The relevant terms are in the word strings composing the URL thereby suggesting it's content.

If I was sufficiently motivated I could have asked the Guardian UK, where the article was published, why the article was no longer at that URL.

I expect to also be able to find the article elsewhere if I was sufficiently motivated.

It's likely to have been Achebe's last article and raised a lot of dust on account of it's unqualified pro-Igbo stance in opposition to the inadequacies of Nigeria, with Achebe arguing that the ascendance of mediocrity in Nigerian public service is linked to the effort to marginalise Ndigbo out of public office  after the civil war, if I recall the article clearly enough.

The article was written in the context of Achebe's last book, on Biafra,  There was a Country, and both article and book whipped up a furore across the length and breadth of Nigerian public space, in Nigeria and abroad, as well as on this group.

If I was sufficiently motivated I could find the article as well as debates on this group and elsewhere on the same subject.

It seems IBK, Kadiri and yourself are on a polemical course against a particular pro-Igbo stance.

Empathetic analysis would be more helpful than polemical responses because the issues implicate the quagmire  Nigeria remains entrenched  in today.

The issues are complex and are not reducible to black and white positions.

On the nature of the Biafran surrender, at the  time Ojukwu fled into exile, his second in command Philip Effiong  stated that Ojukwu expected the fight to continue.

To some observers, the fight should have ended when Biafra lost Port Harcourt, the only remaining water route out of the enclave, yet the war continued for years after.

So, the surrender could have been negotiated in the sense of promises made in the event that the clearly overwhelmed but still fighting Biafran side stopped fighting, preventing more losses to themselves and others.

There is nothing to crow about in  triumphalism from any side in relation to that war.

At what points could war have been averted?

Pre the Jan 1966 coup or pre the coup that followed and the anti-Igbo/anti-South massacre that ensued, or after the Aburi Accords or before or after the decree forming new states or after the founding of Biafra or the initial efforts to rein in Biafra or before the Midwest offensive or after or the succesive opening of various theatres of the war, the Biafran bombing of Lagos, to the Ahiara Declaration, if I recall the name well to the Nigerian bombing of concentrations of Biafran civilians to......the reverberations we continue to experience today.

The Igbo experience is strategic as those of other ethnicities are to the ongoing confusion of Nigeria.

A superb entry into that war and it's implications is Roy Samuel Dorons PhD free online-

 Forging A Nation While Losing A Country: Igbo Nationalism, Ethnicity and Propaganda in the Nigerian Civil War 1968-1970.


I also find Max Siollun's book Oil, Politics and Violence:  Nigeria''s Military Coup Culture helpful on the issues around it.

Thanks

Toyin






OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 4, 2021, 5:56:55 PM10/4/21
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Toyin Adepoju.

I was specific on Sanusi Lamido. I still cant find it.

I did not ask for Achebe whose position is understandable and on which you went on and on.

The position that the Igbo are the angels of the Civil Service is untenable and you know it.  Why is this not so in the Civil Service of Igbo states?

Why could the Ezekwes not do in the Federal Govt the technological feats propaganda said they achieved in Biafra?


OAA



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
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Date: 04/10/2021 22:03 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 4, 2021, 6:08:29 PM10/4/21
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IBK:

I beg to differ.

There was indeed a 'negotiated surrender'

The emphasis is on surrender. The Federal Government felt there was no need to finish off the rag- tag rump of an army made up of former compatriots  Dealing with the aftermath of the quarrel between erstwhile brothers is not the same as dealing a coup de grace on an enemy from without.  That would be senseless genocidal slaughter ( I know neo- Biafranists insist on flogging a dead horse to no avail.)

It was not the negotiations that led to the surrender.  The negotiations came after the suffering on the other side became too much for those who had the superior forces who inflicted the suffering.  It came after the will to surrender was communicated to the Federal commanders( we know of the story of how the Biafran side wanted to push its luck and Col Obasanjo negotiating on the federal side was reported to have stated that if they did not want to accept defeat they should go back to the fighting front but the Effiong group backed down.  Effiong knew they stood no chance) The hall mark was to ensure it was not a humiliating surrender.  The Nigerian Federation kept its promise.

Its like a referee allowing a boxing match to go on when it is clear one of the boxers is no longer raising his hands to defend himself because he was incapable of so doing.  He would justifiably be accused of murder.

Our brothers and sisters in the East gave a good account of themselves having been misled into a war they stood no chance of winning.  Level headed easterners should ask neo- Biafranists to stop adding insult upon injury and let sleeping dogs lie.


OAA


Majority rule at the centre come 2023.



Sent from my Galaxy

-------- Original message --------
From: Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk...@gmail.com>
Date: 04/10/2021 19:46 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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Chidi,

I know that what you wrote here was just to lift up your personal morale.  There was no negotiated surrender.  It was a rout.  Ojukwu has run away with his tail between his hind legs from the Uli airstrip.  The war fronts had collapsed and hunger was rife all over the shrinking enclave of Biafra.  It was a complete capitulation.

So as your initial paragraph below is a false premise, all that you built of it falls with it.

"Immediately after the Biafra-Nigeria civil war ended in 1970, following the negotiated surrender of Biafra, all agreements reached that necessitated the surrender were abandoned by the Federal Government of Nigeria."

Nothing was negotiated.  Nothing was agreed.  Therefore nothing was abandoned.  The bedraglled Efiong and his defeated co-travellers were frogmarched to Lagos for a photo opportunity with Jack Yakubu Gowon. 

Cheers.

IBK

_________________________
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide (IBK)

AN ENGLISH NURSERY RHYME

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose

 

The law demands that we atone

When we take things that we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine

 

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law

 

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back

 -        Anonymous (circa 1764)


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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 4, 2021, 9:07:54 PM10/4/21
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Thanks OAA.

Odd.

Are you stating you can't find a news item quoting Sanusi as making such a statement?

That would be odd because I've seen the report and sebates on it, and am yet to see a rejection of the report by Sanusi.

Or are you starting you do not see the reports as credible?

If the latter, you need to explain why.

Thanks

Toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB29824F882BDD9A62F1D9E9BAA6AE9%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 4, 2021, 9:07:54 PM10/4/21
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Na was, as is said in Nigerian Pidgin.

The Biafran army was rag tag but you could not defeat them within three years of fighting. 

The same army that even at it's lowest point was able to muster an air force that delivered punishing power to the feederal side.

An army that you had to starve both the army and the civilian population in an effort to defeat them  by blocking off  supply routes in the claim that it was the soldiers alone you were targeting, thereby birthing the classic image of the big bellied and yet skinny Biafran child as others lay dying at his feet, yet someone is making sounds about mercy in war between siblings.

The story of the Nigerian Civil War is not a fit platform for muscle flexing.

It's a story of both heroism and horror, of blindness and courage, of things we should not have done if we had known better.

Here we are now with an internal insurgencies.

Military bases have twice been breached, the second time with high fatalities, and we can't even name those responsible, except to call them anonymous " bandits" all in the regime of the person touted as Nigeria''s saviour in waiting.

Ethnic dynamics again.

The anti-Igbo war polemics always comes from Yoruba people like OAA, IBK or Kadiri or from the North, the group allied against Biafra in that war.

Yet, where does everyone stand today?

The entire country is under siege in the regiime of a man on whose behalf the SW, the North and others were beguiled into.thinkihg he had something revitalizing to offer.

In the midst of this hell, you chaps are enacting Nigerian Civil War dramas.

Well done.

Toyin




Ibukunolu A Babajide

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Oct 5, 2021, 4:43:32 AM10/5/21
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Toyin,

You know yourself. You admit that you are lazy. I have always known that about you. Your failure to cut it as an academic and gain the confidence of your peers is because of your laziness.  Your never sufficient motivation. 

In your Freudian slip, "if I was sufficiently motivated," you self admit to, and declare your laziness.

You wrote:

"It seems IBK, Kadiri and yourself are on a polemical course against a particular pro-Igbo stance."

Here you reveal your lazy thinking again. Chidi stated a lie. I called him out on it. As you are wont to do, you hide behind words you do not fully understand to create your own imaginary alternative reality. What is a "polemical course"?  What is a "particular pro-Igbo stance."?

Total bombast and illogical stringing of high sounding words to trick your porous mind that you have worked hard at thinking. You can deceive the likes of Prof. Toyin Falola. You cannot deceive Kadiri, Agbetuyi and my humble self. We see through you and your "Emperor's clothes."

Now, a lie or embelishment by an Igbo man with fond and sanguine feelings and expectations for his people who wants to boost his own morale is neither polemic nor a stance.

You can fool some, but you cannot fool all. Ojukwu fled to escape capture and trial. Gowon was magnanimous in declaring no "Victor, no Vanquished" but that is not an excuse to rewrite or doctor history.

My friend, Toyin simple words enhance deep thinking. Ideas are clean and clear when rendered with simple and felicity's language. 

Good day. 

Cheers. 

IBK

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 5, 2021, 4:43:54 AM10/5/21
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Toyin Adepoju

By the time of the end of the war  the Biafran army had been reduced to a rag tag army by the Federal forces and that was why Ojukwu fled into exile. Or was he still commanding them from exile?

Toyin Adepoju you should know better than these vainglorious circumlocutory arguments about settled history.

At any rate where were the likes of CAO, Biko Agozino and Toyin Adepoju when the man in the thick of these events HE Obasanjo was invited by the Moderator to the forum?
Were they on the moon?  

Because anyone who wanted to ask him questions from anywhere around the globe was given the chance to. It went to an extent the Moderator was almost scandalised into the accusation of perpetually holding the man against his will. These fantasists conveniently vanished into their bolt holes only to resurface with their ludicrous claims months after everything has settled down.  They had the opportunity to clarify Adepoju's £20 allegation, Agozino's belaboured reparations claims and Opara's abandonment of surrender agreements.  They never came forward.

I call anyone who failed to ask HE Obasanjo questions about Biafra during the interview only to sneak back out from their concealement with their fanciful stories spineless cowards whose divisive posts on the subject should no longer be entertained by the Moderator.

OAA


Majority rule at the centre in Nigeria come 2023 or a sixtarchy presidential council.



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Date: 05/10/2021 02:21 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (ovde...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
Na was, as is said in Nigerian Pidgin.

The Biafran army was rag tag but you could not defeat them within three years of fighting. 

The same army that even at it's lowest point was able to muster an air force that delivered punishing power to the feederal side.

An army that you had to starve both the army and the civilian population in an effort to defeat them  by blocking off  supply routes in the claim that it was the soldiers alone you were targeting, thereby birthing the classic image of the big bellied and yet skinny Biafran child as others lay dying at his feet, yet someone is making sounds about mercy in war between siblings.

The story of the Nigerian Civil War is not a fit platform for muscle flexing.

It's a story of both heroism and horror, of blindness and courage, of things we should not have done if we had known better.

Here we are now with an internal insurgencies.

Military bases have twice been breached, the second time with high fatalities, and we can't even name those responsible, except to call them anonymous " bandits" all in the regime of the person touted as Nigeria''s saviour in waiting.

Ethnic dynamics again.

The anti-Igbo war polemics always comes from Yoruba people like OAA, IBK or Kadiri or from the North, the group allied against Biafra in that war.

Yet, where does everyone stand today?

The entire country is under siege in the regiime of a man on whose behalf the SW, the North and others were beguiled into.thinkihg he had something revitalizing to offer.

In the midst of this hell, you chaps are enacting Nigerian Civil War dramas.

Well done.

Toyin




On Mon, Oct 4, 2021, 23:08 OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

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Biko Agozino

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Oct 5, 2021, 5:44:45 PM10/5/21
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Bro Chidi,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on the unprecedented recovery of the Igbo that Oluwatoyin is wisely urging us to study for the purpose of learning something that could help to uplift the rest of Africa where similar problems of genocidal neocolonialism persist. The reference by 'toyin to the article in The Guardian were excerpts from TWAC which many are yet to read before rejecting with Igbophobia.

Some of the keys to Igbo recovery that could be identified are the fact that the Igbo did not obsess about seeking revenge and punishment against genocidists (unlike Nuremberg, Boko Haram, Dimka, and armed cattle herders) but poured their energies into rebuilding their ravished economic structures, educating their male and female children, sports, arts and music, filmmaking, and fearlessly migrating to other parts of Africa to serve their fellow Africans with buying and selling. All Nigerians and all Africans can study the Igbo survival script to learn something useful just as the Igbo are busy studying the valuable contributions of other Africans for good lessons in resilience, democracy, and tolerance. 

If Gowon had implemented the peace plan that Azikiwe outlined at Oxford University Union still during the war as the basis for no victor no vanquished, instead of seeking to crush the Igbo militarily or starve them into surrender as the nominal Christians - Jeremiah Awolowo, Benjamin Adekunle, and Anthony Enahoro preferred - Nigeria would have advanced better. Now that Igbo youth demand a referendum on Biafra, the Yoruba demand Oduduwa republic, Boko Haram pursue an Islamic State in West Africa, the Middle Belt seek autonomy from the core North, and Niger Delta militants seek resource control, we are all Biafrans as Chido Onumah poetically prophesied in his book. 

Rather than launch another genocidal war as Buhari threatened against the Igbo exclusively (no other ethnic group was included in his twitter rant), all Nigerians should demand the release of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igbogho from detention and allow them the freedom of expression to campaign for secession the way many in California, Texas, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Catalan, etc. have campaigned non-violently for self-determination. Time for those who torture themselves with what Achebe called the 'flood of hatred' against the Igbo in The Trouble with Nigeria, should free themselves from hate and learn to love all, including the Igbo, for their own good.

When Nigerians say that there was no victor and no vanquished in Biafra, they mean that la luta continua and they have continued the mass killing of the Igbo since then. The Igbo know that they were never vanquished for we bounced back with a World Heavyweight Champion in wrestling a few years after the war, Rangers international dominated the Nigerian league for ten years and was the first to win an African title for Nigeria to inspire more talents to emerge in football in the country, Nollywood was eventually built by the dogged merchants from the East, academically, the Eastern region remains the top achiever in the country, and yet there is no single Federal Government industry sited in the South East up till today and all the other five regions have six states each while only the South East has five states to cement marginalization. My personal preference is for a Pan African restructuring of Africa to delete all the colonial borders.

No Nigerian would lose anything the day Nigeria wakes up and offers atonement for the evil done to the Igbo given that the rulers have tried to compensate Niger Delta Militants, Odi and Zaki Biam survivors of massacres by the government and given the way that even terrorists are negotiated with and paid millions of naira with which to buy weapons and continue attacking fellow Africans with impunity. If any group claims to be the victors and regards others as vanquished, they should explain to their children why they have continued waging the war of aggression with threats and mass killings reported by Amnesty International. If the rulers of Nigeria devoted the resources being stolen or wasted on militarism to the eradication of illiteracy in the country in the next few years, a lot more could be achieved than obsess with marginalizing the Igbo who have been exemplary citizens despite marginalization, threats, and recurring massacres.

Olayinka is mistaken in assuming that cowardice prevented anyone from asking Obasanjo tough questions during his Falola Interview, knowing that the moderator could not call on everyone who had a question because of the constraints of time. It is not up to the Igbo alone to ask tough questions to those who misruled Nigeria. Tough questions have been facing Obasanjo and his self-proclaimed never-do-well military rulers who ruined the country. My own brief report about that interview by Falola was shared on this forum before being published in Nigerian and in other African newspapers, drawing an angry response from Uncle Sege that the moderator kindly shared on this forum. It is not the job of only those who survived genocide to demand for reparative justice - all of humanity should join Fela, Lennon, Hendrix,  Fawehinmi, Achebe, Emecheta, Ekwe-Ekwe, Bassey, Amadiume, Soyinka, Adichie, Aribisala, Dokubo, Kukah, Kperogi, Fani-Kayode, and even Sanusi to say; never again!

Biko

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 6, 2021, 11:01:18 AM10/6/21
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Biko:

Provocative statements- like 'we bounced back' ' were never vanquished' are not useful in a debate of this nature as they unnecessarily polarise group debate.

As Baba Kadiri and myself have consistently shown, Ndigbo bounced back precisely because all other ethnicities welcomed them back with open arms into their own states to make brisk business. toward recovery.  

This is why your tangential American parallel which is the backdrop to your reparations call and the Holocaust parallel do not fit, hence no one will take you serious.  Unlike the Black experience in the United States which you invoke inappropriately it did not take 100 years of Igbo-Bar ( equivalent of the 1865 proclamation of Emancipation and its realisation in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960sand the intervening Color bar)  before normalcy of relations and equality of rights across the rest of the country was granted the Igbo and other non Igbo Biafrans. Continuity was immediately restored after the war and  that is why we say the Federation immediately kept its promises

Black Americans will therefore not fall in love with you (and may never forgive you) for polemically trivialising their own harrowing experience in your newfoundland with events in Nigeria in such a base way. 

When in Nigerian history for example did the rest of Nigerians target Ndigbo exclusively for slave trade and to work in slave plantations across Nigeria?  What we find as discussed on this forum is that Ndigbo were major slave entrepreneurs who sold their own kind across the Atlantic (as other Africans did)

When have you ever called for reparations for the the Òrę victims of Biafran invasion?  Yes your reparations must only be for the Igbo in your tunnel-visioned Igbo exceptionalism!

When have you called for reparations for victims of the Barbarossa-like lightning strikes which Emeka Ojukwu launched against Nigerians hoping an unprepared Nigeria would collapse and accept Biafra as their suzerain?  Like Hitler Emeka Ojukwu miscalculated because like the Soviet authorities, when the Nigerian authorities cleared the sleep from their eyes in the middle of the night and cranked their own war machine, Ojukwu learned the bitter lesson of not opening war on several fronts simultaneously.

When have you canvassed for reparations for the family of Victor Banjo who was assassinated in bold blood like a stray dog by Emeka Ojukwu despite all he did for the  launch of Biafra,just because the scales fell from his eyes and he had the temerity to demand that enough was enough of the senseless bloodletting on both sides?

When have you ever called for reparations for the non-Igbo participants in Biafra?  To you they are just cannon fodder for the iIgbo majority.  Mere inconsequential statistics!

And that is why your fellow wayfarer Toyin Adepoju thinks any effort to finetune the Biafran debate is anti-Igbo

When did you ever call for reparations for the countless Federal troops felled by Biafran bullets whose only crime was that they obeyed the call of their commander in chief to prevent part of the land that was the commonweal of Nigerians from being taken away by force of arms rather than by negotiations?
.

When will inhabitants of former Biafra start paying back their own reparations for the rape of the commonweal called Nigeria from their recent and ongoing haul from the commonwealth?



OAA



Their is no reasonable alternative to majority rule in modern democracies.  Minority rule is an aberration.  Nigeria must reclaim majority rule at the centre come 2023 or face the consequences of the continuation of a centre that cannot hold.



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 05/10/2021 22:52 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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Bro Chidi,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on the unprecedented recovery of the Igbo that Oluwatoyin is wisely urging us to study for the purpose of learning something that could help to uplift the rest of Africa where similar problems of genocidal neocolonialism persist. The reference by 'toyin to the article in The Guardian were excerpts from TWAC which many are yet to read before rejecting with Igbophobia.

Some of the keys to Igbo recovery that could be identified are the fact that the Igbo did not obsess about seeking revenge and punishment against genocidists (unlike Nuremberg, Boko Haram, Dimka, and armed cattle herders) but poured their energies into rebuilding their ravished economic structures, educating their male and female children, sports, arts and music, filmmaking, and fearlessly migrating to other parts of Africa to serve their fellow Africans with buying and selling. All Nigerians and all Africans can study the Igbo survival script to learn something useful just as the Igbo are busy studying the valuable contributions of other Africans for good lessons in resilience, democracy, and tolerance. 

If Gowon had implemented the peace plan that Azikiwe outlined at Oxford University Union still during the war as the basis for no victor no vanquished, instead of seeking to crush the Igbo militarily or starve them into surrender as the nominal Christians - Jeremiah Awolowo, Benjamin Adekunle, and Anthony Enahoro preferred - Nigeria would have advanced better. Now that Igbo youth demand a referendum on Biafra, the Yoruba demand Oduduwa republic, Boko Haram pursue an Islamic State in West Africa, the Middle Belt seek autonomy from the core North, and Niger Delta militants seek resource control, we are all Biafrans as Chido Onumah poetically prophesied in his book. 

Rather than launch another genocidal war as Buhari threatened against the Igbo exclusively (no other ethnic group was included in his twitter rant), all Nigerians should demand the release of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igbogho from detention and allow them the freedom of expression to campaign for secession the way many in California, Texas, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Catalan, etc. have campaigned non-violently for self-determination. Time for those who torture themselves with what Achebe called the 'flood of hatred' against the Igbo in The Trouble with Nigeria, should free themselves from hate and learn to love all, including the Igbo, for their own good.

When Nigerians say that there was no victor and no vanquished in Biafra, they mean that la luta continua and they have continued the mass killing of the Igbo since then. The Igbo know that they were never vanquished for we bounced back with a World Heavyweight Champion in wrestling a few years after the war, Rangers international dominated the Nigerian league for ten years and was the first to win an African title for Nigeria to inspire more talents to emerge in football in the country, Nollywood was eventually built by the dogged merchants from the East, academically, the Eastern region remains the top achiever in the country, and yet there is no single Federal Government industry sited in the South East up till today and all the other five regions have six states each while only the South East has five states to cement marginalization. My personal preference is for a Pan African restructuring of Africa to delete all the colonial borders.

No Nigerian would lose anything the day Nigeria wakes up and offers atonement for the evil done to the Igbo given that the rulers have tried to compensate Niger Delta Militants, Odi and Zaki Biam survivors of massacres by the government and given the way that even terrorists are negotiated with and paid millions of naira with which to buy weapons and continue attacking fellow Africans with impunity. If any group claims to be the victors and regards others as vanquished, they should explain to their children why they have continued waging the war of aggression with threats and mass killings reported by Amnesty International. If the rulers of Nigeria devoted the resources being stolen or wasted on militarism to the eradication of illiteracy in the country in the next few years, a lot more could be achieved than obsess with marginalizing the Igbo who have been exemplary citizens despite marginalization, threats, and recurring massacres.

Olayinka is mistaken in assuming that cowardice prevented anyone from asking Obasanjo tough questions during his Falola Interview, knowing that the moderator could not call on everyone who had a question because of the constraints of time. It is not up to the Igbo alone to ask tough questions to those who misruled Nigeria. Tough questions have been facing Obasanjo and his self-proclaimed never-do-well military rulers who ruined the country. My own brief report about that interview by Falola was shared on this forum before being published in Nigerian and in other African newspapers, drawing an angry response from Uncle Sege that the moderator kindly shared on this forum. It is not the job of only those who survived genocide to demand for reparative justice - all of humanity should join Fela, Lennon, Hendrix,  Fawehinmi, Achebe, Emecheta, Ekwe-Ekwe, Bassey, Amadiume, Soyinka, Adichie, Aribisala, Dokubo, Kukah, Kperogi, Fani-Kayode, and even Sanusi to say; never again!

Biko

On Tuesday, 5 October 2021, 04:48:36 GMT-4, Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk...@gmail.com> wrote:


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Salimonu Kadiri

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Oct 6, 2021, 4:47:03 PM10/6/21
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​It seems IBK, Kadiri and yourself (Olayinka Agbetuyi) are on a polemical course against a particular pro-Igbo stance - Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju on Monday, 4 October 2021.

The anti-Igbo war polemics always comes from Yoruba people like OAA, IBK or Kadiri or from the North, the group allied against Biafra in that war - Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju on Tuesday, 5 October 2021.

If you have read and understood my submissions on this subject, you would not have failed, so woefully, to grasp my point that there is no pro-Igbo stance in the claim of your pal that despite vanquishment and marginalisation of the Igbo after the civil war, the Igbo had risen to dominate the economy of Nigeria. It is impossible for an ethnic group to claim dominance of the economy of Nigeria as your pal did while simultaneously claiming to be marginalised and treated as vanquished in the country. Majority of Nigerians, and of all tribes, are still in abject poverty while minority few elites from the major ethnic groups are millionaires/billionaires. There may be more Igbo millionaires or billionaires than in other ethnic groups but what is essential to note is that to become a millionaire in Nigeria is directly related to a person's nearness to the centre of federal, state or local government power. Since the circumference of the federal, state and local government is very narrow with short diameter, it can only contain few individuals from the ethnic groups. Thus, an individual will steal from the public coffer in the name of tribe. Were the individual to steal on behalf of his/her tribe, the proceeds of stealing will be taken to the entire tribe for sharing. Since an Igbo millionaire does not make all Igbo millionaires there is nothing polemic to assert that Igbos are neither treated as vanquished nor marginalised in Nigeria.

The anti-Igbo war polemics always come from Yoruba people and the North that allied against Biafra in that war, you vomited. It is this type of statement that makes one feels that the head of some people contains intestine and not brain. The Nigerian Infantry Battalions in 1966 consisted of 98 per cent Northerners mainly from the Middlebelt. When the revenge coup of 29 July 1966 occurred, a Yoruba Brigadier and a Yoruba full Colonel besides eight other senior Lt. Colonels were shoved aside to pave way for the takeover of the Army leadership by the then, Lieutenant colonel Yakubu Gowon because the infantry soldiers refused to obey command from Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe or any of the senior Lt. Colonels to Gowon. At Ibadan, the Military Governor of Western Region, Lt. Colonel Francis Adekunle Fajuyi, who refused to abandon his guest, Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi, were arrested by the duo of the then Captain Theophilus Danjuma and 2nd Lieutenant Jeremiah Useni who handed over to the NCOs to be murdered. Thereafter, the Middlebelt dominated 4th infantry battalion at Ibadan rampaged and conducted house to house search for Igbo civilians to be eliminated in retaliation for the murder of their Commander, Lt. Colonel Aborgo Largema killed by Major Emanuel Ifeajuna in the 15 January 1966. Ibadan people with bare hands and chest defended their Igbo brethren against the marauding Middlebelt soldiers from the 4th Battalion. Similar thing occurred in around Lagos where Northen soldiers hunted down both Igbo military and civilians. In Lagos, the Northern Soldiers were looking for Chinua Achebe because of his book published a week before the coup of January 15, 2021, in which he predicted a coup by 'our young officers' in a fictitious republic. The Yoruba protected and hid Achebe from the soldiers. When he decided to head for the East, a Yoruba person drove him from Lagos to Asaba on zig-zag routes but when Achebe narrated this in his *There Was A Country* he gave the false impression that he sat in his personal car and drove past all the military and police checking points without being apprehended despite the fact that he was well- known, easily recognised and was being looked for. Had Ojukwu accepted Decree No.8 of March 1967 that contained everything agreed upon at Aburi, except the addition that the Federal government could declare a State of emergency in any part of the Federation provided it was supported by at least two governors, war could not have broken out in July 1967. Three of the four Governors then were in the South. If you now say that the Yoruba aligned with the North to fight against Biafra, was your Midwest Region of Edo people neutral? Was your Midwest Region not invaded by Biafra and the Urhobo born Military Governor of the Region, Lieutenant Colonel David Akpode Ejoor, deposed and replaced with an Igbo, Major Albert Okonkwo, by Ojukwu? When the Federal forces recaptured Midwest and Major Samuel Ogbemudia was appointed Governor, what happened to the Igbos of the Midwest who were accused of having supported and enabled Biafran invasion? Did the Igbos in non-Igbo speaking area of the then Midwest Region get back their houses as it were in the Southwest, including Lagos? Were rents collected from Igbo properties in the West and Lagos not put in escrow and released to the rightful Igbo owners after the war? If not for one of Ojukwu's sibblings, Lotanna Ojukwu, who sued Chukwuemeka to court to claim his share on their father's property in Lagos, could Nigerian have known that Chukwuemeka Ojukwu collected N12 million as rent arrears collected from their father OTL properties? The Yoruba are the most tolerant people in Nigeria and that is why you find all ethnic groups in Nigeria living prosperously there. That perhaps, makes you too, to bear Yoruba names with pride, even though you are not a Yoruba and you do not speak the language. Well, it may be logic is alien to modern Ifa priests.
S. Kadiri 


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Salimonu Kadiri

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Oct 7, 2021, 5:12:37 PM10/7/21
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​If Gowon had implemented the peace plan that Azikiwe outlined at Oxford University Union still during the war as the basis for no victor no vanquished, instead of seeking to crush the Igbo militarily or starve them into surrender as the nominal Christians - Jeremiah Awolowo, Benjamin Adekunle and Anthony Enahoro preferred - Nigeria would have advanced better - Biko Agozino Professor of Criminology.

Professor Biko Agozino, with the above assertion, would appear to be clever by half by beginning to eat his biscuit from the middle instead of from the edge. The sudden appearance of Emmanuel Azikiwe at the Oxford University on 16 February 1969 where he proposed United Nations supervised cease-fire was preceded by his abscondment from the Biafran arms negotiating delegation to Paris in September 1968. At that point in time, Biafra was completely surrounded and landlocked by the Federal Army. The only major Igbo towns still in control of the Biafran army were Owerri, Abba and Umuahia which were under siege. The delegation which was sent to Paris by Ojukwu for more French arms support was led by Emmanuel Azikiwe and included Michael Okpara, Kenneth Dike and Francis Nwokedi. The French realizing that no amount of weapon could turn the tide of Biafra military misfortune, for the better, declined to invest more into Biafra's sinking military boat. Faced with that reality, the Biafran arms delegation to Paris, except Francis Nwokedi, sent a cable to Ojukwu declaring that time was ripe to give up Biafra sovereignty and to re-enter Nigeria. Ojukwu sent a telegram accusing Azikiwe and others of treason and emphasized that Biafra's sovereignty was not negotiable under any circumstances. He ordered them to return to Biafra which others complied with, except Azikiwe, who sought for refugee in London. From September 1968, Emmanuel Azikiwe laid low until 16 February 1969, when he announced his proposed peace plan at the University of Oxford which was not endorsed by Ojukwu and neither the United Nations nor Federal government that received copies of the speech acted on it.

On 17 August 1969, Azikiwe visited Nigeria and was made to tour the country, including liberated areas of Biafra. Philip Effiong recorded reactions in Biafra to his visit as a betrayal thus, "In Biafra, the move was denounced with demonstrations and public speeches led by political activists. Azikiwe's effigy was burned and a mock funeral held (p.255, Nigeria & Biafra : My Story By Philip Effiong)." After returning to London from his visit to Nigeria, Azikiwe addressed the press on August 28, 1969, where he stated 'that the accusation of genocide against Nigeria is palpably false.' That fact was corroborated by Ojukwu himself in his speech to the Consultative Assembly towards the end of September 1968 when claimed, "Our real victory lies in our ability to prevent the extermination of our people by a heartless enemy. In so far as these aims are concerned, we have not failed (p.353, volume 1, Biafra: Ojukwu's Selected Speeches)." So, if Ojukwu and Azikiwe said there was no genocide against the Igbo as a people, from where has Professor Biko Agozina gotten his information that the Federal Government of Nigeria committed genocide against the Igbo? When the news of starvation in the Biafran enclave reached the outside world in 1968, Chinua Achebe wrote in his swansong, There Was A Country, that Gowon decided to open land routes to Biafra for International Redcross supervised transport of relief supplies to civilians, but Ojukwu rejected it (p.211). In his Ahiara declaration of June 1, 1969, Ojukwu complained not only about Biafrans who threw weekend parties when the war was ongoing but about those who slaughtered cows for Christening their new-born babies. Yes, the Igbo superior caste, Diala, were not starving to death but the inferior Igbo caste, Osu/Ohu did. 

Despite no victor no vanquished in Biafra, Professor Biko Agozino claimed that Nigerians, "have continued the mass killing of the Igbo since then." And to prove that the Igbos are marginalized he wrote that, "all the other five regions have six states each while only the South East has five states to cement marginalisation."  The land mass of each geo-political zone and population according to 2006 census are as follows : South West, 80, 116 sq. km., (27,722,432); South East, 29,388 sq. km., (16,431,555); South-South, 94,924 sq. km., (21,044,081); North West, 216,065 sq. km., (35,915,467); North Central, 235,110 sq. km., (18,933,377); North East, 275,677 sq. km., (18,984,299). The landmass of the South East is the smallest and as such, even five states appear to be too much when compared with other geo-political zones which are three or more times bigger but with six states. On Igbo land and population Chinua Achebe wrote, "The population density in Igbo land created land hunger - a pressure on their low-fertility, laterite laden soil for cultivation, housing and other purposes, factors that led ultimately to migration to other parts of the nation (p.75, There Was A Country)." At moment, the 36 states are not economically viable and on what ground does Professor want the sixth state in the South East with total landmass of 29, 388 sq. km.? Read what Asari Dokubo said in the following link: ​https://www.tori.ng/news/182706/southeast-has-no-economic-value-to-nigeria-asari-d.html 
He said: “Southeast Nigeria has almost no substantial natural resources.The South East is almost a barren soil. The southeast has no outstanding Federal importance. The only thing the Igbos in the East have to their advantage is the ability to turn money into more money, but they can only achieve that if the East is peaceful for business.”
​S. Kadiri

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 7, 2021, 5:19:08 PM10/7/21
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Great thanks IBK, for unmasking that perfidious creature whom you describe as not only lazy, insufficiently  unmotivated, a failure as an academic unable to gain  the confidence of his peers, a person whose writing is characterised by  ''Total bombast and illogical stringing of high sounding words to trick [ his]  porous mind that [ he has]  worked hard at thinking'', naked yet claiming to be clothed in an emperor's clothes,   a stunted thinker who imagines himself as a hippopotamus [though] less than a rat in... stature.  If he jumps into the water, he will make no splash or steam, a fly   buzzing around and land [ing] on any feces he chooses, in  puerile attempt [s] to pass off a dog as a monkey,  as you once strikingly characterised him, a person who ''hides behind words he does not fully understand to create his own imaginary alternative reality'' yet is able to gain the confidence of a Toyin Falola.

 

Such a characterisation might ordinarily be seen as illogical but may history not bear witness otherwise?

 

How could a pseudo-scholar, a trader in emptiness masquerading as knowledge, be able to deceive such a consummate scholar as Falola?

 

Was the famous British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper not deceived by the forgery known as the Hitler Diaries, fabrications pretending to be the intimate writings  of the leader of the Third Reich?

 

Please forgive the awkwardness of comparing Trevor-Roper with Falola, since the much earlier historian represents everything Falola contradicts.

 

Roper, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, is the man known for the following statement:

 

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness… the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe, and darkness is not the subject of history.

 

Toyin Falola, currently Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, on the other hand, may be represented by this passage  privileging African thought and history in its formation before contact with Europe: 

 

Wisdom is like a baobab tree, a single person's hand cannot embrace it. It is time for all disciplines to combine, providing an understanding of the centres of indigenous epistemologies, unifying their  multi-layered and intricately connected ontologies, plumbing  the depth and breadth of their ritual archives,  the density of each genre with its own hydra-headed fragments and hundreds of individual constructions and presentations,  converting them to theories of universal power.

 

 

Forgive me for correlating  Falola's words from his essay,"Power is Knowledge: Discussions in Intellectual Liberation", where the Akan baobab image comes from, with lines from his "Ritual Archives'', slightly edited for smoothness, in order to arrive at that representative passage.

 

Is it possible this masquerade has bewitched Falola by pretending to be a Falola scholar, presuming in ''Toyin Falola: A Dancing Mask and His Footprints,'' to sum up strategic aspects of Falola's work from the past ten years?

This character's  expressions also include  what he describes as other mappings of Falola's creativity  in terms of what he wants us to think are multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary forms, "Toyin Falola and the Caravan of Thought: African History on a Global Stage in a Multifaceted Lens", Parts One and Two.


He claims to examine and apply Falola's ideas on classical African thought in ''Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African 'Ritual Archives': Disciplinary Formations in African Thought'', "Reworking Ifa : Self Initiation into Èṣù through Contemplation, Invocation and Prayer Inspired by the Work of Toyin Falola'' Parts One and Two" and ''Baobab Epistemology and Mysticism : A Critical Response to Toyin Falola on the Baobab as Epistemic Metaphor''. He presents himself as further developing these orientations in ''African Epistemic Metaphors : From the Mask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge,'' Parts One, Two and Three.

How much of this is hot air and how much true scholarship?
 

Shorter essays also issue from him,  seemingly aspiring  to density  of thought, such as ''A Response to Toyin Falola's "Humanism and the Future of the Humanities", ''The Scholar as Public Educator vs the Scholar as Self Preserver : Engaging The Toyin Falola Reader'', ''Paradoxical Positions: Western Thought in Toyin Falola’s Introduction to the Toyin Falola Reader and in Salimonu Kadiri’s Contributions in the USAAfrica Dialogues Listserve'' with a rich debate at that link.

In his normal lazy style of self publishing he has also thrown online  his essay  correlating Falola's thought and a strand of Hinduism, ''Imagination as Transposition Between Realities : Image Theory in Falola’s Thought and in Hindu Yantra Aesthetics''.

Clearly an ambitious creature. Suspiciously  so in the breadth of knowledge he claims for himself. 


These questionable posturings  of intercultural and multi-disciplinary knowledge  tiresomely unfold in a search for his writings  on Falola on the USAfrica Dialogues Series group and a general online search on the same subject.

 

One must be wary of this character, though. 


What self respecting scholar chooses to use social media as a publishing platform, talk less a primary one?

 

An effort to avoid the cleansing rigors of peer review, as you once alleged?

''...an impostor and a charlatan who cuts corners and is unwilling to subject himself to the rigours of academics but wishes to bask in the undeserved limelight (by tagging on the coattails of hard thinkers and workers)'' as you boldly declared in response to Falola's ''Toyin Adepoju is a Genius''?

 Falola perhaps dazzled by the chap's flashy displays, even in their emptiness of substance? A ''genius'' whose productions are cooked in his bedroom and the cave of his mind alone and assessed by no one?

 

No wonder he has no academic position, a misfit even in his earlier University of Benin position as you once observed, fleeing to Britain to engage in self indulging splurging in anything that caught his fancy, writing about everything  from erotica to esoterica, publishing from Youtube to academia.edu to Scribd to Facebook to Linkedin to listerves and self created websites, creating and populating more than eighty blogs with different levels of content, writing in Standard English and translating the first chapter of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of Western literature, into  Nigerian Pidgin English, as if such dilettantism would impress anyone,  a so called multi-disciplinary and multi-platform scholar, seeking to bamboozle through butterfly  restlesness in place of any kind of solidity, his publications in academic books and journals likely to be due to the kindness of honest scholars  taking pity on him.

 

From within this clowning he claims to be rethinking and reworking such venerable African knowledge systems  as the Yoruba origin Ifa, the most venerable Ogboni, the ancient Olokun and to map the esoteric Egbe/Mgbe and its Nsibidi script  with its premier artistic projector Victor Ekpuk.

Really?

Within that little head of his alone?

He even claims to be developing an expansion of the Hindu ritual the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, in honour of the Goddess Tripurasundari, from the dust of whose feet the cosmos was created, one side glance from whom can transform a decrepit old man, unskilled in the arts of love, into a focus of crazy desire for women, who race after him, their clothes bursting asunder in their haste, as described in the Soundaryahalari, The Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, Goddess of Lust and yet of Wisdom, tensions unifying cosmos, but this character's description of his efforts resembles one of his suspicious schemes to monetise knowledge which he dubiously claims to possess.

Focus yourself on something verifiable and credible, he should be told. 

Scholar of  relationships between the visual and verbal arts, philosophy, spirituality and science he calls himself, pontificating on no less a one than the magnificent Islamic philosopher and mystic Ibn Arabi, claiming to analyse the dazzling opening to Arabi's awesome Futuhat al Makkiyah, The Meccan Illuminations, correlating Ifa and Buddhist poet hermit Milarepa, claiming such pioneering  analyses as of Bruce Onobrakpeya's  artistic Oracle series and a broad ranging and supposedly unique study of the Nigerian artistic movement Uli, a self constructed website containing the texts and  cosmographic art of the Ghanaian Nyornuworfia Agorsor, among other self bloatings.

 

Even positioning  himself as a thinker on such pre-eminent scholars as Nimi Wariboko, Abiola Irele and Immanuel Kant.

Really? One person.

Its challenging trying to present more than this representative fraction  of his roamings from subject to subject. Where  could I find the energy to fully map his will of the wisp fleeting from discipline to discipline, from  culture to culture,  continent to continent, from claiming such unprecedented creativities as composing new Ifa literature by a non-initiate of that venerably esoteric guild to making a film unifying the poetry of Christopher Okigbo with the underwater photography of David Doubilet, even taking time to do what he calls celebrations of  his teachers at the University of Benin while claiming he could settle neither there nor anywhere because of his self proclaimed creative restlessness.  


Really? 


Softening them up to make it hard for them to expose the rogue pseudo-scholar as they know him?

 

A PhD he will not get like any serious scholar. A person unable to complete a doctorate at both the University of Benin and University College, London, needs to take a hard look at himself.

He is known to claim inadequate freedom in those places to pursue his predilections, his eccentricities, as if academia is about dancing without rhythm, the style he is known for.

Skipping across his fantasies, how can he thrive in the rule bound rigour of supervised academia? Those who schooled well after him have long become professors while he glories in posting essays on social media. A confused creature. 


An academic job he will not seek. Where will he find the discipline for such focused pursuits? He might even see such systems as constricting to his self understood largeness of quest. A circumference everywhere and a centre nowhere? That he was able to hold an academic job at the University of Benin for the time he did is itself an aberration, given the chameleonic creature he is.

His means of income, if he has any, is unknown. He is known for such funny schemes as trying to make money from so called self created knowledge systems. He is to be found requesting donations at the conclusions of his tediously ceaseless essays, claiming to have created one of the most extensive free access online scholarly and writing platforms. He should approach UNESCO if he is serious. We are not fooled.


He presented an odd story tring to paint himself as a visionary thinker out of place in the world.


Hm! He wishes. Get down to work like everyone else, sir.

 

A cautionary tale really in spite of the impression of scope of writing and publication. 

 

Who is he really?

 

Seat your ass in one place and be useful to yourself and others, he should  be told, not gallivanting ceaselessly   online from place to place. 

 

Thanks for your service to humanity, brother, in unmasking him.


Thanks


A Scandalised Onlooker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Biko Agozino

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Oct 7, 2021, 5:19:16 PM10/7/21
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Olayinka,

You sure say you read the post? There is no comparison of Africans with African Americans, we are one people, and I did not mention African Americans even once.

I also mentioned other groups who were wronged in Nigeria and supported the reparative justice given to some of them. Yes, there are other groups entitled to reparative justice too, but what exactly is your reason for opposing reparative justice for the Igbo?

Biko

Biko Agozino

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Oct 8, 2021, 12:33:04 AM10/8/21
to 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
"Our real victory lies in our ability to prevent the extermination of our people by a heartless enemy. In so far as these aims are concerned, we have not failed (p.353, volume 1, Biafra: Ojukwu's Selected Speeches)."

al Kadiri,

The above statement by Ojukwu declares 'real victory' in the form of the determination of the people to survive complete extermination and he was proved right, the people were not completely wiped out. As you may know, genocide does not require complete extermination. There are many survivors.

Azikiwe was a journalist who got some reports wrong and was successfully sued by many, including Awolowo who won twice against the Zik Group. But all he was saying is that he did not see evidence of genocide which was not on display in any museum. What he said was different from the declaration of victory by Ojukwu but both are in agreement that the people will survive to tell the tale.

You cite Dokubo to claim that the Igbo have no economic value to Nigeria, after you accused them of dominating the economy. But Dokubo is right, the value of human beings is never measured in terms of economic value. The Igbo name their children Nwakanma or Nwakaego, Ndukaku or Maduka, all similar to the Yoruba Omoboriowo of Ekiti. But if you think that Owoboriomo and so you do not need the Igbo in a democratic and fair country, well let my people goI However, Nigeria must still pay reparations to the Igbo, there is no need for more genocidal killings. 

If you oppose reparations for the Igbo while supporting it for other wronged groups, say why.

Biko

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 8, 2021, 7:21:56 AM10/8/21
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Biko: 

You quibble with the words extermination and complete extermination.

Ojukwu was wrong in launching a war that killed several times more Igbo and other Nigerians than if he refused to launch Biafra and war and heeded those who counseled unceasing negotiations including Zik and Soyinka.

I oppose reparations for only Igbo  as demonstrated in your obsession.  The Igbo should start the reparations ball rolling starting from the politicians killed in the January 1966 genocide coup, followed by those I listed as felled by Biafran bullets in the reckless war initiated by Ojukwu according to the CIA dossier shared on this forum in November 2017.  Others can then follow the reparations payments by the Igbo.

I did not say you mentioned African Americans in my post. I said it could be inferred your sojourn in American influenced your drumming the reparation drums against the backdrop of playing to the gallery of the Black American audience where you reside to create the impression the Igbo suffered the fate similar to theirs.  Its a wrong impression and you are not the first Igbo to play that game.  So its all too familiar.


OAA


Minority rule by guile or stealth is a RAPE of the majority.
Let those who believe in majority rule clamour for its practice at the centre in Nigeria come 2023



Sent from my Galaxy



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From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 08/10/2021 05:46 (GMT+00:00)
To: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thought For Today

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"Our real victory lies in our ability to prevent the extermination of our people by a heartless enemy. In so far as these aims are concerned, we have not failed (p.353, volume 1, Biafra: Ojukwu's Selected Speeches)."

al Kadiri,

The above statement by Ojukwu declares 'real victory' in the form of the determination of the people to survive complete extermination and he was proved right, the people were not completely wiped out. As you may know, genocide does not require complete extermination. There are many survivors.

Azikiwe was a journalist who got some reports wrong and was successfully sued by many, including Awolowo who won twice against the Zik Group. But all he was saying is that he did not see evidence of genocide which was not on display in any museum. What he said was different from the declaration of victory by Ojukwu but both are in agreement that the people will survive to tell the tale.

You cite Dokubo to claim that the Igbo have no economic value to Nigeria, after you accused them of dominating the economy. But Dokubo is right, the value of human beings is never measured in terms of economic value. The Igbo name their children Nwakanma or Nwakaego, Ndukaku or Maduka, all similar to the Yoruba Omoboriowo of Ekiti. But if you think that Owoboriomo and so you do not need the Igbo in a democratic and fair country, well let my people goI However, Nigeria must still pay reparations to the Igbo, there is no need for more genocidal killings. 

If you oppose reparations for the Igbo while supporting it for other wronged groups, say why.

Biko

On Thursday, 7 October 2021, 17:19:16 GMT-4, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:


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Salimonu Kadiri

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Oct 8, 2021, 7:23:11 AM10/8/21
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​As you may know, genocide does not require complete extermination - Professor Biko.

Thank you, my super Professor, for prophesising to me that there is distinction between genocide and extermination. If you are insisting that genocide was committed against the Igbo by the Nigerian Armed Forces between 6 July 1967, when the civil war started and January 15, 1970, when the war ended, the onus is on you to prove where, when, and how it was committed.  However, before you produce evidence of what you profess to constitute genocide, I want to bring to your notice that in a BBC news interview on January 13, 2000,  Ojukwu was asked if he accepted responsibility for wasting Igbo lives in a war that was not necessary. He said, "Responsibility for what went on - how could I feel responsible in a situation in which I put myself out and SAVED THE PEOPLE FROM GENOCIDE? No, I don't feel responsible at all. I did the best I could." In Ojukwu's owned words, he prevented genocide from occurring by going to war and by implication, he assumed that genocide was about to happen to the Igbo and, therefore, he went to war to prevent it. The BBC news interview was conducted by Barnaby Philips and titled, Biafra : Thirty Years On. If it has not been deleted, here is the link. ​http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/596712.stm  
As my respected Professor, I will not like to associate you with the careless use of the word GENOCIDE for political or ethnic reason. Diala Igbo ate well throughout the war but the Osu/Ohu/Oru Igbo castes starved to death under Ojukwu's government.

You cite Dokubo to claim that the Igbo have no economic value to Nigeria, after you accused them of dominating the economy - Professor Biko Agozino.

Sorry, my dear Professor, you have deliberately distorted what Asari Dokubo said and my intention of citing him. Asari Dokubo never said that the Igbo have no economic value to Nigeria, but the land in South East. His observation is in agreement with what Chinua Achebe wrote on p. 75 of his There Was A Country about the population density and barren land in Igbo land as being responsible for the enormous emigration of the Igbo to other parts of Nigeria. I cited Achebe and backed it up with a link to Dokubo. In the same vein, I have never accused the Igbo of dominating Nigeria's economy, rather it was the author of Thought For Today, who stated emphatically that despite being vanquished and marginalised since the end of the war, the Igbo had risen up to dominate the economy of Nigeria.

If you are demanding reparation for the Igbo, you have to state what the reparation is for. In the Niger Delta, farms and fishing ponds were destroyed by oil explorers without compensation from the government. You cannot compare the Niger Delta situation with Ojukwu's war against presumed genocide.
S. Kadiri 



From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: 08 October 2021 02:22
To: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

unread,
Oct 8, 2021, 1:29:51 PM10/8/21
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
                                                          Between Charlantry and Scholarship

                                A Brief Analysis of the Life and Work of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju




Introduction

A response to the efforts of someone on the USAAfrica Series Google group at characterising the unconventional scholarly style of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,  suggesting how the logic of those claims may be examined, in the context of questions about legitimacy of forms of scholarship. 


Response

Great thanks  for unmasking that perfidious creature whom you describe as not only lazy, insufficiently  unmotivated, a failure as an academic unable to gain  the confidence of his peers, a person whose writing is characterized by  ''Total bombast and illogical stringing of high sounding words to trick [ his]  porous mind that [ he has]  worked hard at thinking'', naked yet claiming to be clothed in an emperor's clothes,   a stunted thinker who imagines himself as a hippopotamus [though] less than a rat in... stature.  If he jumps into the water, he will make no splash or steam, a fly   buzzing around and land [ing] on any faeces he chooses, in puerile attempt [s] to pass off a dog as a monkey,  as you once strikingly characterised him, a person who ''hides behind words he does not fully understand to create his own imaginary alternative reality'' yet is able to gain the confidence of the consummate scholar a Toyin Falola, as you state.


Such a characterisation might ordinarily be seen as illogical but may history not bear witness otherwise?

 

How could a pseudo-scholar, a trader in emptiness masquerading as knowledge, be able to deceive such a scholar as Falola?

 

Was the famous British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper not deceived by the forgery known as the Hitler Diaries, fabrications pretending to be the intimate writings  of the leader of the Third Reich?

 

Please forgive the awkwardness of comparing Trevor-Roper with Falola, since the much earlier historian represents everything Falola contradicts.

 

Roper, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, is the man known for the following statement:

 

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness… the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe, and darkness is not the subject of history.

 

Toyin Falola, currently Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, on the other hand, may be represented by this passage  privileging African thought and history in its formation before contact with Europe: 

 

Wisdom is like a baobab tree, a single person's hand cannot embrace it. It is time for all disciplines to combine, providing an understanding of the centres of indigenous epistemologies, unifying their  multi-layered and intricately connected ontologies, plumbing  the depth and breadth of their ritual archives,  the density of each genre with its own hydra-headed fragments and hundreds of individual constructions and presentations,  converting them to theories of universal power.

 

 

Forgive me for correlating  Falola's words from his essay,"Power is Knowledge: Discussions in Intellectual Liberation", where the Akan baobab image comes from, with lines from his "Ritual Archives'', slightly edited for smoothness, in order to arrive at that representative passage.

 

Is it possible this masquerade has bewitched Falola by pretending to be a Falola scholar, presuming in ''Toyin Falola: A Dancing Mask and His Footprints,'' to sum up strategic aspects of Falola's work from the past ten years?

This character's  expressions also include  what he describes as other mappings of Falola's creativity  in terms of what he wants us to think are multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary forms, "Toyin Falola and the Caravan of Thought: African History on a Global Stage in a Multifaceted Lens", Parts One and Two.


He claims to examine and apply Falola's ideas on classical African thought in ''Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African 'Ritual Archives': Disciplinary Formations in African Thought'', "Reworking Ifa : Self Initiation into Èṣù through Contemplation, Invocation and Prayer Inspired by the Work of Toyin Falola'' Parts One and Two" and ''Baobab Epistemology and Mysticism : A Critical Response to Toyin Falola on the Baobab as Epistemic Metaphor''. He presents himself as further developing these orientations in ''African Epistemic Metaphors : From the Mask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge,'' Parts One, Two and Three.

How much of this is hot air and how much true scholarship?
 

Shorter essays also issue from him,  seemingly aspiring  to density  of thought, such as ''A Response to Toyin Falola's "Humanism and the Future of the Humanities", ''



Clearly an ambitious creature. Suspiciously

 so in the breadth of knowledge he claims for himself. 


These questionable posturings  of intercultural and multi-disciplinary knowledge  tiresomely unfold in a search for his writings  on Falola on the USAfrica Dialogues Series group and a general online search on the same subject.

 

One must be wary of this character, though. 


What self respecting scholar chooses to use social media as a publishing platform, talk less a primary one?

 

An effort to avoid the cleansing rigors of peer review, as you once alleged?

''...an impostor and a charlatan who cuts corners and is unwilling to subject himself to the rigours of academics but wishes to bask in the undeserved limelight (by tagging on the coattails of hard thinkers and workers)'' as you boldly declared in response to Falola's ''Toyin Adepoju is a Genius''?

 Falola perhaps dazzled by the chap's flashy displays, even in their emptiness of substance? A ''genius'' whose productions are cooked in his bedroom and the cave of his mind alone and assessed by no one?

 

No wonder he has no academic position, a misfit even in his earlier University of Benin position as you once observed, fleeing to Britain to engage in self indulging splurging in anything that caught his fancy, writing about everything  from erotica to esoterica, publishing from Youtube to academia.edu to Scribd to Facebook to Linkedin to listerves and self created websites, creating and populating more than eighty blogs with different levels of content, writing in Standard English and translating the first chapter of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of Western literature, into  Nigerian Pidgin English, as if such dilettantism would impress anyone,  a so called multi-disciplinary and multi-platform scholar, seeking to bamboozle through butterfly  restlesness in place of any kind of solidity, his publications in academic books and journals likely to be due to the kindness of honest scholars  taking pity on him.

 

From within this clowning he claims to be rethinking and reworking such venerable African knowledge systems  as the Yoruba origin Ifa, the most venerable Ogboni, the ancient Olokun and to map the esoteric Egbe/Mgbe and its Nsibidi script  with its premier artistic projector Victor Ekpuk.

Really?

Within that little head of his alone?

He even claims to be developing an expansion of the Hindu ritual the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, in honour of the Goddess Tripurasundari, from the dust of whose feet the cosmos was created, a side glance from whom can transform a decrepit old man, unskilled in the arts of love, into a focus of crazy desire for women, who race after him, their clothes bursting asunder in their haste, as described in the Soundaryahalari, The Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, Goddess of Lust and yet of Wisdom, tensions unifying cosmos, but this character's description of his efforts resembles one of his suspicious schemes to monetise knowledge which he dubiously claims to possess.



Focus yourself on something verifiable and credible, he should be told. 

Scholar of  relationships between the visual and verbal arts, philosophy, spirituality and science he calls himself, pontificating on no less a one than the magnificent Islamic philosopher and mystic Ibn Arabi, claiming to analyse the dazzling opening to Arabi's awesome 

Futuhat al Makkiyah, The Meccan Illuminations, correlating Ifa and Buddhist poet hermit Milarepa, claiming such pioneering  analyses as of Bruce Onobrakpeya's  artistic Oracle series and a broad ranging and supposedly unique study of the Nigerian artistic movement Uli, a self constructed website containing the texts and  cosmographic art of the Ghanaian Nyornuworfia Agorsor, among other self bloatings.

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

unread,
Oct 8, 2021, 1:29:51 PM10/8/21
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs
                                                          Between Charlantry and Scholarship

                                A Brief Analysis of the Life and Work of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju




Introduction

A response to the efforts of someone on the USAAfrica Series Google group at characterising the unconventional scholarly style of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. The response suggests how the logic of those claims may be examined, in the context of questions about legitimacy of forms of scholarship. 


Response

Great thanks  for unmasking that perfidious creature whom you describe as not only lazy, insufficiently  unmotivated, a failure as an academic unable to gain  the confidence of his peers, a person whose writing is characterized by  ''Total bombast and illogical stringing of high sounding words to trick [ his]  porous mind that [he has]  worked hard at thinking'', naked yet claiming to be clothed in an emperor's clothes,   a stunted thinker who imagines himself as a hippopotamus [though] less than a rat in... stature.  If he jumps into...water, he will make no splash or steam, a fly buzzing around and land [ing] on any faeces he chooses, in puerile attempt [s] to pass off a dog as a monkey,  as you once strikingly characterised him, a person who ''hides behind words he does not fully understand to create his own imaginary alternative reality'' yet is able to gain the confidence of the consummate scholar Toyin Falola, as you state.

Such a characterisation might ordinarily be seen as illogical but may history not bear witness otherwise?

 

How could a pseudo-scholar, a trader in emptiness masquerading as knowledge, be able to deceive such a scholar as Falola?

 

Was the famous British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper not deceived by the forgery known as the Hitler Diaries, fabrications pretending to be the intimate writings  of the leader of the Third Reich?

 

Please forgive the awkwardness of comparing Trevor-Roper with Falola, since the much earlier historian represents everything Falola contradicts.

 

Roper, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, is the man known for the following statement:

 

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness… the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe, and darkness is not the subject of history.

 

Toyin Falola, currently Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, on the other hand, may be represented by this passage  privileging African thought and history in its formation before contact with Europe: 

 

Wisdom is like a baobab tree, a single person's hand cannot embrace it. It is time for all disciplines to combine, providing an understanding of the centres of indigenous epistemologies, unifying their  multi-layered and intricately connected ontologies, plumbing  the depth and breadth of their ritual archives,  the density of each genre with its own hydra-headed fragments and hundreds of individual constructions and presentations,  converting them to theories of universal power.

 

 

Forgive me for correlating  Falola's words from his essay,"Power is Knowledge: Discussions in Intellectual Liberation", where the Akan baobab image comes from, with lines from his "Ritual Archives'', slightly edited for smoothness, in order to arrive at that representative passage.

 

Is it possible this masquerade has bewitched Falola by pretending to be a Falola scholar, presuming in ''Toyin Falola: A Dancing Mask and His Footprints,'' to sum up strategic aspects of Falola's work from the past ten years?

This character's  expressions also include  what he describes as other mappings of Falola's creativity  in terms of what he wants us to think are multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary forms, "Toyin Falola and the Caravan of Thought: African History on a Global Stage in a Multifaceted Lens", Parts One and Two.


He claims to examine and apply Falola's ideas on classical African thought in ''Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African 'Ritual Archives': Disciplinary Formations in African Thought'', "Reworking Ifa : Self Initiation into Èṣù through Contemplation, Invocation and Prayer Inspired by the Work of Toyin Falola'' Parts One and Two and ''Baobab Epistemology and Mysticism : A Critical Response to Toyin Falola on the Baobab as Epistemic Metaphor''. He presents himself as further developing these orientations in ''African Epistemic Metaphors : From the Mask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge,'' Parts One, Two and Three.

How much of this is hot air and how much true scholarship?
 

Shorter essays also issue from him,  seemingly aspiring  to density  of thought, such as ''A Response to Toyin Falola's "Humanism and the Future of the Humanities", ''The Scholar as Public Educator vs the Scholar as Self Preserver : Engaging The Toyin Falola Reader'', ''Paradoxical Positions: Western Thought in Toyin Falola’s Introduction to the Toyin Falola Reader and in Salimonu Kadiri’s Contributions in the USAAfrica Dialogues Listserve'' with a rich debate at that link.

Much writing. How much substance?

In his normal lazy style of self publishing, as you describe it, he has also thrown online  his essay  correlating Falola's thought and a strand of Hinduism, ''Imagination as Transposition Between Realities : Image Theory in Falola’s Thought and in Hindu Yantra Aesthetics''.

Clearly an ambitious creature. Suspiciously  so in the breadth of knowledge he claims for himself. 


These questionable posturings  of intercultural and multi-disciplinary knowledge  tiresomely unfold in a search for his writings  on Falola on the USAfrica Dialogues Series group and a general online search on the same subject.

 

One must be wary of this character, though. 


What self respecting scholar chooses to use social media as a publishing platform, talk less a primary one?

 

An effort to avoid the cleansing rigors of peer review, as you once alleged?

''...an impostor and a charlatan who cuts corners and is unwilling to subject himself to the rigours of academics but wishes to bask in the undeserved limelight (by tagging on the coattails of hard thinkers and workers)'' as you boldly declared in response to Falola's ''Toyin Adepoju is a Genius''?

 Falola perhaps dazzled by the chap's flashy displays, even in their emptiness of substance? A ''genius'' whose productions are cooked in his bedroom and the cave of his mind alone and assessed by no one?

 

No wonder he has no academic position, a misfit even in his earlier University of Benin position as you once observed, fleeing to Britain to engage in self indulging splurging in anything that caught his fancy, writing about everything  from erotica to esoterica, publishing from Youtube to academia.edu to Scribd to Facebook to Linkedin to listerves and self created websites, creating and populating more than eighty blogs with different levels of content, writing in Standard English and translating the first chapter of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of Western literature, into  Nigerian Pidgin English, as if such dilettantism would impress anyone,  a so called multi-disciplinary and multi-platform scholar, seeking to bamboozle through butterfly  restlessness in place of any kind of solidity, his publications in academic books and journals likely to be due to the kindness of honest scholars  taking pity on him.

 

From within this clowning he claims to be rethinking and reworking such venerable African knowledge systems  as the Yoruba origin Ifa, the most venerable Ogboni, the ancient Olokun and to map the esoteric Egbe/Mgbe and its Nsibidi script  with its premier artistic projector Victor Ekpuk.

Really?

Within that little head of his alone?

He even claims to be developing an expansion of the Hindu ritual the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, in honour of the Goddess Tripurasundari, from the dust of whose feet the cosmos was created, a side glance from whom can transform a decrepit old man, unskilled in the arts of love, into a focus of crazy desire for women, who race after him, their clothes bursting asunder in their haste, as described in the Soundaryahalari, The Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, Goddess of Lust and yet of Wisdom, tensions unifying cosmos, but this character's description of his efforts resembles one of his suspicious schemes to monetise knowledge which he dubiously claims to possess.

Focus yourself on something verifiable and credible, he should be told. 

Scholar of  relationships between the visual and verbal arts, philosophy, spirituality and science he calls himself, pontificating on no less a one than the magnificent Islamic philosopher and mystic Ibn Arabi, claiming to analyse the dazzling opening to Arabi's awesome Futuhat al Makkiyah, The Meccan Illuminations, correlating Ifa and Buddhist poet hermit Milarepa, claiming such pioneering  analyses as of Bruce Onobrakpeya's  artistic Oracle series and a broad ranging and supposedly unique study of the Nigerian artistic movement Uli, a self constructed website containing the texts and  cosmographic art of the Ghanaian Nyornuworfia Agorsor, among other self bloatings.

 

Even positioning  himself as a thinker on such pre-eminent scholars as Nimi Wariboko, Abiola Irele and Immanuel Kant.

Really? One person.

Its challenging trying to present more than this representative fraction  of his roamings from subject to subject. Where  could I find the energy to fully map his will of the wisp fleeting from discipline to discipline, from  culture to culture,  continent to continent, from claiming such unprecedented creativities as composing new Ifa literature by a non-initiate of that venerably esoteric guild to making a film unifying the poetry of Christopher Okigbo with the underwater photography of David Doubilet, Sanskrit religious music and Christian Gregorian chant, even taking time to do what he calls celebrations of  his teachers at the University of Benin while claiming he could settle neither there nor anywhere because of his self proclaimed creative restlessness.  

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