Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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Farooq A. Kperogi

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Sep 26, 2020, 8:45:42 AM9/26/20
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Saturday, September 26, 2020

Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi


Nigeria will be 60 years old as a formally independent country next Thursday, but the divisibility and tiresomely endless feuding that have emerged as some of its defining features since its forced birth more than a century ago show no sign of abating.


The immobilizing factiousness of the past five years have particularly conduced to the growing sentiment that Nigeria won’t be around much longer.  Opinion leaders of major ethnic groups are plotting exit strategies from the Nigerian union.

But as much as I respect the rights of any people to dissociate from a toxic Nigerian union that seems to hold everybody back, I think that news of Nigeria’s imminent dismemberment is greatly exaggerated.

What I foresee happening—bits of which are actually already manifest—is that Nigeria would use its current ethnographic resources to evolve into a completely different country. And here’s my admittedly imperfect ethnographic forecast of an evolved Nigeria.


Let me begin from northern Nigeria, Lugardian northern Nigeria, that is. Home to more than half of Nigeria’s over 500 ethnic groups, northern Nigeria is Nigeria’s most diverse region. Even the two major ethnic groups from Southern Nigeria are represented in the North.


There are Yoruba people who are native to Kwara and Kogi states and there are Igbo people—of the Ezza, Izzi and Effium sub-group, who are also found in Ebonyi State—who are native to at least four of Benue State’s 23 local governments. That makes northern Nigeria the microcosm of Nigeria.


But I prognosticate that an evolved northern Nigeria would be monolingual with a few holdouts. The Hausa language already predominates in 16 of northern Nigeria’s 19 states. Only Benue, Kogi and Kwara states have so far resisted the linguistic hegemony of the Hausa language.


Every subsequent generation in the 16 Hausaphone northern Nigerian states internalizes the logic and desirability of Hausa-inflected linguistic uniformity and a corresponding abandonment of the plethora of native languages that dot the region’s linguistic map.


Even Fulfulde (as the language Fulani people speak is called) is dying in such northeastern states as Adamawa, Taraba, Gombe and Bauchi, and the resistance to Hausa in Kanuri-speaking Borno and Yobe weakens every generation.


The relentless march of the Hausa language in Northern Nigeria will ensure that a somewhat unified mega identity, riven only by religion, would emerge, and memories of previous ethnic and linguistic identities would recede or disappear—in the same way that many Hausa-speaking communities in northwest Nigeria have no memory that their distant ancestors were not Hausa-speaking people.


So two dominant identities would emerge from northern Nigeria: Hausaphone Muslim northerners and Hausaphone Christian northerners. The Tiv, Idoma, Igede, Igbo, etc. people of Benue State who have historically resisted the Hausa language would share more in common with the emergent ethnic alchemies of southern Nigeria than they would with Hausaphone northern Christians.


The Yoruba-speaking people of Kwara and Kogi states would also fit more easily with their kith in the Southwest, with Ilorin Emirate being a holdout even though its sociolinguistic and geographic singularities would not permit its seamless fusion into the Hausaphone northern Muslim identity.


The people of what has been called Kwara North—the Baatonu and Boko people of Baruten and Kaiama local governments and the Nupe people of Pategi and Edu local governments— who are culturally more similar to other Muslim northerners than they are to the Yoruba-speaking parts of Kwara State would easily meld well into the Hausaphone Muslim identity. Both the Igala and the Ebira of Kogi have cultural and linguistic kith in southern Nigeria and are easily amenable to Hausaphone Muslim/Christian identities.


The former Eastern and Midwestern Nigeria are already witnessing the incipience of an alchemic ethnic fusion of disparate groups enabled largely by the enormous creolization of Nigerian Pidgin English and the Pentecostalization of the Christianity of the regions.


By creolization, I mean the transformation of Nigerian Pidgin English from an anarchic, emergency contact language for episodic encounters to a stable, rule-governed, self-sufficient native language that millions of people speak and identify with on an emotional and cultural level such as is the case with the Krio of Sierra Leone.


The creolization of Nigerian Pidgin English seems unstoppable and appears primed to play the role Hausa is playing in northern Nigeria as an ethnographic glue to coalesce otherwise historically disparate people. The shared Christian identity of the people of the regions, which is now increasingly Pentecostal Christianity, would accentuate this process.


As anyone who pays attention to Edo State would testify, the new identity formation among southern Nigerian minorities is already killing Islam in Edo North where it has existed for decades. There is a mass Christianization of Muslims in northern Edo, and this would only intensify in the coming generations.


As I’ve shown previously, Islam is a strong building block for identity formation in Northern Nigeria, so that “Hausa” and “Muslim” have become misleadingly synonymous in the Nigerian popular imagination. That is why people of northern Edo used to be erroneously called “Bendel Hausa” even though they speak an Edoid language that is almost mutually intelligible with the Bini language.

The association of Islam with Hausa—or, to use the trendiest hyphenated identity formation, Hausa-Fulani—is leading to its repudiation in even historically Muslim polities in southern Nigeria such as Yorubaland. 


Stories of Yoruba Imams who aren’t allowed to lead prayers in the North and of the distrust of the authenticity of the Islam of Yoruba people by Hausa Muslims help to solidify resistance to Islam. Today, overtly Muslim Yoruba people are seen as by non-Muslim Yoruba as perfidious toadies of the Muslim North.

If this attitude persists—and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t—it means southern Nigeria would become wholly Christian a few generations from now.


It is not clear to me now if Pidgin English in the former Western Nigeria would be creolized like it is becoming among southern minorities because of the social prestige of the Yoruba language and the numerical power of its native speaker base, but there are already signs that this is happening among the Igbo people.


The Igbo language is the only Nigerian language with millions of native speakers which is nonetheless classified as an “endangered language” because of the tendency toward what Professor Chukuwma Azuonye has called “the fetishization of English” among the Igbo, including code-mixing and  code switching, assimilation of Pidgin English into the Igbo language, among other factors he identified in his article titled “Igbo as an Endangered Language.”


I have a personal encounter with this. In 2000 when news filtered through that there were retaliatory mass slaughters of northerners in the southeast, the editor-in-chief of Weekly Trust where I worked requested that I travel there to cover it.


He said I could easily pass for an Igbo man and that my linguistic handicap in the Igbo language wouldn’t be an issue since Igbo people actually revere their kith who are monolingual in English. What he said turned out to be accurate. Throughout the five days I traveled all over the region, not once was I suspected to be anything but an Igbo.


I got along with a mixture of Pidgin English, Standard English, and a strategic sprinkling of “nna” and other popular Igbo intensifiers in my speech. In fact, when I was returning to Kaduna, someone in Onitsha actually asked why I was going to “where they are killing our people.” “Nna, na my business,” I said.


In other words, generations from now, the fissiparity that drives Nigeria’s current ethnic tensions will dissipate and the fresh contradictions of an evolved Nigeria would frustrate its dismemberment.


For instance, Hausaphone northern Christians, who are a huge chunk, would be invested in a united Nigeria for their self-survival. Although they would share linguistic affinities with the Hausaphone Muslim North, their apprehensions about religious domination would connect them to a creolized Christian South.

More than that, though, Nigeria has generated an enormous repertoire of collective national identity symbols that the upcoming generations, who won’t be moored to the same identities as us, would find hard to throw away.


Of course, as the example of Somalia shows, nations don’t endure merely because of the similarities and shared memories of the people that constitute it. That was why Steve Goodier once said, “We don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with people.” 


Oshiomhole and His Lizard and Lion Hyperbole

I watched a video clip of Oshiomhole's interview with ChannnelsTV a day before the Edo governorship election where he characterized Obaseki's promise to extirpate his "godfatherly" tentacles in Edo as the threats of a "lizard" to a "lion." (Obaseki is the "lizard" and he is the "lion.")


That's an unusually over-dramatic hyperbole, which aggrandizes the enormity of Oshiomhole's defeat--and the deep psychic rupture he must be nursing now. 


The defeat of a lion by a lizard is the stuff of legends. The Bible's "David and Goliath" story pales miserably in comparison!

Related Article:

Obaseki’s Win, Tinubu, and the Power of American Threats

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
School of Communication & Media
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Kennesaw State University
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Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

Toyin Falola

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Sep 26, 2020, 9:06:54 AM9/26/20
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Farooq:

 

Great essay, but can you do a follow-up in comparative terms? Link languages to identity (we see the success in Israel, the Afrikaners in South Africa). I have traveled to places to see how this works, including to India. But I have also see failure—the Yoruba speak the same language and its variants but they fight a lot. Don’t be surprised, there are Yoruba who say that I am not Yoruba because I eat with Biko!

 

Unless I am misreading you, and doing so to an extreme, a common language does not erase other identity markers, as they are socially constructed. The slaves and their masters spoke the same language, to use an extreme example.

Ahmad Bamba used Wolof to do what you are recommending, ultimately creating a broader identity.

I am not joking—if spreading the use of one language can bring about what you intend, a state that controls the bulk of the budget can achieve this within a few years. If you don’t speak Hausa, no pay-check!

 

Let me now get into trouble with you—I once told you Buhari every week is a bad staple; we need to eat other food!

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, September 26, 2020 at 7:45 AM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

 

Saturday, September 26, 2020

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

 

Nigeria will be 60 years old as a formally independent country next Thursday, but the divisibility and tiresomely endless feuding that have emerged as some of its defining features since its forced birth more than a century ago show no sign of abating.

 

The immobilizing factiousness of the past five years have particularly conduced to the growing sentiment that Nigeria won’t be around much longer.  Opinion leaders of major ethnic groups are plotting exit strategies from the Nigerian union.

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Anthony Akinola

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Sep 26, 2020, 10:12:09 AM9/26/20
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Good music to my ears.
Anthony Akinola

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 26, 2020, 10:45:56 AM9/26/20
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When everyone sings the same note we not only do not get harmony we get no music at all.

Let everyone on the forum sing "do'  in unison till eternity, all we will be doing will be 'do-ing.'  There is more to music than the individual note(s); the harmony is worked into the notes and the other elements.  The same goes for human communities.

The musician is always honest about his intention to create harmony of disparate elements; human elements arent so honest with each other.  Some aim at syncopation all of the time with their own community receiving all the emphasis.

Pidgin will never be creolized in the West true because the Yoruba correctly identify pidgin as a surrogate language without enough vocabulary for contingencies of antiquated realities.  It will fail for the same reason ultimately in Igbo land.  How will pidgin translate 'À toko ìròkò d'óko ìrókòto.' and such aphorisms?

I never heard the late Ikemba Nnewi speak in pidgin before.  I only heard him speak fluent Igbo, English, Hausa or Yoruba.  The same was true of the Cicero of Esa Oke the late Bola Ige.They pointed to the future of Nigeria.  A polyglossian comparatist's delight ( let the trans- national linguistic bonding schools commence!)

Go to a palace and start speaking to a Yoruba monarch in pidgin and watch him reciprocate!

I never heard a governor from the South East ever make a broadcast in pidgin or creolized pidgin.

The various looting and military kleptocracies have all been in anticipation of a break up of Nigeria which never materialised, so perpetrators can get as much to their side before the anticipated sinking of a ship which can only be a self- fulfilling prophecy in view of the activities of the kleptocrats.

OAA



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Date: 26/09/2020 13:52 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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Farooq A. Kperogi

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Sep 26, 2020, 11:40:53 AM9/26/20
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Oga,

This last paragraph from the column answers your concern:

"Of course, as the example of Somalia shows, nations don’t endure merely because of the similarities and shared memories of the people that constitute it. That was why Steve Goodier once said, 'We don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with people.'"

I agree that I need to develop it further. Although linguistic similarities don't erase ethnic differences, I think they make harmonious co-existence easier.

Farooq

 


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Twitter: @farooqkperogi
 

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Toyin Falola

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Sep 26, 2020, 11:52:42 AM9/26/20
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Farooq:

We have to keep pushing your thesis. Conflicts will never disappear, even at the most elementary level between a man and his children and a wife and her husband. A plural society is basically about conflicts, and you find hegemonic forces (as in Hindu in India, and people tend to forget that China has an hegemonic ethnicity) to manage more effectively. I don’t want to be a Muslim in India or a Christian in China.

It is the mismanagement that is our trouble, based on the main desire of those who govern us to steal money and to see things from a tunnel/narrow perspectives. Why should I impose Islam on the Tiv? Why should I ask my cattle to go and graze in Enugu? Why should I take all the money from the Niger Delta and relocate them to the desert?

We have examples of how nations have used language(s) to create harmony. And we have the ongoing example of Rwanda where our friend is trying ethnic erasure, at least in public.

You have a great idea to pursue, and you should keep pushing it, although don’t tell some people now to learn Hausa!!!

Saturday, September 26, 2020

Biko Agozino

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Sep 26, 2020, 3:17:48 PM9/26/20
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Ogo Farooq,

Na wetin you find during that 'reccing' (reconnaissance) journey to the East? You find retaliatory killing? For where? Nna, give some credit to your in-laws now. Give Ndi Igbo some credit for never resorting to retaliatory mass killings despite waves of genocidal violence directed against them. They keep going back to where they are killing their people for their business of serving their fellow Africans. Urge the Nigerian government to apologize for the treatment of model citizens like the Igbo and offer them reparative justice. No need for evolution on that one.

If you had stopped at Artisan Market in Enugu to buy a goat during your sabo trip, the young Hausaphone sellers would have bargained with you in perfect Igbo because they were born and raised there where a Fulani man was elected for two terms as the first Mayor back in 1952. It is only when you ask them their names that you will realize that they are Muslims. The Igbo, Hausa, Youruba, Efik, Ijaw, Urobo, Tiv, Nupe, Birom, Edo, Ibibio, Ikwere, are all brothers and sisters as you reminded us in a previous post. 

Oga Falola, no mind those parapo Yoruba people, you done dey chop amala and ewedu soup with Oyibo more than you done chop isi ewu with any Igbo man, except Ohadike or Afigbo maybe, and yet they still dey call you Baba Kiki Iwin, not Omo Okoro. Next time they yab you, remind them that the Ooni himself agrees with Ifa that the father of Obatala was Igbo. We are family and anyone who thinks otherwise should prove the null hypothesis of no relationship between x and y.

We are all African brothers and sisters though tongues differ. There will still be quarrels in every family, but the genocidal Igbophobic violence is a colonial intrusion that our people did not experience before slavery and colonialism, according to Walter Rodney inn HEUA. The Labour Party government of Harold Wilson, USSR, and Shell BP are not African tribes, yet they armed the genocidist troops against innocent Igbo people and called it ethnic conflict.

Your final paragraph on Somalia raises the curse of the Tower of Babel that Toni Morrison ailuded to in her Nobel Prize lecture, praising diversity as something good - speaking the same tongue leads to trouble because even when someone whistles to say that your mama is so ugly, you go hear am and say that he should take it back or wahala go burst. Germany, Japan, Italy, Rwanda, and Somalia came close to that hysterical imposition of monolingualism but they each paid a huge price of nearly being wiped out of the face of the earth.

What you left out of the equation is the question of class. Irrespective of your language or religion, you go follow them dey chop if you are one of the Aristos oppressing the people. Eskor Toyo taught us that Nigerians make the mistake of thinking that religion or ethnicity is the most important identity but if you no go school and you no get kwudi-ego-owo-okuk-money, you go dey chew nails for any capitalist country.

Farooq, pursue this research but shift it away from ethnic supremacy. Instead ask the Hausa elites and ordinary parents why they are neglecting the education of the Talakawa. It is impossible to imagine that the Igbo would dominate the federal government as much as the Hausa and Fulani have while their young people perform so poorly 
in education. Let us address the question of access for all boys and girls immediately and train them to avoid the distractions of smart phones and naughty movies late at night.

This is a problem that will not wait for gradual evolution across Africa. Education can be revolutionized within a generation so that, irrespective of the numbers of languages you speak, you can read and write t make it more difficult for anyone to mobilize you to go and kill millions of your brothers and sisters just because they speak a different tongue that you probably learned and aced the way they say that Baba Buhari got A in Igbo on his WAEC certificate (perhaps to equip him to spy on the unjustly hated Igbo but also more likely because he may have been adopted by an Igbo teacher when he was orphaned). 

We need to emphasize education in all the 2000 languages in Africa to enable us to tap into the mystery hypothesis which states that no culture has ever industrialized by relying on the languages of colonizers.

This may be relevant to the testing of the hypothesis:



Biko

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 26, 2020, 3:17:48 PM9/26/20
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I would tell non- Hausa speakers to learn Hausa.  In fact every federal legislators should be constitutionally required to learn the three lingua francas in addition to English as I have been pushing since 1998 ( and certified with an NYSC type testimonials in govt accredited language schools) before they are cleared for elections in to the National Assembly.  It would serve to dent that narrow- mindedness that you have correctly identified in politicians. The technology is now around in Androids so there is no excuse for non compliance.

Every additional language is an asset to every Nigerian.

OAA



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-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 26/09/2020 16:55 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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Farooq:

We have to keep pushing your thesis. Conflicts will never disappear, even at the most elementary level between a man and his children and a wife and her husband. A plural society is basically about conflicts, and you find hegemonic forces (as in Hindu in India, and people tend to forget that China has an hegemonic ethnicity) to manage more effectively. I don’t want to be a Muslim in India or a Christian in China.

It is the mismanagement that is our trouble, based on the main desire of those who govern us to steal money and to see things from a tunnel/narrow perspectives. Why should I impose Islam on the Tiv? Why should I ask my cattle to go and graze in Enugu? Why should I take all the money from the Niger Delta and relocate them to the desert?

We have examples of how nations have used language(s) to create harmony. And we have the ongoing example of Rwanda where our friend is trying ethnic erasure, at least in public.

You have a great idea to pursue, and you should keep pushing it, although don’t tell some people now to learn Hausa!!!

TF

Saturday, September 26, 2020

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Obododimma Oha

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Sep 26, 2020, 7:18:00 PM9/26/20
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Farooq,
That Nigeria won't break presupposes that

1. Nigeria, as it exists, is fragile,
2. Nigeria, as a fork, is held as one. 
Am I right? 

Sincerely, 
Obododimma. 

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Farooq A. Kperogi

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Sep 26, 2020, 7:18:07 PM9/26/20
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Oga prof.,

Sadly, there were retaliatory murders of northerners in Aba, Onitsha, Owerri and other places. Sadder still, most of the victims were Tiv, Idoma, Igala, etc. Christians whose protestations that they were neither Hausas nor Muslims did little to save them.

But I also found heartwarming stories of northerners who were saved by their Igbo neighbors.

The story of one Amina who was born and raised in Aba and who spoke better Igbo than she spoke Hausa caused me to shed tears. She was going to be killed by the Bakassi Boys because her dressing gave her away as a Hausa girl. 

At the point she was going to be struck, she said in perfect, unaccented Igbo that if they killed her, they would be killing their own sister because she had never been to the North and considered herself Igbo. She said she was as troubled by the periodic massacres of Igbos up North as everyone of her potential killers.

The Bakasi Boys not only spared her, they changed their minds and went from retaliatory murders of northerners to looking for northerners to save. 

Yes, class is an ever-present structural feature of our society, but Claude Ake's seminal observation that while class may be a "determinant" contradiction (in Nigeria), it isn't the "dominant" one is important here. Ethnicity and religion are our dominant contradictions, but I admit that class can't be ignored.

Daalu!

Farooq




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Sent from my phone. Please forgive typos and omissions.

Farooq A. Kperogi

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Sep 26, 2020, 9:09:01 PM9/26/20
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Chief Obododimma,

I guess you can say that. Nigeria's fragility is well-known to everyone, and the annoyingly banal proclamations of its "indivisibility" in spite of this fragility by elites who enjoy the spoils of political power at the center are so well-known.

 But note that I was only being prognostic. My somewhat optimistic ethnographic forecast could be entirely misplaced.

Farooq


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Biko Agozino

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Sep 26, 2020, 10:20:51 PM9/26/20
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Oke Ogo,

So you witnessed sister Amina being saved by a 'retaliatory mob' that turned into a salvation mob looking for Hausas to save in Aba? Have you ever heard of any such brotherly love in the North, a mob of the Talakawa looking for Ndi Nkiti to save? After the Nigerian Biafra War, my father accommodated a family of 'Mallam Nwa Awusa' with his two wives and children and without charging any rents even though we lost family members to the genocidal violence against the Igbo committed mainly by fellow Christians who spoke different tongues in Nigeria.

Soyinka addressed this in Death and the King's Horseman with the science fiction character of the Not I Bird. The hunter was going after the innocent bird that never hurt a fly and the bird knocked on the doors of neighbors for asylum but Soyinka's kinsmen, including Christian and Muslim clergy,  claimed not to have heard the cry for help. In Season of Anomy, Soyinka again recounted the eye-witness story of the mass killing of Mr Half Dozen and his people by their friends and neighbors though he drunkenly fought back before he was over-powered. Adichie also narrates how Olanna witnessed the killing of her uncle by his poor friends and neighbors in Kano but in her case, her royal boyfriend saved her and urged her to flee from the North for safety in Half of a Yellow Sun. 

Instead of a salvation mob looking for the Igbo to save, the mob gathered in Gboko to waylay the fleeing Igbo who were fleeing from the north and force the young women from the trains to be raped by lepers, cut open wombs and dashed the fetuses against rocks, and used tippers to offload the dead and dying into the river, Soyinka testified in Conversations at Night with a Cockroach. Where is the outrage from Nigerian intellectuals from all over the country the way almost all Nigerians are outraged about the kidnapping of gwongworo loads of school children for sex slavery or their unlawful detention by the government in the North East and over the killing of farmers by cattle herders in Benue, Southern Kaduna, and all over the south today? African Lives Matter!

It is true that there are killings in the East by Easterners too and most of the victims are Igbo. But everyone will agree that the Igbo have never committed genocide against any other group of people and yet they are the ones targeted for massacres by security forces. The minority people of the South South sometimes allege that the Igbo, and not the invading federal troops, must have killed their own people too but the evidence shows that the minorities joined the federal troops in hunting and massacring their Igbo neighbors and friends to claim their properties as abandoned properties. Moreover, Elechi Amadi, Ken Sara-Wiwa, Adaka Boro, N.U. Akpan, and Phjillip Effiong, never reported any genocide by the Igbo against their people in their memoirs as minority leaders on both sides of the conflict.

It is interesting to know that Ake regarded ethnicity as dominant while class is determinant but how come he never said a word to condemn the genocide against the Igbo and express support for the principle of self-determination by oppressed nationalities, the way Lenin did? If he did so in his influential theoretical work somewhere, I must have missed it and would like to follow up on that. Nzimiro and Achebe were clear that there were intellectuals waging a class war within Biafra to push for a socialist agenda and they won the symbolic victory of getting Ojukwu to proclaim the Ahiara Declaration much like the Arusha Declaration of Nyerere. 

The socialist intellectuals who rallied around the genocidal army in national interest had only crass opportunism to show for it, says Madunagu, except for intellectuals like Malam Aminu Kano, S.G. Ikoku and Ukpabi Asika who may have influenced Gowon to accept the peace proposal by Azikiwe and declare no victor no vanquished. Awo, as Finance Minister and Vice Chair of the military administration, imposed the 20 pounds refund per family no matter how much they had in the banks before the war to cripple the survivors economically and he joined Anthony Enahoro to continue defending their indefensible claim that starvation was a legitimate weapon of war and that all was fair in warfare against innocent fellow Christians. 

To those who brag that the Igbo deserved genocide as retaliation because Igbo officers were among the leaders of the coup that killed leaders from other parts of the country, remind them that that coup was quashed by Igbo officers and that the coup plotters were arrested and detained to await trial and that the mass killing of the Igbo started in Jos in 1945 and in Kano in 1956 during colonial rule before the civil war and that it continues in what Ekwe-Ekwe called the Fourth Stage today.

In-Law, Nna men bros, it is not too late for you to add your voice in condemnation of the genocide that claimed 3.1 million of your own ndi Ogo. Even Soyinka, Dokubo, Fani-Kayode, and a few others who are not all related to the Igbo by marriage, have cleared their conscience by condemning the genocide. Which side you dey? Call for atonement in your influential columns. Also call for Talakawa parents to insist on the education of all their sons and daughters to the best of their abilities the way that rich northerners and even poor southerners sacrifice to educate their children to the best of their abilities in Nigeria and abroad.

Finally, let us also organize for restructuration to go beyond colonial borders and include the Pan African option of one Afrika for all Africans at home and abroad without any colonial boundaries. Forward to the Peoples Republic of Africa or the United Republic of African States. Organize, do not agonize!

Biko

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 27, 2020, 7:11:31 AM9/27/20
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Oga Biko. 

 You deliberately muddle the Civil War and killing of Igbo in the North in your usual wont and you devalue the integrity of your politicised post thereby.


As a trained literary critic I know what you say of Soyinka's Conversation with Cockroach is inaccurate.


OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.



-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 27/09/2020 03:32 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (usaafric...@googlegroups.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
Oke Ogo,

So you witnessed sister Amina being saved by a 'retaliatory mob' that turned into a salvation mob looking for Hausas to save in Aba? Have you ever heard of any such brotherly love in the North, a mob of the Talakawa looking for Ndi Nkiti to save? After the Nigerian Biafra War, my father accommodated a family of 'Mallam Nwa Awusa' with his two wives and children and without charging any rents even though we lost family members to the genocidal violence against the Igbo committed mainly by fellow Christians who spoke different tongues in Nigeria.

Soyinka addressed this in Death and the King's Horseman with the science fiction character of the Not I Bird. The hunter was going after the innocent bird that never hurt a fly and the bird knocked on the doors of neighbors for asylum but Soyinka's kinsmen, including Christian and Muslim clergy,  claimed not to have heard the cry for help. In Season of Anomy, Soyinka again recounted the eye-witness story of the mass killing of Mr Half Dozen and his people by their friends and neighbors though he drunkenly fought back before he was over-powered. Adichie also narrates how Olanna witnessed the killing of her uncle by his poor friends and neighbors in Kano but in her case, her royal boyfriend saved her and urged her to flee from the North for safety in Half of a Yellow Sun. 

Instead of a salvation mob looking for the Igbo to save, the mob gathered in Gboko to waylay the fleeing Igbo who were fleeing from the north and force the young women from the trains to be raped by lepers, cut open wombs and dashed the fetuses against rocks, and used tippers to offload the dead and dying into the river, Soyinka testified in Conversations at Night with a Cockroach. Where is the outrage from Nigerian intellectuals from all over the country the way almost all Nigerians are outraged about the kidnapping of gwongworo loads of school children for sex slavery or their unlawful detention by the government in the North East and over the killing of farmers by cattle herders in Benue, Southern Kaduna, and all over the south today? African Lives Matter!

It is true that there are killings in the East by Easterners too and most of the victims are Igbo. But everyone will agree that the Igbo have never committed genocide against any other group of people and yet they are the ones targeted for massacres by security forces. The minority people of the South South sometimes allege that the Igbo, and not the invading federal troops, must have killed their own people too but the evidence shows that the minorities joined the federal troops in hunting and massacring their Igbo neighbors and friends to claim their properties as abandoned properties. Moreover, Elechi Amadi, Ken Sara-Wiwa, Adaka Boro, N.U. Akpan, and Phjillip Effiong, never reported any genocide by the Igbo against their people in their memoirs as minority leaders on both sides of the conflict.

It is interesting to know that Ake regarded ethnicity as dominant while class is determinant but how come he never said a word to condemn the genocide against the Igbo and express support for the principle of self-determination by oppressed nationalities, the way Lenin did? If he did so in his influential theoretical work somewhere, I must have missed it and would like to follow up on that. Nzimiro and Achebe were clear that there were intellectuals waging a class war within Biafra to push for a socialist agenda and they won the symbolic victory of getting Ojukwu to proclaim the Ahiara Declaration much like the Arusha Declaration of Nyerere. 

The socialist intellectuals who rallied around the genocidal army in national interest had only crass opportunism to show for it, says Madunagu, except for intellectuals like Malam Aminu Kano, S.G. Ikoku and Ukpabi Asika who may have influenced Gowon to accept the peace proposal by Azikiwe and declare no victor no vanquished. Awo, as Finance Minister and Vice Chair of the military administration, imposed the 20 pounds refund per family no matter how much they had in the banks before the war to cripple the survivors economically and he joined Anthony Enahoro to continue defending their indefensible claim that starvation was a legitimate weapon of war and that all was fair in warfare against innocent fellow Christians. 

To those who brag that the Igbo deserved genocide as retaliation because Igbo officers were among the leaders of the coup that killed leaders from other parts of the country, remind them that that coup was quashed by Igbo officers and that the coup plotters were arrested and detained to await trial and that the mass killing of the Igbo started in Jos in 1945 and in Kano in 1956 during colonial rule before the civil war and that it continues in what Ekwe-Ekwe called the Fourth Stage today.

In-Law, Nna men bros, it is not too late for you to add your voice in condemnation of the genocide that claimed 3.1 million of your own ndi Ogo. Even Soyinka, Dokubo, Fani-Kayode, and a few others who are not all related to the Igbo by marriage, have cleared their conscience by condemning the genocide. Which side you dey? Call for atonement in your influential columns. Also call for Talakawa parents to insist on the education of all their sons and daughters to the best of their abilities the way that rich northerners and even poor southerners sacrifice to educate their children to the best of their abilities in Nigeria and abroad.

Finally, let us also organize for restructuration to go beyond colonial borders and include the Pan African option of one Afrika for all Africans at home and abroad without any colonial boundaries. Forward to the Peoples Republic of Africa or the United Republic of African States. Organize, do not agonize!

Biko

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 27, 2020, 7:11:32 AM9/27/20
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Yes we have to emphasise education in 2000 languages of Africa in the long term but due to financial constraints the lingua francas take priority first.

In Nigeria for example a big shame on the past national leaders ( and the incumbent government) for not emphasising that each candidate must have a credit requirement in at least one indigenous lingua franca in addition to English at the School Certificate Ordinary Level.  English has its uses internationally but I do not want to continue to learn of Igbo culture in English.

It will thrill me to no end to find out that half of school leavers in the West can speak fluent native speaker Igbo while the other half can speak flawless Hausa.  All regions can be Hausaphonic ( and not just the North)  Igbophonic and Yorubaphonic.  These would be the building blocks of national cohesion within a generation but our politicians are such lazy thinkers who cannot think outside the ( ethnic) box and too selfish in playing divisive politics.

Stage Two:  From National Cohesion to Integrated National Development.

Many of the jobless graduates can be sent across the nation as linguistic cultural ambassadors rather than roaming the streets as if they were not born with any innate saleable skills beyond their university degree certificates.

From such beginnings cross cultural business developments can evolve: from language schools to business schools and business ventures nation wide.

The idea of the dichotomy of federal establishment versus state establishments will be shattered forever: 

 integrated national publuc/private establishments.  

Along the lines sketched by Lagos State govt of joint business enterprises among SW state enterprises there should sprout parallel ventures say between Imo, Ondo and Osun, FG, Anambra and Ekiti, Kano, Lagos Ogun and Abia, FG, Ondo and Rivers, Oyo, Edo and Niger, Enugu, Kwara and Osun.
.All of these will transform to massive job creation potentials between public and private sector potentials of an integrated Nigerian society in which the idea of blaming FG for not creating jobs for the unemployed will become irrelevant as all able hands will be on deck nationwide on all dorts of enterprises their linguistic skills being the bedrock bond.


OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.



-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 26/09/2020 20:27 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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Ogo Farooq,

Na wetin you find during that 'reccing' (reconnaissance) journey to the East? You find retaliatory killing? For where? Nna, give some credit to your in-laws now. Give Ndi Igbo some credit for never resorting to retaliatory mass killings despite waves of genocidal violence directed against them. They keep going back to where they are killing their people for their business of serving their fellow Africans. Urge the Nigerian government to apologize for the treatment of model citizens like the Igbo and offer them reparative justice. No need for evolution on that one.

If you had stopped at Artisan Market in Enugu to buy a goat during your sabo trip, the young Hausaphone sellers would have bargained with you in perfect Igbo because they were born and raised there where a Fulani man was elected for two terms as the first Mayor back in 1952. It is only when you ask them their names that you will realize that they are Muslims. The Igbo, Hausa, Youruba, Efik, Ijaw, Urobo, Tiv, Nupe, Birom, Edo, Ibibio, Ikwere, are all brothers and sisters as you reminded us in a previous post. 

Oga Falola, no mind those parapo Yoruba people, you done dey chop amala and ewedu soup with Oyibo more than you done chop isi ewu with any Igbo man, except Ohadike or Afigbo maybe, and yet they still dey call you Baba Kiki Iwin, not Omo Okoro. Next time they yab you, remind them that the Ooni himself agrees with Ifa that the father of Obatala was Igbo. We are family and anyone who thinks otherwise should prove the null hypothesis of no relationship between x and y.

We are all African brothers and sisters though tongues differ. There will still be quarrels in every family, but the genocidal Igbophobic violence is a colonial intrusion that our people did not experience before slavery and colonialism, according to Walter Rodney inn HEUA. The Labour Party government of Harold Wilson, USSR, and Shell BP are not African tribes, yet they armed the genocidist troops against innocent Igbo people and called it ethnic conflict.

Your final paragraph on Somalia raises the curse of the Tower of Babel that Toni Morrison ailuded to in her Nobel Prize lecture, praising diversity as something good - speaking the same tongue leads to trouble because even when someone whistles to say that your mama is so ugly, you go hear am and say that he should take it back or wahala go burst. Germany, Japan, Italy, Rwanda, and Somalia came close to that hysterical imposition of monolingualism but they each paid a huge price of nearly being wiped out of the face of the earth.

What you left out of the equation is the question of class. Irrespective of your language or religion, you go follow them dey chop if you are one of the Aristos oppressing the people. Eskor Toyo taught us that Nigerians make the mistake of thinking that religion or ethnicity is the most important identity but if you no go school and you no get kwudi-ego-owo-okuk-money, you go dey chew nails for any capitalist country.

Farooq, pursue this research but shift it away from ethnic supremacy. Instead ask the Hausa elites and ordinary parents why they are neglecting the education of the Talakawa. It is impossible to imagine that the Igbo would dominate the federal government as much as the Hausa and Fulani have while their young people perform so poorly 
in education. Let us address the question of access for all boys and girls immediately and train them to avoid the distractions of smart phones and naughty movies late at night.

This is a problem that will not wait for gradual evolution across Africa. Education can be revolutionized within a generation so that, irrespective of the numbers of languages you speak, you can read and write t make it more difficult for anyone to mobilize you to go and kill millions of your brothers and sisters just because they speak a different tongue that you probably learned and aced the way they say that Baba Buhari got A in Igbo on his WAEC certificate (perhaps to equip him to spy on the unjustly hated Igbo but also more likely because he may have been adopted by an Igbo teacher when he was orphaned). 

We need to emphasize education in all the 2000 languages in Africa to enable us to tap into the mystery hypothesis which states that no culture has ever industrialized by relying on the languages of colonizers.

This may be relevant to the testing of the hypothesis:



Biko

On Saturday, 26 September 2020, 11:40:51 GMT-4, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote:


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Salimonu Kadiri

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Sep 27, 2020, 10:34:52 AM9/27/20
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​I agree with you that Nigeria will never break. The of Nigeria is that of ethno-religious elites who impose themselves on the masses as leaders and who always employ ethno-religious reasons to compete among themselves for the control of the nation's resources. Should one go to any Nigerian market e.g. in Sokoto, Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Jos, Makurdi, Lagos, Ibadan, Onitsha, Aba, Sapele, Warri, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Uyo, Benin etc., one would find Nigerians of different languages trading together in peace. In most cases the traders are from different ethnic parts of Nigeria, with different religions, but they still communicate and trade amicably with one another. It is the competing educated elites who utilize ethnicity and religion as a weapon of mass deception to create tribal and religious tension in the country. 

In August 2013, the political elites were threatening that Nigeria would break up if President Jonathan was not featured as the PDP Presidential candidate in 2015. On the contrary, the political editor of the online Nigerian Vanguard, Emmanuel Aziken, carried a report of the response of the then Governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, that Nigeria would never break up. Sule Lamido reasoned, "It (Nigeria) is too weak to break. Who will break it? The ordinary person in Jigawa or ordinary person in Sokoto or the ordinary person in Bayelsa? Is it the Ibo vulcaniser or the Yoruba woman that is selling kerosene by the roadside or the Okada man in Delta? They (ordinary Nigerians) don't have the capacity to unite because they are burdened by poverty. We (the elites) have taken away from them their dignity, their self-esteem, their pride and self-worth so that they cannot even organise.
Up there, we (the elite) are united, we sing and so we will never allow Nigeria to break because once it breaks, we will lose. But the common man loses nothing. What is he losing? He is already living in hell; he cannot lose anything more than this hell." What the Governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, was emphasizing upon is the cross ethnic and religious solidarity among the Nigerian elites against the masses. For instance, Jigawa is a Sharia state but that did not prevent the predecessor of Lamido in office, Taminu Turaki, of stealing N36 billion belonging to the poor people of the state. When Turaki was charged to court by the EFCC in July 2007 and remanded in custody because he could not fulfil his bail conditions, it was former Abia State Governor, Orji Uzor Kalu, who arranged his bail through an Abia Igbo monarch. But what has Taminu Turaki of Jigawa State in common with Orji Uzor Kalu of Abia State since they don't share the same ethnicity and religion? They both speak English; both were governors in their respective state; and while Turaki looted his state of the sum of N36 billion, Kalu only looted N7.2 billion in his Abia State; and both have been granted bail since 2007 with their cases yet to be concluded in 2020.

Major Christian Anuforo did not share in common only English language with Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe but also the Igbo ethnic language as well as the Christian religion. Yet, Christian Anuforo did not hesitate to kill Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe in the January 15, 1966 coup. Major Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma and 2nd Lieutenant Jeremiah Useni were both good English-speaking Nigerian military officers and also religiously Christians just like Major General Johnson Thompson Aguiyi Ironsi and his host Lieutenant Colonel Francis Adekunle Fajuyi yet, Christian religion and English language affinity did not prevent Theophilus and Jeremiah from abducting and murdering Johnson-Thompson and Francis on 29 July 1966. 

When the official language of governance in Nigeria, English is spoken and understood by every Nigerian, the threat of break up will disappear. By then, no Nigerian leader will be able to steal the developmental funds of the nation and tell the impoverished citizens that the stolen funds are blessings from Allah or God. And educated Nigerians will see themselves as a people belonging to a nation with the same destiny. As of now, the Nigerian masses don't have the same father/motherland as the political cum ethno-religious elites. Before every Nigerian can be educated in the federal language of governance, English, the local ethnic language should be made the official language of governance in each state of Nigeria, while English should be the second language. Budget prepared and presented to the people in indigenous language of each state would make people follow the implementation and non-implementation of the budget. One can just envisage how fantastic it would be for the Alhmajiris to know in the local language that there is an annual budget of millions of naira for their primary education. At moment, the budgets including that of primary education are prepared in English language and allocated funds are stolen by the governors and their cronies in government only for the ruling elites to turn around and tell the Alihmajiris in local language, Allah ta rago, meaning God is the defender of the poor.
S. Kadiri     

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com>
Sent: 26 September 2020 06:39
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How
 

Obododimma Oha

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Sep 27, 2020, 12:15:33 PM9/27/20
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Sorry for the error in typing. It should have read: "Nigeria, as a form, is held..." Hell, "fork"! Why "fuck," sorry, "fork"? 
-- Obododimma. 

Obododimma Oha

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Sep 27, 2020, 12:15:33 PM9/27/20
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But, seriously, fragile things can still break up, no matter how well we handle them. Thank heavens. You didn't want to say "prophetic." You chose "prognostic" instead ! Trying to be scientific. 

Anyway, you are simply predicting, using the available indices. Breakable plates are supposed to break, to convince us. 
Daalụ.

Sincerely, Obododimma. 

Farooq A. Kperogi

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Sep 27, 2020, 8:01:02 PM9/27/20
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"So you witnessed sister Amina being saved by a 'retaliatory mob' that turned into a salvation mob looking for Hausas to save in Aba? Have you ever heard of any such brotherly love in the North, a mob of the Talakawa looking for Ndi Nkiti to save?"

I covered a lot of bloodstained conflicts in my journalism career in Nigeria and witnessed several versions of this story all over the country, including in the North. 

An imam in Jos, for instance, made international headlines recently--and even won an American and other awards-- for using his home and his mosque to save hundreds of Christians from bloodthirsty mobs.

Every ethnic and religious group has both good and bad people. Goodness and badness aren't exclusive to any group.

I'm as repulsed by the regrettably heartrending bloodletting during the Civil War as I am of all senseless mass slaughters. 

During the Civil War, my father was mistaken for an Igbo in New Bussa in 1968 and was nearly killed. His attackers said he was too light-skinned to be native to Borgu. His Borgu facial marks were dismissed as "recent" and intentionally designed to conceal his putative Igbo identity. He survived because someone who knew him and his family from our hometown vouched for his Borgu bona fides. Each time he recalled the story he often recoiled in terror. So I can imagine what actual Igbo people suffered in the place.

Nonetheless, I've also heard stories of the horrors some people, including other Igbos who were tagged "saboteurs," witnessed on the Biafran side.

Farooq


Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
 

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 27, 2020, 8:01:03 PM9/27/20
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Baba Kadiri.


Your submission that the indigenous languages be the main languages of government at state and local government level with English as second language makes a lot of sense.

But I insist for federal cohesion federal public officers be required to show evidence of the competence on the constitutional emphasis on the major Nigerian lingua francas before appointment into offices.  It will bridge the gap between serving at state level and serving at federal level where the emphasis should be on national cohesion instead of natal and prebendal politics.

OAA


Mr. President you swore an oath to rule according to the Constitution.  Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country"s lingua francas?



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.



-------- Original message --------
From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>
Date: 27/09/2020 15:40 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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​I agree with you that Nigeria will never break. The of Nigeria is that of ethno-religious elites who impose themselves on the masses as leaders and who always employ ethno-religious reasons to compete among themselves for the control of the nation's resources. Should one go to any Nigerian market e.g. in Sokoto, Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Jos, Makurdi, Lagos, Ibadan, Onitsha, Aba, Sapele, Warri, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Uyo, Benin etc., one would find Nigerians of different languages trading together in peace. In most cases the traders are from different ethnic parts of Nigeria, with different religions, but they still communicate and trade amicably with one another. It is the competing educated elites who utilize ethnicity and religion as a weapon of mass deception to create tribal and religious tension in the country. 

In August 2013, the political elites were threatening that Nigeria would break up if President Jonathan was not featured as the PDP Presidential candidate in 2015. On the contrary, the political editor of the online Nigerian Vanguard, Emmanuel Aziken, carried a report of the response of the then Governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, that Nigeria would never break up. Sule Lamido reasoned, "It (Nigeria) is too weak to break. Who will break it? The ordinary person in Jigawa or ordinary person in Sokoto or the ordinary person in Bayelsa? Is it the Ibo vulcaniser or the Yoruba woman that is selling kerosene by the roadside or the Okada man in Delta? They (ordinary Nigerians) don't have the capacity to unite because they are burdened by poverty. We (the elites) have taken away from them their dignity, their self-esteem, their pride and self-worth so that they cannot even organise.
Up there, we (the elite) are united, we sing and so we will never allow Nigeria to break because once it breaks, we will lose. But the common man loses nothing. What is he losing? He is already living in hell; he cannot lose anything more than this hell." What the Governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, was emphasizing upon is the cross ethnic and religious solidarity among the Nigerian elites against the masses. For instance, Jigawa is a Sharia state but that did not prevent the predecessor of Lamido in office, Taminu Turaki, of stealing N36 billion belonging to the poor people of the state. When Turaki was charged to court by the EFCC in July 2007 and remanded in custody because he could not fulfil his bail conditions, it was former Abia State Governor, Orji Uzor Kalu, who arranged his bail through an Abia Igbo monarch. But what has Taminu Turaki of Jigawa State in common with Orji Uzor Kalu of Abia State since they don't share the same ethnicity and religion? They both speak English; both were governors in their respective state; and while Turaki looted his state of the sum of N36 billion, Kalu only looted N7.2 billion in his Abia State; and both have been granted bail since 2007 with their cases yet to be concluded in 2020.

Major Christian Anuforo did not share in common only English language with Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe but also the Igbo ethnic language as well as the Christian religion. Yet, Christian Anuforo did not hesitate to kill Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe in the January 15, 1966 coup. Major Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma and 2nd Lieutenant Jeremiah Useni were both good English-speaking Nigerian military officers and also religiously Christians just like Major General Johnson Thompson Aguiyi Ironsi and his host Lieutenant Colonel Francis Adekunle Fajuyi yet, Christian religion and English language affinity did not prevent Theophilus and Jeremiah from abducting and murdering Johnson-Thompson and Francis on 29 July 1966. 

When the official language of governance in Nigeria, English is spoken and understood by every Nigerian, the threat of break up will disappear. By then, no Nigerian leader will be able to steal the developmental funds of the nation and tell the impoverished citizens that the stolen funds are blessings from Allah or God. And educated Nigerians will see themselves as a people belonging to a nation with the same destiny. As of now, the Nigerian masses don't have the same father/motherland as the political cum ethno-religious elites. Before every Nigerian can be educated in the federal language of governance, English, the local ethnic language should be made the official language of governance in each state of Nigeria, while English should be the second language. Budget prepared and presented to the people in indigenous language of each state would make people follow the implementation and non-implementation of the budget. One can just envisage how fantastic it would be for the Alhmajiris to know in the local language that there is an annual budget of millions of naira for their primary education. At moment, the budgets including that of primary education are prepared in English language and allocated funds are stolen by the governors and their cronies in government only for the ruling elites to turn around and tell the Alihmajiris in local language, Allah ta rago, meaning God is the defender of the poor.
S. Kadiri     
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To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How
 
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tunde jaiyeoba

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Sep 28, 2020, 7:23:33 AM9/28/20
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Baba Kadiri,

I totally agree with you that the elites especially the political elites are the problem of Nigeria. They continue to use the colonialists strategy of 'divide and rule'; a worrisome continuity.

Have you heard about any Senator or House of Representatives member from the South East talking about Biafra or the ones from the South West mentioning Oduduwa Republic? Fast forward to 2021 and there will be hot debates about how power must shift!!!

Also, i agree with Prof Biko on education for all. The day education is liberalised in Northern Nigeria will be the beginning of the Nigerian revolution !!!

The knowledge of our indigenous languages and the abridged/developed ones is critical to our development. Speaking them and continuous research are just too important and should contribute to our togetherness but EDUCATION , EDUCATION, EDUCATION should be our nursery rhyme.



Babatunde  JAIYEOBA
























Prof. E. Babatunde JAIYEOBA PhD
Head, Department of Architecture
Faculty of Environmental Design and Management
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria



Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Sep 28, 2020, 10:14:59 AM9/28/20
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OAA
These are great suggestions for job creation and cohesion.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
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Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2020 7:06 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How
 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

Biko Agozino

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Sep 28, 2020, 10:14:59 AM9/28/20
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Nna Men Bros,

"Every ethnic and religious group has both good and bad people. Goodness and badness aren't exclusive to any group."

When it comes to genocide, it is not helpful to classify whole ethnic groups into good and bad people. 

Perfectly good people are known to carry out evil orders to exterminate millions of people. 

Perfectly good children are mobilized to carry out evil campaigns. Perfectly good intellectuals keep silent in the face of tyranny and many moral intellectuals become the cheer leaders of genocide. 

Wherever violence is institutionalized, we need to go beyond the tribalism of good people versus bad people and challenge oppressive institutions too as you appear to be doing in your columns. 

Thanks for expressing your sorrow on behalf of the millions who were killed in the genocide against the Igbo. Chineke will bless you.

Biko


OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 28, 2020, 11:42:44 AM9/28/20
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Nna Bros Biko.

I hope you too will be be reciprocally generous enough to express sorrow at the deeds of the Igbo officers led ethnic cleansing of January 1966 and the countless civilian victims on the federal side felled by Biafran bullets.


May Òrúnmìlà grant you eternal wisdom.


OAA



Mr President you swore an oath to rule according to the Constitution.  Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 28/09/2020 15:25 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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Nna Men Bros,

"Every ethnic and religious group has both good and bad people. Goodness and badness aren't exclusive to any group."

When it comes to genocide, it is not helpful to classify whole ethnic groups into good and bad people. 

Perfectly good people are known to carry out evil orders to exterminate millions of people. 

Perfectly good children are mobilized to carry out evil campaigns. Perfectly good intellectuals keep silent in the face of tyranny and many moral intellectuals become the cheer leaders of genocide. 

Wherever violence is institutionalized, we need to go beyond the tribalism of good people versus bad people and challenge oppressive institutions too as you appear to be doing in your columns. 

Thanks for expressing your sorrow on behalf of the millions who were killed in the genocide against the Igbo. Chineke will bless you.

Biko


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Biko Agozino

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Sep 28, 2020, 1:45:22 PM9/28/20
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Olayinka,

I was not among those who jubilated all over the country when Nzeogu announced that 'our enemies are political profiteers in high and low places'. I was too young to know what was going on. I have grown up as a genocide survivor to be against the killing of Nigerians by the military and I am against military coups in general. How about you?

As an adult, I am firmly against the death penalty for all offenses and I have published in the African Journal; of Criminology and Justice Studies and in the British Journal of Criminology, among other outlets, to make this clear. If politicians are corrupt, it is equally wrong to assassinate them extrajudicially when they could be arrested and tried the way that Idiagbon and Buhari attempted. Are you in favor of the death penalty or coups  for corruption allegations?

Since that first coup, there have been other bloody coups in Nigeria but no generalized ethnic response with phobia the way the coup that was carried out by officers from all over Nigeria was blamed on the Igbo as perceived bad people to be subjected to the final solution. Do you believe that the genocide against the Igbo can be justified by the treasonable actions of some Igbo officers?

A Yoruba officer, Ademoyega, who was one of the five Majors that led the bloody coup explained that they struck with the  motive to release Awolowo from prison and impose him as a Prime Minister. But it will be wrong to blame their plan on every Yoruba speaker even though Gowon implemented that plan partially. Do you agree?

Many of the Igbo leaders of the coup came from the old Western region and may have benefited from Ile Iwe Ofe or free education program of Awo. Do you think that it is my fault and so I should express 'remorse' for what British trained officers did when I was an infant just because I speak Igbo?

I am on record for advocating tirelessly for the Northern Talakawa who are deliberately denied education opportunities by their leaders, for the cattle herders who should be assisted to open their modern ranches and I hav advoctaed for the poor farmers who are slaughtered to steal their land instead of giving them agricultural subsidies so that they can continue feeding the nation, I advocated for the poor Yoruba claimed by Operation Wetie, for South South communities denied a fair share of the resources derived from their region, as much as I have advocated for the Igbo who are unjustly oppressed since slavery and colonial times to the neocolonial present. Do you have a similar principled opposition to injustice no matter who is the target? Where have you published such work?

My advocacy goes beyond Nigeria to address apartheid, immigrants, women, the poor within and beyond Africa with the aim of ending racism-sexism-imperialism worldwide. Have you ever advocated for the Igbo and against the genocidal policies targeting them the way Soyinka does? Why not if not?

Biko

Salimonu Kadiri

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Sep 28, 2020, 7:18:13 PM9/28/20
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Biko, since you claimed to be a survivor of genocide, can you inform us the name of the concentration camp where you were kept for elimination and by who? 
Can you share with us the information where it was judicially decided/declared, and by who, that the upheavals in Nigeria between 15 January 1966 and 15 January 1970 constituted genocide?
You wrote : A Yoruba officer, Ademoyega, who was one of the Five Majors that led the bloody coup explained that they struck with the motive to release Awolowo from prison and impose him as a Prime Minister. 

Major Adewale Ademoyega wrote the book, Why We Struck, in 1981, fifteen years after the coup had taken place. While one of the intentions of the coup makers might have been to release Awolowo from prison, the major reason for the coup was announced by Major Patrick Chukwuma Nzeogwu in a radio broadcast from Kaduna at noon on 15 January 1966. He did not mention the release of Awolowo in that broadcast, rather, he said that their coup was meant to end corruption in Nigeria. The probable corrupt elements at that time were those who dominated politics, governance, commerce and the arts in Nigeria as identified by Chinua Achebe on p. 48-49, 66-67, and 74-75 in his swan song, THERE WAS A COUNTRY.

You averred, "Many of the Igbo leaders of the coup came from the old Western Region and may have benefited from Ile Iwe  Ofe or free education program of Awo." It is to counterfeit history by claiming that many of the Igbo leaders of the coup came from the Old Western Region. Midwest Region was created in 1963 out of Western Region and the so-identified Western Ibo ceased to exist. Captain Ben Gbulie listed the names of participants in the January 1966 coup on p 158-159 of his book, THE FIVE MAJORS, and their Region of Origin in Nigeria. Major Adewale Ademoyega (West), Major Christian Anuforo (East), Major Humprey Chukwuka (East), Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna (East), Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu (Midwest), Major Donatius Okafor (East), Major Tim Onwuatuegwu (East), Major John Obienu (East), and Major Chudi Sokei (East). As you will see only Nzeogwu was from the Midwest region, but he was born in the North and he received his primary and secondary education in the North. Of Major Nzeogwu, Achebe wrote, "Nzeogwu  himself was Igbo in name only. Not only was he born in Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the Northern traditional dress when not in uniform (p. 79, There Was a Country.)" So much was about the emotional falsification of history.

Elsewhere, you wrote about giving the Igbo only £20 regardless of what they had in the bank after the war. In which bank did the Igbo deposit their money, in Nigeria or Biafra? Biafra introduced their national currency in 1968 and ordered all Biafrans to change their Nigerian money to the Biafran one before the end that year, otherwise it would be invalid. Nigerian currency was changed before Biafra. Every act of the secessionist government was illegal and as such Biafran currency was illegal and untenable in Nigeria. The £20 was a generous social welfare payment from the federal government to the Igbo after the war and not an exchange for illegal Biafran notes. Did Ojukwu get £20? No, he got N12 million rent collected on his father's property  (Ojukwu Transport Limited) in Lagos, and Nigerians got to know of it when his half-brother, Lotanna Ojukwu, sued him to court in 1998 to demand his share of their father's inheritance. Ojukwu was a General in Biafra, but he was granted pension as a Lieutenant Colonel, the rank he held before secession in Nigeria after he was pardoned by Shagari's government. Azikiwe too got back all his money in the African Continental Bank and not just £20.
S. Kadiri   

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

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 29, 2020, 2:49:04 PM9/29/20
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Biko, my broda.

I want you to do this forum a favour. Google which ethnicity is the richest in Nigeria and report back: You will find out it is not the Fulani, it is not the Idoma, it is not the Hausa, it is not the Kanuri, nor is it the Yoruba;  it is the Igbo.  That shows Nigeria has paid back whatever it owed the Igbo as a result of the Biafran Civil War and the events leading to it.  

When will the likes of you start campaigning for reparations to the family of the Sardauna whose paterfamilias was murdered in cold blood by the Igbo officers dominated January 1966 coup plotters  from this post war largesse?

When will the likes of you start campaigning for reparations to the family of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa whose paterfamilias was gunned down in cold blood by the Igbo officers dominated January 1966 coup plotters, Balewa whose singular crime was being the first elected prime minister of this country?

When will the likes of you start campaigning for reparations to the family of Ademulegun whose sole crime for being gunned down in his bed was being enlisted in the same armed forces as the Igbo officers dominated January 1966 coup plotters from this post war largesse of the Igbo?

When will the likes of you start campaigning for reparations to the family of Samuel Ládòké Akíntólá whose sole crime was being the premier of the Western Region when the January 1966 coup plotters dominated by Igbo officers came calling?  When will the campaign for reparations to the family of this late Àre Ònà Kakanfò commence from the post war largesse of the Igbo?

When will the likes of you start campaigning for reparations to the countless families of Ore township felled by Biafran bullets in the effort to steal this township from the federal government and forcibly add this to Biafra?  When will the campaign for reparations to the Ore victims commence from the likes of you from the post war largesse of the Igbo?

Farooq expressed not a sorrow of collective northern guilt to you and not one of wholesale northern guilt of complicity and that was why he narrated the story of his father nearly being killed because he was mistaken for Igbo.  This was why I thought decency demands that you reciprocate by expressing sorrow at the mindless atrocities committed by fellow Igbo and not because you were personally responsible for their acts.  I do not expect a professor of your age and standing to create the impression that everything an Igbo did was always right and everything non Igbo did in a mutual encounter is always wrong and the Igbo are always the victim.  

In England when someone expresses sorrow for an act for which he is not to blame, the usual response from an interlocutor is, 'Never mind, its not your fault.'  If you dont ( as in your case) it means you think its his fault and therefore accept the apology in recompense.  In that case you too should take the guilt by association for all the atrocities of Igbo during the same period and the word ' sorry' should not be too heavy to be uttered in reciprocity.


OAA




Mr  President you swore an oath to rule according to the Constitution.  Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?



Sent from Samsung tablet.

Biko Agozino

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Sep 29, 2020, 9:37:39 PM9/29/20
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OAA,

The likes of me have always campaigned for a reparative justice approach to historic wrongs such as slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and genocide. It is all in the public domain for your to search and you should feel free to disagree with.

I actually coined that phrase, reparative justice, before it was adopted by Caribbean countries in their demand for slavery reparative justice. I directed and produced a video documentary on this and it was premiered on African Independent Television, Lagos, in 2002; and I have published book chapters on the topic. My books on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System and on Counter-Colonial Criminology are based on this theme.

Senior colleagues and young scholars have hailed my work as founding the 'decolonization paradigm' in criminology, as initiating the post-colonial perspective in criminology, and as campaigning for 'justice for all'. I am not bragging when I say that a major text on Liberation Sociology highlighted my work multiple times as a good example of what the authors mean by Liberation Sociology. Have you read any of my scholarly works?

I agree with you that the families of those assassinated by army officers, including by officers from all over the country as testified  by a Yoruba army Major who confessed to their plans, deserve reparative justice. I agree that their families should be offered reparative justice along with the families of hundreds of army officers from the east who were massacred by their comrades in retaliation and along with the families and survivors of the genocide against the Igbo. 

I will not stop there, I have also advocated in writing that the Talakawa should be offered reparative justice by wiping out illiteracy and poverty from all over the country. The innocent children being detained unlawfully by the security forces while also being terrorized in the North East as reported by Amnesty International in 'We Have Dried Our Tears' deserve reparative justice too. 

Reparative Justice is due also to the Igbo youth being massacred simply for exercising freedom of association and for wanting to fly a flag in honor of their dead and stay at home once a year to sing songs of remembrance without killing anyone as Amnesty International has been reporting over the years. If IPOB wants a referendum on secession, let us allow this to go ahead as has been the case several times in Scotland, in the Basque region and in California where the democratic process allows debates and the people decide.

My co-authored report for the Centre for Democracy and Development on Nigeria: Democratising a Militarised Civil Society was based on fieldwork across the country with the conclusion that we should move away from punitive justice and towards reparative justice from the family level to the institutions, the state and internationally. The Justice Oputa Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Violations made similar recommendations. When will the likes of you add your support to the demand for social justice for all and not just for your family loss?

You think that because the Igbo have survived and managed to make themselves richer than some of those who claim to have defeated them, therefore they do not deserve reparations? What principles of jurisprudence would support your strange claim that just because the person you robbed and killed appears richer than you, then you do not need to return the stolen goods or atone for the lives you wasted? 

Imagine how much more the Igbo could have contributed to the Nigerian economy if after the initial pogrom that claimed an estimated 100,000 lives in the North, General Gowon had adopted reparative justice by offering one billion pounds to the survivors. There may have been no civil war in which many more billions were wasted and a further three million Igbo lives were lost. The Aburi Accord actually called for a non-violent resolution of the conflict.

I am one of the few who wrote to commend President Yar'Adua for adopting the amnesty program for Niger Delta Youth instead of continuing with Obasanjo's militarism option. I am probably the only Nigerian who has ever written to say thank you to Nigerian cattle herders for feeding the country for over 100 years and I am one of the first to recommend that cattle herding should be modernized with ranches to avoid conflict with farmers and to allow the children of the herders to go to school with opportunities for others to go into ranching business too. 

I even wrote to say that Boko Haram is not completely wrong when they say that western education is forbidden because it is actually forbidden to the masses of the Talakawa. I observed that we can learn from even the Boko Haram as Edward Blyden once wrote by teaching the dangers of alcoholism while encouraging the Boko Haram to see Boko as Halal in line with the suggestion of Ken Harrow here. The first university in the world was established by an African woman in a Mosque in Fez, Morocco, I wrote recently.

The superpower US government is in talks with the Taliban to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan because terrorism is difficult to defeat militarily. Already, Nigerian officials have admitted paying money to militants to negotiate the release of captives. Boko Haram should be negotiated with to allow them to operate as a political party without threatening the freedom of other citizens. If they win elections in a local government area, let them promote education and healthcare, and govern it without corruption and violence so that they may win other local government areas or states through the democratic process. 

Lenin put the principle of the right to self-determination by oppressed nationalities  in the constitution of the great Soviet Union to allow Finland to secede without firing a shot and Gorbachev used it to dissolve the USSR peacefully. Let us aim at rebuilding the Pan Africanism of Azikiwe and Nkrumah towards the United Republic of African States without colonial boundaries. One Africa for all.

The British government reached a similar accord with the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Volunteer Forces by recognizing them as legitimate political parties that now share power in Northern Ireland after decades of troubles. The government of Columbia recently reached a peace accord, modeled after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, to end decades of guerrilla warfare. Israel did something similar with the Palestinian Authority. Mahatma Gandhi reported in his autobiography that it was the war-like Zulu who taught him the philosophy of non-violence that Desmond Tutu calls Ubuntu and Achebe called Mbari or the World House of Martin Luther King Jr.

Similarly, I have suggested in published writing that IPOB should adopt a political party of their choice or form one and contest elections so that they can allow more freedom to people in areas where they win elections. For instance, they can allow citizens to fly the flag of Biafra privately (that Garveyist flag fine pass the Green White Green self) and build museums or reenact civil war battles to attract tourists the way it is done in the US even though the Confederates were the aggressors who wanted to continue slavery while Biafra was waging a defensive war against genocide. 

The people clamoring for Oduduwa Republic or for the North Central Nigerian autonomy should also resist resorting to violence. Malcolm X taught us that when faced with the choice between the ballot and the bullet, we should adopt the ballot as more effective whenever it is allowed in free and fair elections.

What will it cost you to support the call for Nigeria to apologize to the Igbo and offer reparations to them instead of continuing military threats and extra judicial massacres long after the war was declared officially over? Nothing.

Biko

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Sep 30, 2020, 9:21:48 AM9/30/20
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Biko.

Reparative justice has been widely in use before 2002.

On this forum you usually singled out Igbo and the Biafran Civil War for reparations.

The corrective should therefore start from you.  If I read you campaigning for those I highlighted then I wont point them out and we wont have much disagreements.

I will be on the lookout for this balance in your posts here.

Thank you.


OAA



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-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 30/09/2020 02:47 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria Won’t Break. It’d Evolve. Here’s How

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OAA,

The likes of me have always campaigned for a reparative justice approach to historic wrongs such as slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and genocide. It is all in the public domain for your to search and you should feel free to disagree with.

I actually coined that phrase, reparative justice, before it was adopted by Caribbean countries in their demand for slavery reparative justice. I directed and produced a video documentary on this and it was premiered on African Independent Television, Lagos, in 2002; and I have published book chapters on the topic. My books on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System and on Counter-Colonial Criminology are based on this theme.

Senior colleagues and young scholars have hailed my work as founding the 'decolonization paradigm' in criminology, as initiating the post-colonial perspective in criminology, and as campaigning for 'justice for all'. I am not bragging when I say that a major text on Liberation Sociology highlighted my work multiple times as a good example of what the authors mean by Liberation Sociology. Have you read any of my scholarly works?

I agree with you that the families of those assassinated by army officers, including by officers from all over the country as testified  by a Yoruba army Major who confessed to their plans, deserve reparative justice. I agree that their families should be offered reparative justice along with the families of hundreds of army officers from the east who were massacred by their comrades in retaliation and along with the families and survivors of the genocide against the Igbo. 

I will not stop there, I have also advocated in writing that the Talakawa should be offered reparative justice by wiping out illiteracy and poverty from all over the country. The innocent children being detained unlawfully by the security forces while also being terrorized in the North East as reported by Amnesty International in 'We Have Dried Our Tears' deserve reparative justice too. 

Reparative Justice is due also to the Igbo youth being massacred simply for exercising freedom of association and for wanting to fly a flag in honor of their dead and stay at home once a year to sing songs of remembrance without killing anyone as Amnesty International has been reporting over the years. If IPOB wants a referendum on secession, let us allow this to go ahead as has been the case several times in Scotland, in the Basque region and in California where the democratic process allows debates and the people decide.

My co-authored report for the Centre for Democracy and Development on Nigeria: Democratising a Militarised Civil Society was based on fieldwork across the country with the conclusion that we should move away from punitive justice and towards reparative justice from the family level to the institutions, the state and internationally. The Justice Oputa Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Violations made similar recommendations. When will the likes of you add your support to the demand for social justice for all and not just for your family loss?

You think that because the Igbo have survived and managed to make themselves richer than some of those who claim to have defeated them, therefore they do not deserve reparations? What principles of jurisprudence would support your strange claim that just because the person you robbed and killed appears richer than you, then you do not need to return the stolen goods or atone for the lives you wasted? 

Imagine how much more the Igbo could have contributed to the Nigerian economy if after the initial pogrom that claimed an estimated 100,000 lives in the North, General Gowon had adopted reparative justice by offering one billion pounds to the survivors. There may have been no civil war in which many more billions were wasted and a further three million Igbo lives were lost. The Aburi Accord actually called for a non-violent resolution of the conflict.

I am one of the few who wrote to commend President Yar'Adua for adopting the amnesty program for Niger Delta Youth instead of continuing with Obasanjo's militarism option. I am probably the only Nigerian who has ever written to say thank you to Nigerian cattle herders for feeding the country for over 100 years and I am one of the first to recommend that cattle herding should be modernized with ranches to avoid conflict with farmers and to allow the children of the herders to go to school with opportunities for others to go into ranching business too. 

I even wrote to say that Boko Haram is not completely wrong when they say that western education is forbidden because it is actually forbidden to the masses of the Talakawa. I observed that we can learn from even the Boko Haram as Edward Blyden once wrote by teaching the dangers of alcoholism while encouraging the Boko Haram to see Boko as Halal in line with the suggestion of Ken Harrow here. The first university in the world was established by an African woman in a Mosque in Fez, Morocco, I wrote recently.

The superpower US government is in talks with the Taliban to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan because terrorism is difficult to defeat militarily. Already, Nigerian officials have admitted paying money to militants to negotiate the release of captives. Boko Haram should be negotiated with to allow them to operate as a political party without threatening the freedom of other citizens. If they win elections in a local government area, let them promote education and healthcare, and govern it without corruption and violence so that they may win other local government areas or states through the democratic process. 

Lenin put the principle of the right to self-determination by oppressed nationalities  in the constitution of the great Soviet Union to allow Finland to secede without firing a shot and Gorbachev used it to dissolve the USSR peacefully. Let us aim at rebuilding the Pan Africanism of Azikiwe and Nkrumah towards the United Republic of African States without colonial boundaries. One Africa for all.

The British government reached a similar accord with the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Volunteer Forces by recognizing them as legitimate political parties that now share power in Northern Ireland after decades of troubles. The government of Columbia recently reached a peace accord, modeled after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, to end decades of guerrilla warfare. Israel did something similar with the Palestinian Authority. Mahatma Gandhi reported in his autobiography that it was the war-like Zulu who taught him the philosophy of non-violence that Desmond Tutu calls Ubuntu and Achebe called Mbari or the World House of Martin Luther King Jr.

Similarly, I have suggested in published writing that IPOB should adopt a political party of their choice or form one and contest elections so that they can allow more freedom to people in areas where they win elections. For instance, they can allow citizens to fly the flag of Biafra privately (that Garveyist flag fine pass the Green White Green self) and build museums or reenact civil war battles to attract tourists the way it is done in the US even though the Confederates were the aggressors who wanted to continue slavery while Biafra was waging a defensive war against genocide. 

The people clamoring for Oduduwa Republic or for the North Central Nigerian autonomy should also resist resorting to violence. Malcolm X taught us that when faced with the choice between the ballot and the bullet, we should adopt the ballot as more effective whenever it is allowed in free and fair elections.

What will it cost you to support the call for Nigeria to apologize to the Igbo and offer reparations to them instead of continuing military threats and extra judicial massacres long after the war was declared officially over? Nothing.

Biko

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