The Ambrose Ehirim Files

Conversations With Patrick H. Johnson On The Pilgrimage To Elixir

2012-01-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

Image: VinZula Kara/Ehirim Files Images

"Join us as we walk to Crenshaw/Stocker to dedicate the mural Elixir to the city. The mural will become a sacred place because of our collective agreement."
------------Patrick Henry Johnson, Artist/Painter/Mural Enterpreneur

I had just noticed Patrick H. Johnson, as an artist, on the Summer of 2010 while pulling out from the Starbucks drive-through on the Washington Corridor in one of my mid-day coffee-break-runs; and Patrick was busy doing his thing: A mural he was setting up by the drive-through to discourage vandalism and graffitti that had been the trademark of the entire Los Angeles area.

Earlier on, I had thought he was like any other would assume, the neighborhood guy one bumps into and exchange some "what's up" kind of greetings as it goes in the Los Angeles/Hollywood road and travel ways. Not until the day of that coffee-break-runs did I know a genius was about to be discovered in the City of Angels, the city with its own kind of drama--where anything goes--and where broken dreams continues apace.

So when I talked Patrick into some talks while the Pilgrim To Elixir was about to begun, he noted the pilgrim was about transformation of himself - about exposure - and time to thank all who collectively helped in the process of putting Elixir in place

Johnson's murals can be found in institutions all around the city: The Central Library, Westwood Charter School, Gardener Elementary School, Bancroft Middle School, Crenshaw Blvd. Leirmert Park, and several other places.

Patrick Henry Johnson Public Art and Mural Video

Kabir Sokoto: Suspects escape from police custody when Igbos are murdered —Nzelu, (SAN)

2012-01-24T16:08:00.000-08:00

Daily Sun Interview

‘This is the second time within three years that police officers had unlawfully eliminated Igbo people, while in police custody’

Nigerians were stupefied over the news of the mysterious escape of Kabiru Umar (aka Kabiru Sokoto), the alleged prime suspect in the macabre Christmas Day bombing of Saint Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla, Niger State, which left 43 people dead and many severely injured.

But a legal practitioner of South-east extraction, Amobi Nzelu (SAN), was not jolted over the development. Speaking with Daily Sun in this interview, Nzelu gives a stunning account of how suspects from a certain section of the country, often disappeared from police custody.
Excerpts:

How do you see the sudden disappearance of Kabiru Sokoto, the prime suspect of the Madalla bombing?

It is very embarrassing. A major breakthrough in the unmasking of those that are behind the Boko Haram has been scuttled by those given the responsibility to protect lives and property and I feel worried.
Worried in the sense that I have to go down memory lane:

In 2003, one Superintendent of Police called, Gambo was DPO in Nsukka, three men were shot dead by him. He was brought to Abuja in handcuff and taken to Area 10. While he was in custody, which is a loose detention, a DIG came to negotiate for his bail and he was told point blank that it was a murder issue and couldn’t be granted bail.

The man on the excuse that he was going to observe his prayer walked out of the gate of Area 10 and disappeared till today! CSP Abdulsalam Uthman supervised the killings of three Igbos during the Apo six saga - to the glory of God, I was the lawyer in that matter.

I took the pictures of those that were killed in Apo, we took their corpses for burial. The man went into custody of the police. He was detained on the 5th floor and from there we were told he said was going to pray. He came downstairs and an AIG, who later retired as a DIG provided his official vehicle and he was ferreted him away!

Again, the man that committed the mayhem of December 25 has disappeared. The question is, is it only when they killed Igbos that the culprits escape from the custody of the police?

Nobody has the monopoly of violence. If the Igbo aren’t secured in this place called Nigeria, we should be told in unmistaken terms… people shouldn’t frustrate the good work of President Goodluck Jonathan. If there is any mayhem in any part of the country, the victims are Igbos. There is a town in Anambra State, they lost nine people in Mubi; nine corpses were brought to the town during the Boko Haram violence. What has been said about this? The government of the day should protect us; we are an endangered specie in the country.

Because Kabiru Sokoto has a lot of information to give to this country that was why the man has been kept and if you look at the sequence, Zakari Biu is from Biu, one of the towns in the old Borno State that formed Borno and Yobe, apparently the headquarters of Boko Haram, the man arrested him and told the entire country.
So, how do you explain this? This is my 32 years as a lawyer, I did my youth service in Maiduguri, I practised there for 14 years, I married there had my children there; I am a grand father. So, I lived in Maiduguri when there was no Boko Haram, peace-loving people.

Suddenly, from nowhere, Boko Haram was introduced into the whole system. So, to tell us that that kind of man, Kabiru Sokoto, has escaped is most unfortunate. Now, we have to cry out to Mr. President that we are the endangered specie; and to hear that they only suspended Zakari Biu.

For how long?

You see, as I have said , anybody created by God has some percentage of insanity in him, it is only when you develop your own that it becomes full-blown madness and nobody has a monopoly of violence. You can decide to be violent, it depends on how you want to use your life but where you turn us to be guinea pigs of this country, it isn’t healthy.

CSP Uthman is on the run and I shouted at the Okiro Panel that time, put this man under handcuff. I wrote a book, called, “Apo Six + one: the tragedy of a nation.’’ Everything you want about Apo Six is in that book and in that book I wrote in page 75 of that book: “This is the second time within three years that police officers had unlawfully eliminated Igbo people, while in police custody.

The first was by SP Gambo, a DPO in Nsukka, Enugu State, who had killed three Igbo men; he was brought under custody to face charges of murder and escaped while in police custody at the then police headquarters in Area 10, Garki, Abuja. Till date, nothing has been said about it.’’

So, it didn’t start today. This is a book I wrote after the Apo Six and it is being published in London. I have held this book down because the judgment hasn’t been delivered in the criminal trial going on. Six years after they have been arraigned in court, no judgment! August 2005, they were arraigned in court, seven years today they haven’t got judgment on this Apo case. The girl that was one of the victims in that case wasn’t shot to death, she was strangled to death.

Each time I remember that seven years after these people were killed, nothing has been done… Reverend King is an Igbo man; he killed somebody in church, within six months he was sentenced to death by hanging but Apo Six has been there for seven years.

But it isn’t only Igbo that died at Madalla. How many from the other ethnic groups? Does a Suleiman go to church? I am asking. Check the number of the people that died there and you would be shocked that, out of the number 35 are from South-east. The one they killed in Mubi, nine of them were from one town in Anambra State. Nine corpses from one town! The uproar in Borno State, how many Northerners has it claimed? Let us see the statistics. I know some Nigerians are equally involved but the majority at the receiving end are Igbos. If there is bombing today in Abuja, they look for Igbo people shops to go and burn. May God forbid.

of the IGSo, what exactly do you want Mr. President to do now? People have called for the resignation P

(cuts in) It is a cartel, they know what they are doing. It is unacceptable to the Igbo nation, they must produce the man. That man, Kabiru Sokoto, has a lot of stories to tell Nigerians, he has a lot of names to mention that will jolt this country.

government. Don’t you think his fears are reaYou have said it is a cartel but don’t you think Mr. President could be exonerated. He has said, even before this jolting escape of Kabiro Sokoto, Boko Haram had infiltrated his l?

You see, anything that it will take him, he is the president and he must be determined to do the work for Nigerians. We know that within the system, people are sabotaging him, that I must tell you. They are there, they are called AGIP – Any Government in Power, they must dictate to government. They don’t want to leave; they recycle them until they cannot recycle them again. There are no bad governments but bad advisers. The good of Mr. President is being frustrated, left, right and centre.

Because of June 12, 1993 election that was annulled, Yoruba went into trenches, both politicians and professors, they got the mandate to rule this country for eight years, but where are my people? When they massacred the Apo Six, nobody raised a voice. I put my life and that of my family on line for that Apo Six and God said to me, I will pay you and God is paying me. I can raise up my head and say my children are doing fine. That’s God grace.

You as an individual is squealing against the injustice in the system; aren’t you worried that South-east governors aren’t talking?

You see, I have gone through the valley of the shadow of death, I have seen what most of them never saw. For primitive gains, they will say nothing. Not only am I speaking out for now, I have been speaking out in the past. I don’t think I need to cringe before anybody. No, I can afford one good meal a day in my house. I have practised law for 32 years; how many years do I have ahead?

What I am saying is that, once they are within the comfort of the Governor’s Lodge, they forget that they will come out one day to meet us on the streets of Nigeria. I am watching to see them take a stand.

One needs to take a stand. My people, they don’t sustain opposition, Yoruba do. I am an Igbo man by birth, a Yoruba man by education because I went to the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University.

An Igbo man, once his container is arriving at the port, he forgets about what is happening to his brother. That’s the problem we have.

The Yoruba, because Babangida annulled June 12, all of them went into trenches: Bola Ige, Adesanya, Obasanjo, all of them, they went into war and they got eight years to rule. Head, or tail – 1999, that was the only election in Nigeria, head or tail, APP, Olu Falae, PDP, Obasanjo.

That was the gain because they could sustain an aggression. That was why I could sustain aggression myself because I have picked part of their blood but my people will not say anything!

Now, this man has escaped and where is the one that escaped after the Apo Six killings?

But he is in Nigeria, they know where he is. It isn’t healthy. They should give this government a chance and not distract it. Anything short of producing this man isn’t acceptable to Nigerians in general and Igbos, because we went to bury our people that were killed.

But the IG has queried and ordered suspension of Zakari Biu; don’t you see that as indication of seriousness to get to the root of the matter?
Query? You see, there are certain things that when they happen in this country, they are laughable. What are you telling me? They allowed the guy to escape. For a CP, Zakari Biu, to allow a star murderer to be taken to his house, doing what? They might have arranged his escape. That’s uncalled for.

But are you calling for the IG resignation?

The issue of his resignation, the president is competent to handle the matter at that level. All I am saying is that, the man must be produced, let him (Kabiru Sokoto) tell us who and who are behind this thing. They denied us the opportunity of getting to the root of Boko Haram when they killed the leader. Those this boy is working for would be on his trail now and before you know, they will kill him. How can these boys buy bombs? Somebody, somewhere is buying the bombs for them to go and bomb. Something must be done. You cannot continue to keep quiet when you are being slapped. This thing is getting too much. We cannot be guinea pigs in this country. Never.

(Imo-Nigeria): Why Rochas Is Buying 1 Million Shoes - Duruji

2012-01-24T10:50:00.000-08:00

A VANGUARD INTERVIEW

The Imo State Commissioner for Information, Barrister Obinna Duruji at a parley with newsmen spoke on the strides, successes and challenges of Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State. He also spoke on issues emanating from the Governor’s recent victory at the Court of Appeal. Excerpts:

EIght months in office, what can you say are the attainments of the administration?

The governor on assumption of office declared free and compulsory education in both primary and secondary levels in Imo State which PDP and Ohakim told Imo people was impossible, placement of order to procure one million school sandals and ordered procurement of 600,000 school bags and desks to boost free education in Imo State.

The governor also ordered the payment of backlog of pension arrears owed for over 12 years by the past administrations, establishment of Imo Pension/Senior Citizens’ Club and donation of vehicles to the club, release of N450 million bailout fund to missionary schools in Imo State, increase of government monthly subvention to IMSU from N57m to N100m, revival of the Imo State University Teaching Hospital (IMSUTH) abandoned by Ohakim’s administration.

Community speakers

He introduced fourth tier Government and appointment of community speakers, which have brought governance closer to the grassroots, reformation of the vigilante outfits by restricting their operations in the communities rather than using them to fight political opponents, establishment of General Security Council and Local Government Security Council and Local Government Security Council in the 27 LGAs, reconstruction of Commissioners’ Quarters abandoned by Ohakim’s administration.

Reconstruction of ALGON and Imo State Council of Traditional Rulers Secretariats, construction of 405 rural roads at 15km per L.G.A, introduction of Health-at-your-door-steps programme in Imo State, the first of its kind in Africa, upgrading of Umuguma General Hospital to a Specialist Hospital, reformation of the State Civil Service Local Government System, blockage of revenue leakages thus saving billions of naira for capital projects in Imo State, construction of International Conference Centre at Oguta Blue Lake of Treasure (formerly known as Oguta Wonder Lake).

It is worthy of note that the Oguta Wonder Lake project only existed in the internet during Ohakim’s regime. These are some of the tremendous achievements of His Excellency, Owelle Rochas Okorocha in less than one year of his administration, which is an eloquent testimony that Imo Rescue Mission has come to stay.

The last administration of Governor Ikedi Ohakim took N18.5b bond from the Stock Market. What does the current administration of Governor Rochas Okorocha intend to do with the bond?

Government is a continuum. We are going to redirect the bond and ensure that it is used for meaningful development projects.

The bond was to be used for the rehabilitation of the Imo state water scheme, rehabilitation and construction of major roads, financing the Imo State government’s equity investment in Imo Wonder Lake and conference centre in Oguta. Okorocha’s administration has started work in all these areas and that’s why I said government is continuum.

There were speculations that APGA was responsible for the transfer of the governorship election tribunal to Abuja. Is this true?

No, we are a responsible government and our priority and focus is the delivery of dividends of democracy. You can see that even on the day of the tribunal verdict on the 12th of November, 2011; the governor was not bothered; he was driving his government bus to various sites inspecting projects.

I was shocked when I came from the tribunal and I saw him at the gate of the Government House in shorts, addressing the crowd and I was curious and I said your excellency are you addressing Imo citizens on shorts, he said it doesn’t matter and that he was coming from the project sites.

So that’s how unruffled he is. His mandate was ordained by God and delivered on the planet earth. It is not our own making. Imo citizens for the first time expressed their wishes and aspirations in the mandate delivered to the Governor.

It was not their making, it was ordained in heaven. So what we saw on earth was the manifestation of the heavenly intervention. So, the governor is loved by his people and those who came to the court were there to show their solidarity to the mandate they gave to him. Neither our party APGA nor government influenced the move to Abuja.

The governor is accused of formulating policies in the state without due process; they cited as example the creation of community speakers without the input of the house of assembly. What is your reaction to this?

He didn’t have to. What people don’t understand is that the only constant thing in life is change. This is a man who is a change agent; he is a catalyst, a facilitator for change and development. He is not going to be held hostage by protocol and mundane understanding of the rule of law.

Law trails development, development does not trail laws unnecessarily, and law trails development all over the world. I am a senior advocate in the Unites States and I do know that law follows development, development does not follow law; otherwise society will not move forward.

As events are happening, law catches up, you don’t wait to make the law for the average human thinking before you can implement, it is only as you evolve that the law trails behind, and all over the world, the due process is a twin sister or brother of democracy.

So the two are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually inclusive. Once you see democracy, the government of the people, for the people and by the people, you are talking about rule of law.

So once he envisions, he conceptualizes and then the legal process takes place. If he does not envision, conceptualize, articulate the polices before the implementation, how can the Legislative house formulate. The House formulates based on the fine prints of articulation of the policies and programmes that emanate from the executive arm whenever necessary.

It is only then that the policy is transmitted to the house for articulation of an enabling law. It cannot be the other way round; otherwise the House will be dictating to the executive. So there is no violation of the rule of law, I challenge any opponent of this administration to come up with a clear indication of where we have violated the law.

Imo indigenes sacked in Abia. Why is the problem still lingering?

Well it is not an Imo problem; it is the South East problem as a matter of fact. But the issue is still pending before the South East Governor’s Forum. So Governor Okorocha has advised us to be cautious in our approach, that dialogue will be a better approach to resolve the quagmire and as obedient servants we so obliged.

Cushioning of effects of the sack

He has also cushioned the effects of the sack, which is our major concern and apprehension about the fate of the Imo indigenes, by assuring us in no mistaken terms that at the appropriate time, if the obnoxious decision is not rescinded, that Imo citizens would be absorbed in the Imo workforce. So that is the last resort and that’s by way of assurance.

What is your reaction to Court of Appeal decision?

Owelle’s victory at the Court of Appeal recently in Abuja is a further manifestation of its divine origin and a revalidation of Imo people’s mandate. The judgment has also rekindled our faith and confidence in the Nigerian judiciary. Imo people applaud the judges for remaining resolute in their determination to uphold Imo people’s mandate despite pressure to the contrary.

Given the wisdom of the tribunal and court of appeal, we are confident that the dismissal will stand Supreme Court scrutiny. To God be the glory.

Q & A Interview With Gerwine Bayo-Martins

2012-01-22T18:05:00.000-08:00

Gerwine Bayo-Martins was born and raised in Hamburg, Northern Germany. Gerwin met her sweetheart, Bayo Martins, one of Africa’s finest drummers in the music of the day while doing voluntary work at the Biafran Committee office in Germany. A lover of art and music, Gerwine, in this interview, talks about her growing up in Germany, her marriage to Bayo Martins, her role at the Biafran Committee, her charity work and foundations, the Orphan Childrens Help Nigeria which she founded and chairs and several other fascinating stuff, including her passion, the arts.

Excerpts:

Tell me a little bit about yourself

Thank you so much, Ambrose, for inviting me to this interview. I appreciate your interest very much.

What can I say? I grew up in Hamburg, Northern Germany, a big city of about 1,8 million people today, When I grew up, it was under one million. My environment was typically bourgeois; my father a director, my mum a housewife. I was a single daughter. My brother was born when I was eleven years.

How was growing up in Germany like?

(Laughs). A German childhood in the mid-fifties and youth in the sixties was a life of strictness and rules, at home and at school, especially as a girl. You had to obey, do not contradict, children should be seen and not heard, more or less. But changes were on the way, profound ones: students were revolting in the sixties against the stuffy atmosphere in schools and universities. As teenagers, we looked at them with admiration and much expectations. It was during the time of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and then all sort of Black Music and recordings--Jazz, Soul, Motown, ABC, Paramount Pictures, Stax Records and more, if I am correct. American culture was heavily coming on to Germany, to our delight and to the wondering of parents, teachers, grandparents and what had become of its new generation being influenced by American mainstream cultural characteristics in music, the arts and social habits. It was an exciting time of old crusts breaking open and new progressives (so we hoped) popping up and developing.

What were your early influences in your passion for art?

My books from early childhood, their title covers and illustrations. I loved them and knew the artists names and still have many books of that time now. I looked for more in the neighborhood library and always wished for them as birthday and Xmas presents. Then, at home, we always had big formatted wall calendars which I collected and kept for years. Any photo of paintings I saw in papers, I clipped and kept in a scrap book.Those were mostly reproductions of so called “Old Masters” of art, of different centuries, from Italy, Holland, Belgium, Spain, England, France, Germany, and occasional modern ones. Painters like Michelangelo, Murillo, Vermeer, Breughel, Velasquez, Gainsborough, Delacroix, Friedrich fascinated me.

At Primary school and later Junior High and High School, we had good art education. Our art teacher helped us with techniques of different styles.

Since we met, I have known you to be a lover of art. What is a good art?

This is not easy to answer and it is such a wide field. Just let me try a bit. The saying “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” applies to an extent. In classics, there are set of academic standards where great painters of the countries I mentioned before had to study to gain recognition by the standards of their time (i.e. 18th and 19th century), for instance, with names like Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Pissarro. These are only few names. Some were revolutionary and suffered from not being recognized, like Cézanne, all his life; more or less, and Manet, at a time. All were fantastic, outstanding artists and, so many more of different styles.

Good art for me is that which speaks to you when you look at it, that moves something inside you, which you may not even be able to name. It is different for different people. Let me just stop here, as I can keep going and going telling you more about a good art.

I don’t know much about art but I have seen folks splatter paint all over a canvas and they’ll read meaning into their work. How is art read?

Ambrose, this is even a wider field. There are so many approaches to reading art. Just this little bit I’d say here: The meaning of art, we can study in aesthetics. One school that set these standards was the Ecole des Beaux Artes, in Paris. The values then were correct perspective, anatomy, light and shade, figurative painting, and likeness in portraiture. These changed a few decades later when Cubism became the vogue. Often, (meaningful) symbols are used. Art affects the senses, intellect and emotions. This could be done deliberately by the artist or not. Like in all art, there are always new developments, such as new styles and inventions. There is classic art and revolutionary art. We read so much in paintings, the time and it’s history when it was painted, the colors the artist used, and the hues. By the strokes, you can see if there is a master at work. You read the spirit of the time, like in other fields of art, such as sculpting, music, literature, fashion and more.

Today we have what I would call WORLD ART; art from all continents, and from all ages. I could go on and on; this could be a topic for a full seminar…

I was at your Haikus blog and saw one of your magnificent work with the catch phrase, “reminiscence to impressionism.” What are the expressions and meaning?

Well, I said so because of the photo style. It is not a sharp image. Many will call it blurred. With my experiments, moving the camera at times, I try to create effects. Some of my photos look like paintings. In impressionism, an art form starting in France, painters composed their pictures not in lines but in free brush strokes, creating a different effect, they wanted the color to vibrate. This was against “academic” painting I mentioned before. They did not paint details like before but looking for the visual effect. They used the light and captured it to create the effect and painted more outside. You can see this with artists like Mary Cassatt and Winslow Homer. The African-American great painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859 – 1937) also painted some pictures in an impressionist style. One is called “On the road to Bethany” where he uses light to express mysticism.

How does one know a good art exhibition before its opening?

Well, difficult question, Ambrose. When the artist is known, then you can be sure of a “good exhibition, provided you like the artist, is one way to “know”…

I read somewhere that you worked for the Biafran Committee in Germany. What was the Biafran Committee all about and what were your assignments?

The Biafran Committee was founded by one German student of Politics, Tilman Zülch. This was in the revolutionary spirit of the time I mentioned above. We were all voluntary workers there. We came after our day jobs and worked there at night. We wanted to help in creating awareness in Germany of this war in Nigeria. We tried this by typing pamphlets which Tilman dictated to us. We designed, painted posters, and, collected money on the streets of Hamburg for the children of then Biafra.

What were your feelings for the committee and what they stood for?

The spirit of working together with others for a cause was a great feeling. I knew Igbo medical students then and they had informed me about the war. They took me to the committee because of my interest and that was how I started to help there.

Let’s talk about your life with one of Africa’s ace drummers, Bayo Martins. How did you become the lucky one?

It was when I was working in the committee, that we met for the first time. He came there with Don Amechi, Easy Kabaka Brown and Olu Igemuna, who is now late. They had arrived from Bulgaria, where they played as a band and represented Nigeria at the Sofia World Youth Festival. A picture of them you can see in my album in Facebook of Bayo’s life. Later he told me that our meeting was spiritual, because, before leaving Nigeria he had a dream seeing me and when he did in reality, he knew I was the one from his dream. We got married after five months.

How was staying married and working with Bayo like?

Our relationship was based on “Love, respect and mutual understanding”. That was our motto. Our love was totally unconditional from the very beginning. We trusted each other always. He went to Nigeria immediately when the war was over and I followed six month later with my almost non-existent information about Nigeria, beginning of the seventies. He had told me a lot, of course, and all, as it was then. I am yet to write more about all these memories, they are in my mind as if everything happened yesterday. Bayo always told me the truth about everything. He showed me his country in her lowest and highest realms. We appeared on the then famous BAR BEACH SHOW hosted by our unforgettable friend Art Alade on TV. I met so many musicians, artists, and contemporary celebrities. We went together everywhere when possible, often in the evening, the traffic was a bit easier then, to see people with whom he was planning events and such. I was always the first witnessing his creative processes. When he had to travel, and he did this untiringly, I stayed in Lagos with the children. He just said “I have to do this and that” and I accepted. We always gave each other time to pursue what was necessary to advance ourselves and things. I sure missed him, but I knew why it was necessary and remained brave. I believe it is the best. When in marriage, you have time to yourself sometimes. We do not own another person. It was the seventies and the eighties and there was neither Internet nor cell phone and we had no land-line at home. We wrote tons of letters to each other; all delivered perfectly to P.O. Box 433 in Yaba, and I have all of them. I carried on with my job,and my writing. My friend, Brigitte Ajagu and I, worked together on founding NIGERWIVES. We created the first cell from where it developed and exists till today.

I went to the Help African Kids website, nothing much seems to be happening. What’s going on?

Oh, this website just shows the flyer of our organization. Things are happening continuously. We have two projects, the orphanage IJAMIDO MOTHERLESS CHILDRENS HOME in Ota, Ogun State. For over 14 years we have helped many children with school fees, university fees, renovated houses, and financed a house, where they have enough space to play and work. My two friends in Lagos visit regularly. We have a project in the Lagos Lagoon, and a village on an island, called Iba Ibeju. These are no orphans but very poor families. We have the primary school repaired, when necessary, especially the roof. We also pay school fees when needed. We trained a medical student. She treats the children when necessary, with vaccinations, worm infested kids, and things of that nature. The organization is an NGO and there are four of us involved in it. Two in Lagos and my friend and I in Frankfurt. I visit there regularly. When invited by organizations here in Germany, I go to introduce the projects, show pictures, talk about it, answer questions, and collect donations. The main funds come from Lufthansa Help Alliance, and we have been a member since Help Alliance was founded.

What would you do differently now if you have to start all over again.

Ambrose, many have been asking me this same question. Nothing I will do differently. The question does not arise for me. Why? The times in our life that we have to make decisions, we do this taking into consideration the circumstances, the time ,and so many other factors…So, these factors are our guide when we make decisions and also, I am convinced our subconscious plays an important part; maybe the most important…

Classic Modeling Shots (Africa) CMS

2012-01-22T18:01:00.000-08:00

Isabel Toledo Spring 1986 Show: Tank top and high-waist, belted skirt at the Isabel Toledo Spring/Summer 1986 show. Photographer Bill Cunningham watches from the front row. Date: November 14, 1985. Image: Tony Palmieri/Conde Nast

Bruce Olfield Fashion Show. Bruce Oldfield celebrates with models after his Spring 1974 collection show for Bendel Studio. Date: November 09 1973. Image: Pierre Schermann/Conde Nast

Wanakee and Karen Alexander: Karen Alexander (L) wearing a jeweled collar necklace by Steven Rosen. Wanakee wearing earrings by Gindi and a beaded shirt by Oscar de la Renta. Date: April 1985. Location: New York. Image: Denis Piel/Conde Nast.

Lanvin Floral Trouser: A model wears a sleeveless, cropped top and slim-fitting pants, designed by French fashion designer Jules-Francois Crahay for the Lanvin fashion house. ca. 1967. Image: Lancaster/Hulton Deutsch Collection.

Dialogue With Boko Haram Members, Lam Tells Jonathan

2012-01-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

By Adebayo Waheed - Nigerian Tribune

A former governor and leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in Oyo State, Alhaji Lam Adesina last Friday disclosed that there are members of the Boko Haram in the army, police and other security operatives in the country.

Speaking when the chairman of the state Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Mr Gbenga Opadotun, who was in his Felele residence to congratulate him on his 73rd birthday, the former governor urged President Goodluck Jonathan to dialogue with Northern leaders over the activities of Boko Haram.

While noting that the Islamic sect had claimed responsibilities for the multiple bomb blasts in some states of the North, which had claimed several innocent lives, Adesina tasked the president not to pretend to not know that Northern leaders were in the know of those behind the incessant bombings.

He stressed the need for the president to convene a meeting with the prominent and powerful leaders of the North now, if he desired urgent resolution of whatever may be the grievances of the sect.

He urged him to dialogue with all the powerful individuals in the North, including military and non-military personnel.

Q & A Interview With Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

2012-01-18T08:33:00.000-08:00

Tell me about yourself?

My name is Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha. I hail from Iho-dimeze in Ikeduru Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigeria. I live in Aba, Abia State, Nigeria. I was born into the family of Mr. and Mrs. Godwin Onuoha on the 12th day of the beautiful Month of May, 1984. I attended Golden Nursery and Christopher Memorial Primary School, all in Aba, Nigeria. I did my Junior Secondary School education at St. Bridget’s College, Aba and my Senior Secondary School education at Federal Government College, Okigwe. I gained admission to study Medicine and Surgery at Imo State University and later dropped out.

I discovered while growing up that I have the passion to motivate, inspire and help people make their lives better. When I left school I went and joined my dad in his ladies footwear business at Ariaria International Market, Aba. I later left the business to pursue my passion and fulfill my God-given purpose to make a positive difference and leave a noteworthy legacy. I went into self education by reading and putting into practice the principles and truths I discover in life. The desire to make a positive impact in people’s lives made me to pay the price and go the extra mile to become an inspirational speaker, life coach and a social entrepreneur.

I work and teach people to make their lives better, this gives me joy. I write and share articles on self-improvement, leadership and other topical issues. I like networking and masterminding with great minds because I know that no one can achieve success alone and secondly, iron sharpens iron. I am grateful to God for the great people He brings my way like you, Sir Ambrose, Mr. Anyaele Sam Chiyson and others I cannot mention due to time. I am thankful to all my friends. I enjoy reading, writing, good music and enriching lives positively.

What was the motivation behind writing a book of this nature?

The motivation behind writing this book was to write a book that will humble, inspire and encourage people to arise and achieve greatness. The content will give the reader the Midas touch to lead a better life.

You said “In this day and age, there is a greater call to build your self-assurance, overcome anything that upset your applecart.” What exactly are you saying here?

Here am saying that in today’s world, to make your dream come true you must define your self-concept and understand who you really are. This helps you believe in yourself and stand firm to defeat the challenges of life that want to distort your great destiny.

As founder of Higherlife International, what is your foundation’s goal?

Our goal is to make the world a better place for all by empowering people with the right education to lead their lives and make a success of it.

How did you come up with the title of the book and what convinced you to know that it was the right choice?

The idea was clear that it will be a book that will enlighten, equip, empower, enrich and inspire people in a way that no book has done. I first titled it: "Overcoming The Challenges of our Time," but when I took it to my friend and brother, Anyaele Sam Chiyson, he read the book and said that the title needs to be changed to something more attractive for my audience. We brainstormed on names that will be right for a book of this nature and finally, we arrived at: "OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE."

I was convinced it was the right choice because whoever heard of it would be compelled to purchase the book and learn how to overcome life's changes.

As a visionary leader what are your thoughts on a Nigeria that has fallen from the standards?

Nigeria is a blessed and beautiful country! One challenge we must overcome urgently is corruption because it is one factor stagnating our advancement. As a nation, we need a positive transformational leadership that will put an end to the works of those cabals that are enriching their personal purses and impoverishing our country. The betterment of our country Nigeria requires a collective effort, alone we can do so little; together we can do much more. Let us immortalize our names and make a lasting legacy by coming together to make Nigeria great again.

Did you ever think of yourself writing a book of the subject matter?

There is no way you can embark on a journey without having any destination in mind. Yes, I have to write a book on this subject because I have seen and had challenges and I overcame them. One thing I won’t fail to mention is that as I began writing, doors to greater wisdom and knowledge opened and I thank God for His favors.

What kind of audience did you target before making up your mind on the book?

The audiences were those who want to improve their lives, and I know that every positive person desires to make better his/her life.

Was the purpose of the book to teach, learn and make a difference, or was it for commercial purposes?

I have a passion and conviction to make humanity better. My purpose for writing this book is to educate, inspire and encourage people to make a positive difference and leave a lasting legacy worthy of emulation. This book teaches true leadership, defines integrity and excellence to the reader as well as positive self improvement.

The Oscars: In Conversations With The Magic Touch Of Jay "The Freak" Porter

2012-01-16T14:49:00.000-08:00

Yeah, we been talking about the Oscar, you feel me? Jay "The Freak", who evolved in so many ways with some cats in Hollywood in all da costume to writing the call sheet for base weekly programs on a pilot to be determined sometime gave me his feel on what he thinks about the upcoming Academy Awards. Gave thumbs up to my homegirl, Adepero Oduye whose role as Alike in the movie "Pariah" is buzzing out there. Met again the second time and Check it out.

Adepero Oduye is my homegirl, you know that, right? She's out with a bang. I think she deserves something, even a nod - being nominated for the 2011 Spirit Awards. What's your take?

Already she gets my vote. It's hard to catch an actress on the crossroads in life and career, a place where she has to decide which way to go. Adepero Oduye is in such a spot now. On one side she's the New York girl of Nigerian parents, graduating from Columbia University to make something out of life and on the other side she's floating with fame just like that in that breakthrough. Great movie and awesome discovery of a talent.

You think she'll get a nod?

Why not? I do think she'll be considered. I mean, think about her real life story; a girl who had planned to study medicine but lost the opportunity when her father died while a junior in college leaving her with no other option, enrolling in acting classes to pursue a career in the arts. Graduating and landing small roles in films such as "Half Nelson" and some TV series including "Law & Order: Criminal Alert," she was able to connect with the Wayans and film director Rees, landing the role of Alike - saying race and sexuality should be taken away in order for one to grip with identity and about trying how to find out how to be in the world."

I did not get to see the movie. People are saying "The Help" is getting the buzz for an Oscar. What your take?

I think the producers Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan did a good job and they should deserve a nod as well in the Best Picture category. It is a funny, touching, and inspiring movie adapted by Tate Taylor, based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett

Finally, it popped up. The life of the notorious FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. What's your take?

Believe me, you know what it is. Got to take that. The heavyweights have it together. Expect some buzz when the Dirty Harry is involved. Dustin Lance Black did great in his research and when asked why of the man's life, he told the press " he [Edgar] was incredibly promising and brilliant, so why did he become a monster? Tha's where my research began." Now I dunno!

Your take in the Best Director category

Let's see here. Very hard to predict though director Stephen Spielbergs "War Horses" might not be all that but with Spielberg, you never know. I think Alexander Payne's "The Descendants" and Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artists" are in for a long ride with any of the projected nods.

C. Odumegwu Ojukwu's Press Conference On Aburi Meeting

2012-01-15T19:54:00.000-08:00

You are already aware that we have just ended the meeting of the Supreme Military Council in Ghana. It has come to my notice that the public is anxious to have more details of decisions taken.

The meeting opened with a joint declaration by all of us, the military leaders, renouncing the use of force as a means of settling the present crisis in Nigeria and holding ourselves in honor bound by that declaration. That declaration also reaffirmed our faith in discussions and negotiations as the peaceful means of resolving the Nigerian crisis. having regard to the great fear and suspicion on all parts about the use of force, we thought that this declaration should precede any other business; and I am sure that all Nigerians will welcome it as a source of great relief.

The next important matter discussed, and upon which a lot of other things hinged, was the organization of the Nigerian army. Let me say here that our discussions right through went on in a calm atmosphere, understanding, and realism. We in the East have always felt that realism and understanding were lacking in the past in the approach to our problems, and it was very encouraging that our meetings on the two days showed the sincere determination by all to find realistic solutions to our problems.

it was agreed that the army will be henceforth be governed by the Supreme Military Council, the chairman of which will be known as Commander-in-Chief and Head of the Federal Military Government. There is to be a military headquarters on which the regions will be equally represented and which will be headed by a Chief of Staff. There shall be an area command in each region under the charge of an area command in each region under the charge of an area commander -- the regions corresponding to the existing ones. There will be a Lagos garrison, which will include Ikeja. For the duration of the military government, military governors will have control over their area commands in matters of internal security. All matters of policy, shall be dealt with by the Supreme Military Council. Any decision affecting the whole country must be determined by the Supreme Military Council, and when a meeting is not possible, such a matter must be referred to the military governors for comments and concurrence.

Subject to the above arrangements, we felt that the existing governmental institutions, namely, the Supreme Military Council and the Federal Executive Council, as well as regional executive councils, are workable and should be retained.

It was agreed that the Supreme Military Council must collectively approve appointments to the following offices: a) diplomatic consular posts; b) senior posts in the armed forces and the police; c) superscale federal corporation posts.

This particular decision was made as a means of removing friction, it being our unfortunate experience that friction and misunderstanding had in the past bedeviled these appointments. What it means is that no one person will have the right and power to make these appointments alone in the future.

Politically, it was unanimously agreed that it was in the interest of the safety of this nation that the regions should move slightly further apart than before. As a prelude to this, it was decided that all decrees and parts of decrees promulgated since the military regime, and which detracted from the previous powers of the regional governments, should be repealed by the twenty-first of this month. Once this is done and the agreements are implemented, the aim of allowing the regions to operate more independently and of ensuring fairness to all will be achieved.

The question of displaced persons was exhaustively discussed. As regards civil servants and employees of government corporations who had to flee their places of work as a result of the current situation, it was decided that such people will be paid their full salaries up to the end of March this year, unless they have found alternative employment.

On the question of other displaced persons, it was decided to set up a committee to look into the problems of rehabilitation and recovery of property. I took that opportunity to repeat my assurance that those non easterners who had to be ordered to leave the region in the interest of their own safety would be welcomed back as soon as conditions become more normal.

I have hurried to make this statement to you because of the misgivings which I understand are prevalent in the region as a result of this meeting. I recall that just before my departure, when the public did not even know that our meeting was so close, students and other groups of individuals issued resolutions advising me against attending any meeting with my counterparts. You will now be convinced that this meeting was more than necessary and worthwhile. Our duty is to reduce or remove tension, in order to leave ourselves free to tackle the most urgent and constructive tasks of economic and social development, which cannot be possible in a state of tension and fear. I have no doubt that all of us who participated in the last discussions are determined to implement the agreements reached. Once this is done, we shall have gone a long way to relieving tension and banishing fear among us. It is our plan to meet again soon, this time in Nigeria, to consider other matters arising from our last discussions and those which were not touched.

I want here to place on record my personal indebtedness to the government and people of Ghana for making a plane available to convey me to and from the meetings on the two days, and for making other arrangements to make this meeting possible. Provided our aims are achieved, we in this country will have cause to remain eternally grateful to Ghana for their constructive initiative.

For our part in this country, we must keep calm and avoid actions or words which might create difficulties for our progress in the solution of our problems.

God will certainly rescue this nation from collapse and perdition.

January 6, 1967 - Government House, Enugu, Eastern Nigeria

Lunch @ Earlez Grill With Leon Haywood

2012-01-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

Years ago at samaka and Deswab Records which sat on the washington Corridor, on the Westside, aspiring Hip-Hoppers and edging rappers alike would pop up to make beats and hang out arranging for the weekend gigs and all that blasts that goes with life in the studios.

During rehearsals, and when the atmosphere is up in smoke, the talks of rival gangs and rival recording studios takes up every discourse and the bad boys of samaka/Deswab would want the challenge to know what's around town with new talents and how to shop around. It was at the time of digging for more acts that I was told Leon Haywood ran a studio not too far from the block - on the Crenshaw Manor thoroughfare, a complex the seventies R&B sensation had bought when the fusion in the blend of soul-disco had waned for a generation, and rap music now dead, would explode from the corners of Sugar Hill Records which gave birth to Sugar Hill Gang, the first rap acts on any record label.

But as it had happened, I never knocked on the doors of Haywood's music and recording studio while overseeing the state of affairs at Samaka Records, until recently when I had thought of series of compilations in all music genre, and when I had scheduled plans to the subjects of my compilations and the liner notes which would need their attention and a one-on-one chat for details during the days of their performances.

I have bumped into Haywood in several occasions but we never had the time to chat. Haywood, born February 11, 1942, in Houston, Texas, is an American funk and soul singer, songwriter and record producer. He is best known for his 1975 hit single "I Want'a Do Something Freaky To You", which has been much sampled by Dr. Dre and others. Born in Houston, he listened to the blues as a child and started playing piano at the age of three. In his teens, he performed with a local group and worked as an accompanist to blues musician, Guitar Slim. In the early 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked with saxophonist Big Jay McNeely.

Asking Haywood while we had a bite at the popular Earlez Grille in the hood, on the Crenshaw Manor thoroughfare about his journey through music way back from Houston, he acknowledged the rough road, and the hard times that comes with surviving and overcoming the "hype" that is Hollywood and the music industry.

On music of today, he noted all had changed and that nobody does music for pleasure anymore, or doing music for the "likeness" of it. "Music, nowadays is all about money and that's too bad the culture is gone."

On Stevie Wonder, Wonder was a good pal helping him through the days of figuring out his mission in the early 70s when he began to discover his path before his major hit which catalpulted him to the charts.

On Quincy Jones, he did session work with the studio rat back in the day.

On Leon Sylvers, they all hanged around in the hood upon Dick Griffey discovering SOLAR Records (Sound Of Los Angeles Records) in the 70s.

On why he never came to Nigeria at the time of his breakthrough with the SOLAR crew and other recording artists during Ben Bruce Murray's Silver Bird Promotions: "I didn't wanna go."

On my plans to buy over the studio, his take was "hey, I'm old now and can't do much anymore. Go for it. It's all yours my African brother."

On his hey days at the recording studio, he wrote and produced songs for many artists and, credited with writing the 1981 hit "She's a Bad Mama Jama" by Carl Carlton, which he produced in his own studio. His last R&B chart record was "Tenderoni" in 1984. After a few more chart singles, for Casablanca Records and Modern Records, Haywood disappeared from the charts. In the late 1980s he became associated in an executive/production capacity with the Los Angeles based Edge Records. Since the 1980s, he has produced blues albums by Jimmy McCracklin, Clay Hammond, Ronnie Lovejoy, Buddy Ace and others, all locals, on his own Evejim Records label.

Haywood will be 70 years old in a few weeks and should be entertaining friends and well wishers at his Evejim Records complex where I intend to recruit for the next explosion in musical genre about to emerge.

Since I'm not a soul-food kinda guy, I asked him about the food and he said 'soul food's the deal." Unless I was taking him to Beverly Hills for $50 a plate lunch, that he's cool with what had been on my tab at Earlez. Nice, soft-spoken man who had his time. "Im cool with that." And a whole lot will be changing when Samaka moves in to the neighborhood.

Ghana Seizes Arms Consignment Bound For Nigeria

2012-01-11T16:49:00.000-08:00

By Agency Reports - Punch Newspapers

A major amount of arms and ammunition, allegedly bound for Nigeria, was seized by the Ghana police in Accra on Tuesday.

The arms and ammunition, including hordes of AAA cartridges, 10 pomp-action guns and 20 double-barreled guns, were found in a false compartment under the flour plate of the carrier truck.

Addressing the media on Tuesday evening, Accra Regional Police Commander, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Rose Atinga Bio, said she had received a call from an informant around 15:00 GMT (4.00pm Nigerian time) that a truck was off loading what could be smuggled goods in a house at Achimota, a suburb of the capital.

The operation, which could be a major break-through for the police into the modus operandi of arms smugglers in the region, led to the arrest three Ghanaians and two Nigerians.

“Upon reaching there, my men only saw an empty truck branded in coca-cola trade-mark on the compound,” she told the media.

But upon scrutiny, the policemen realised that the flour plate had just been welded at some specific points, raising their suspicion that there could be something unusual under the plate.

The police team ordered the driver to open the compartment and large caches of arms and ammunition were seen concealed under the flour plate.

Bio said Kwadwo Baffoe, a Ghanaian, claimed ownership of the cargo, while two other Ghanaians, Kofi Aboagye and Kwasi Nkrumah, had also been apprehended.

In addition, two Nigerians, Sandy Eze from Anambra State and Amosu Taiwo from Ogun State, were also arrested, the police officer said.

The owner admitted to the police that the arms were being transported to Nigeria in the truck with registration number XA 761-YAB.

“This is the first of its kind since 2009 when I took charge of the region. We are very much alert, especially because this year is an election year, and so we will protect the nation with the force at our disposal,” said Bio.

Goodluck Jonathan and Fragments of a Dysfunctional State

2012-01-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

These days and much expected of a Nigeria that is full of uncertainties, there are many ways now to pick up fights, and with Nigeria, unlike her counterparts in cyberspace which did change the way the world thinks and operates, its networking activism as seen the past few weeks to effect change and turn things around in the country is really hard to tell if the cybernation picketers or the normal weak and vulnerable working class populace on the ground have any hope since a federal Nigeria government had declared from its court ruling that the fuel subsidy strike is illegal and therefore the participants in the alleged protests are doing so at their own risk, engaging in what would cost them terribly.

Also, in a hopeless situation with the on the ground picketers, some not sure when the next meal will be available and, at the mercy of President Goodluck Jonathan himself who had nothing to do with all these if it had not been the barrels of the gun begun from IBB (Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida) to structurally adjust the nation’s programs, to OBJ (Olusegun Obasanjo) who spotted GEJ (Goodluck Ebele Jonathan), and dabbled him into nasty political tactics that certainly would consume the presidency if Jonathan comes short of taking the next step - meeting to what the people demands and settling his personal score with Boko Haram, the Islamic jihad bloodthirsty nihilists, whose big rolling funding machines are part of his cabinet he patently acknowledged while the media mounted a microscope on him.

Ironically, Jonathan is on the nation’s hot seat. Just that he may have had good intentions to lead the nation to the forefront as a honestly good man and not as a political money launderer or a traditional grassroots political player; he has been called many names in which fights had been picked among his admirers and haters. He has been called a “dumb-ass idiot,” “a dummy,” “a political fool shenanigans follower,” “a OBJ surrogate,” “a clueless Ijaw man whose presidency was not his own making,” “a college professor who should have been in the classroom rather than putting up a political trap that’s about to nail him,” “a figurehead who’s not smart enough to outplay his political foes and the ones that had set him up as a guinea pig in a nation sitting on a time bomb,” and a host of other name-calling slogans.

Jonathan did not know what befell him until the outcome of the strike began to take its toll - where his own police force he had sent out to enforce the law are fatally shooting peaceful demonstrators demanding what they had thought was fair, objecting to his removal of fuel subsidies among other complaints in a nation a do-nothing National Assembly legislators amass wealth on public funds and earns more than any government official on Earth. In a nation nothing had worked on normal settings from its franchise military juntas and dictatorships, to an abnormal, doctored democratic fabric. In a system where the chief engineer Obasanjo begun the Fourth Republic, rigging himself into reelection to the presidency, gathering his cronies to enrich them, to cover-up his own shady dealings amassing incredible wealth, and deliberately handing over power to a sick and incompetent successor with a puppet that lacked political guts as running mate to an ailing president, provides a clue about the way the system works. What Obasanjo had done in his political gimmick by handpicking deadbeats as successors and taking that as a credible succession formula being components of any political system and democratic fabric, and the way Obasanjo stage-managed his acts means Nigeria doesn’t have one - a credible and sound democracy.

Obasanjo had thought of what it would cost him giving up power entirely. He would have been in the dock - he couldn’t have taken it. He would have been made to testify under oath - that has not worked effectively in a state without structure and sound judiciary. He would have been made to face the question of how he legalized his funds and his friends’ ill-gotten funds and assets in the West where bags of cash full to the brim loots are dumped. And what Obasanjo had done in his picks of the political airheads to succeed him was not to bury the OBJ system, but to save it. It backfired. So far, it seems so.

The nation has been perilous on the first day of Obasanjo’s transition from around which Nigerians should have known clearly that in any democracy, no system, much less the deadbeats that he chose, can be stable if it depends on the well-being and survival of one man - Obasanjo - which is why the country is crumbling.

Nigeria is beginning to be the usual sickening joke we had thought was going to be a thing of the past when Jonathan got the peoples votes on his own very playgrounds and, had promised a new dawn, not knowing the onetime college professor who should have stayed where he belonged teaching, had no clue what he was doing in the presidency, and had relied on the misleading counsels of his kitchen cabinet who had taken him as a fool and for a long ride until his admission of the bloodlust Boko Haram being part of his dysfunctional regime that has practically nothing to offer the nation since he took the oath to defend the nation’s integrity other than anarchy.

One would presume Jonathan was telling a bunch of confused Nigerian audience in his thinking that perhaps the not consistent gullible press had not known about his pally with bedfellows who bankroll the Islamic group from public funds to terrorize the whole nation in the name of radical Islam.

What had been going on and especially what happened on Christmas Day, 201i, on that scheduled program to blow up institutions which the terrorists had forewarned, signaled Jonathan's fall. I had carried out a “swing poll” few days after the simultaneous bombings on whether Jonathan should resign on the basis of keeping a staff of traitors who cared less about the country’s well-being, and a staff that do not want his presidency to succeed which leaves him with the choices of quitting or getting rid of his cabinet that’s taking the country to hell.

In that “swing poll,” I had said that by Jonathan not doing much in critical and testing situations, that he is giving credence to the perpetrators of injustice. That his statements demonstrates his lack of sense of leadership and very apathetic about the suffering of his subjects - the Nigerian people. That he needs to show more responsibility to handle every situation protecting Nigerians. That if he cannot perform to secure his own people from his ineptitude, he must resign.

Thus Jonathan should either dissolve his present cabinet staff of cronies that was not his own making but that of special interests who had designed his administration to be a failure, and a staff out to discredit his South-South connections which links him with his protege, the source behind the origin of all the chaos. Jonathan should resign to save himself from further embarrassments. He has not done anything differently except for his willingness to negotiate with Boko Haram terrorists whose sponsors helped neutralize the president’s attempt to sought the cells of the terrorists with a tactical move for negotiations. Negotiate with terrorists for what?

That gesture energized and motivated the terrorists to keep up steadfastly with their quest for what they demand - an Islamic state. When the president isn’t doing much independently to use his sense of judgement as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces; and, when it’s very clear that the Islamic murderous gang Boko Haram are composed of people he knows very well, what message is he really sending to the Nigerian people?

Jonathan should know that he is sitting on a time bomb. If he has any advisers on this current crisis, which I doubt, it’s about time for him to find a way to diffuse that bomb for his own life and the interest of the nation. And on the striking working class, this is the time he should gather these people, consult with them and give them what they want. This is the best time for him to use diplomacy which should constitute a fair warning to a legislative fraud that power belongs to the people, giving the people what they want for the interest of the country and again for his own life.

C. Odumegwu Ojukwu On The July 29, 1966 Mutiny And Massacre

2012-01-11T14:25:00.000-08:00

I have considered with my Executive Committee the very grave events in some parts of the country regarding the rebellion by some sections of the Nigerian army against the National Military Government which resulted in the kidnapping of His Excellency the Head of the National Military Government and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Major General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, and the cold premeditated murder of officers of eastern Nigerian origin.

In the course of this rebellion, I had discussions with the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, Brigadier Ogundipe, who, as the next most senior officer in the absence of the Supreme Commander, should have assumed command of the army; my colleagues, the other military governors; and the Chief of Staff, Army Headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon. During this discussions it was understood that the only conditions on which the rebels would agree to cease-fire were:

1). That the Republic of Nigeria be split into its component parts;

2). That all Southerners resident in the North be repatriated to the South, and all Northerners resident in the South repatriated to the North.

In spite of the fact that the only representations made at these cease-fire negotiations were those of the rebels and and their supporters in the North, and notwithstanding that the views of the people of the Eastern group provinces had not been ascertained, it was agreed to accept these proposals and stop further bloodshed.

The public is aware of the wanton and deliberate massacre of several people of Eastern Nigerian origin in last May’s disturbances in parts of the Northern group of provinces. In view of the very strong feelings aroused among the people of the east at that time as to whether their membership in the Nigerian nation was desirable, I appealed to chiefs and leaders of the people to use their influence to stop any retaliation or precipitate action, in the hope that this would be the final act of sacrifice Easterners would be called to make in the interest of Nigerian unity. However, the brutal and planned annihilation of officers of Eastern Nigerian origin in the last few days has again cat serious doubts as to whether the people of Nigeria after these cruel and bloody atrocities, cn ever sincerely live together as members of the same nation.

I have noted the action taken to stop bloodshed in the country, and I now consider that the next step is to open discussions at the appropriate level to allow other sections of the igeria eple to express their views, as their Northern compatriots have recently done, as to what form of association they desire for themselves in accordance with the ceasefire terms.

As a result of the pressures and representations now being made to me by the chiefs, leaders and organizations in the Eastern group of provinces, I am arranging for representatives of chiefs and organizations in these provinces to meet and advise me.

Meanwhile, I appeal to our people of these provinces not to give expression to their feelings in any violent form but to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities in he assurance that their rights of self-determination will be guaranteed.

I have further conveyed to the Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters, my fellow military governors, and the Chief of Staff at Army Headquarters my understanding that the only intention of the announcement made by the Chief of Staff at Army Headquarters today is the restoration of peace in the country, while immediate negotiations are begun, to allow the people of Nigeria to determine the form of their future association.

August 1,1966 Broadcast, Enugu, Eastern Nigeria Government House.

C. Odumegwu Ojukwu's Diary Of Events July 05 - August 26, 1966

2012-01-08T19:24:00.000-08:00

July 5-25, 1966: Appeasement measures by Major General Aguiyi Ironsi continue. Efforts at personal friendship and alliance with Northern Emirs. Sultan of Sokoto visits Lagos. Persistent rumors of Northern Nigeria’s plan to secede from the Federation. Meeting of the Supreme Military Council. The council endorses the Supreme Commander’s plan to undertake and educate the people tour of the country.

July 25, 1966: Major General Ironsi begins national tour with a two day visit to Northern Nigeria. Series of dramatic and bloody events follow in cities and towns of Nigeria.

July 25-27, 1966: Ikeja; A Northern Nigerian basketball team from Abeokuta Barracks arrives in battle order to rehearse and reconnoiter for undisclosed “impeding operations.” Secret meetings of Northern Nigerian army officers with Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, Lieutenant Colonel Murtala Mohammed, and Major Alao in Ikeja Garrison.

July 28:1966: Ibadan: The Supreme Commander, Major General Ironsi, addresses a meeting of traditional rulers. In Lagos, Lt.-Col. Mohammed, Major Alao, and Major Martin Adamu alert and address the Northern soldiers in secret. This is followed by the disarming of Southern Soldiers, seizure of the armory, and distribution of arms and ammunition to Northern troops. Abeokuta (Western Nigeria): Two sections of Northern Nigeria troops break into a meeting of officers mess and kill Major Obienu, Lieutenant Orok, and Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel Okonweze - all Eastern and Mid-Western officers. Ibadan: Southern troops in the Supreme Commander’s bodyguard at Ibadan Government House are removed and disarmed by troops sent by Lieutenant Colonel Gowon. The Northerners among the bodyguards are reinforced by a special contingent of 24 Northern soldiers. Midnight; Ikeja: The stage is set for a coup. The leader of the coup Lieutenant Colonel Gowon, moves into his rebel headquarters at Ikeja Barracks. The code word for the coup is Araba Day - Secession Day.

July 29-30, 1966: Eastern Nigerian officers and soldiers are lined out and shot along with some Eastern Nigerian policemen and civilians. Abeokuta: Northern troops disarm Southern soldiers among the guards, break into armory, arm all northern troops, arrest and detain all Southern Soldiers. The eastern Nigerian soldiers among those arrested are sorted out and shot. Captain Ogbonna (an easterner) manages to escape from Abeokuta and telephone Enugu to alert me of the coup. This is my first knowledge of what is happening. Kaduna (Northern Nigeria capital): Eastern Nigeria Commanding Officer of 3rd Battalion, Lieutenant Okoro, is shot by two Northern Nigerian officers, Lt. Gambo and Lt. Buka Dimka. Alarm is sounded early in the morning and all troops assemble at the hockey pitch, which is surrounded by Northern troops. All the eastern Nigerian soldiers are shot dead. Ibadan: Lieutenant Colonel Joseph R. I. Akahan, commanding officer of 4th Batallion, convenes a meeting of his officers. When the officers arrive 74 of them who are Easterners are arrested and shot. Looting of property and raping of wives of Eastern Nigerian soldiers by Northern troops begin. Lietenant Colonel Akahan later gives an assurance to eastern Nigerian soldiers in hiding that there will be no more bloodshed. The soldiers came out of their hiding places and are massacred by northern troops. Enugu (Eastern Nigeria): Northern Nigerian troops attempt to seize the armory and arm themselves, to carry out their scheduled assignment in the coup. The attempt is foiled by the precautionary measure of Lieutenant Colonel Ogunewe, who is already alerted by the telephone call from Abeokuta.

July 30: 1966: Some Northern Nigerin political leaders and their Western allies of the Nigerian National Democratic Party hold a series of secret meetings with Northern army officers to finalize plans for the break-up of the country. Lt.-Col. Gowon hoists and flies in front of the 2nd Battalion headquarters at Ikeja (his temporary headquarters) a flag in red, yellow, black, green, andkhaki colors - the new flag of the “Republic of the North.” Telephone conversation with the chief of staff, Supreme Headquarters, Brigadier Ogundipe. He says that the Northern troops are determined to continue the bloodshed until Northern Nigeria is allowed to secede from the Federation. I agree to the terms to further bloodshed. Situation deteriorates. Increased massacre of Easterners by Northern troops. Brigadier Ogundipe flees.

July 3, 1966: Telephone conversation with Lt.-Col Gowon. He confirms the mutineers’ terms mentioned yesterday by Brigadier Ogundipe. I agree. I pledge my cooperation to help stop the bloodshed before we call on the people to decide the future of the country. I warn him that my government does not recognize the mutiny and that he should not announce himself as Supreme Commander.

August 1, 1966: Scheduled day for beginning of the commission of inquiry into May 29, 1966 Pogrom. Thwarted by July 29 mutiny, British High Commissioner, Cumming Bruce, has top-secret talks with Lt. Col. Gowon and sends envoys to Northern Nigerian emirs to dissuade Northern Nigeria from secession. Lt. Col Gowon appoints himself Supreme Commander and Head of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria. In the broadcast, he declares that there is no basis for Nigeria unity. Major Ekanem, Provost Marshall, reporting for duty in response to Lt.-Col Gowon’s assurance of safety, is shot dead on Carter Bridge in Lagos by Lieutenant Numan, a northern Nigerian officer,

August 2, 1966: Release of Western Nigeria army officers who took part in the January 15, 1966, revolution. At the same time, their eastern Nigerian counterparts who were detained in the North are shot by Northern officers at a spot 19 miles fro kaduna.

August 8, 1966: At the army workshop, Yaba, all neastern Nigerian army personnel are ordered to leave on pain of execution.

August 9, 1966: Meeting of representatives of the military governors is convened in lagos to consider what immediate steps are to be taken to stop further bloodshed and reduce the extremely high tension existing in the country.

August 12, 1966: Mass arrest of all NCO’s of Eastern Nigerian origin in Apapa, Yaba and Surulere.

August 16, 1966: Army officers of eastern Nigerian origin are abducted from Benin Prisons and shot by Northern Nigerian troops. The rebel troops at the same time release the Northern Nigeria troops. The rebel troops at the same time release the Northern Nigerian soldiers who are in detention with the easterners for their participation in the January 15, 1966 revolution. Major Daramola orders the shooting of 15 eastern soldiers.

August 18, 1966: Atmosphere of insecurity heightens in the country. I assure a delegation of oil companies of the maximum protection of their business by my government.

August 20, 1966: Following the decision to return troops to their regions of origin, I send for eastern Nigeria soldiers. To forestall this, Lt. Nuhu gives orders for the execution of 22 Eastern Nigerian non-commissioned officers detained by the mutineers in Ikeja barracks.

August 25, 1966: Influx of refugees from all parts of Nigeria back to the region increases by the hour. I give directives to ministries and departments to absorb as many refugees and servants as they can.

August 26, 1966: I set up the Rehabilitation Commission wit an initial sum of 1 million Pounds.

2011 In The Books: My Cousin Daniel And All That Stuff

2012-01-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

I was not sure what 2011 was to be, beginning on its first night when clearing all the stuff from my head became a major task. I had not made up my mind what I thought would conform with what I had to do in my literary errands and basically on the idea of attempting a book as had been suggested by many of my friends, colleagues and in particular, my die hard fan, my cousin Daniel, who had insisted he would stop listening to me since I have been ignoring a book call until a book pops out showcasing my works, even though I had argued with him insisting what he had been reading over the years from my literature could be the book in question.

But Daniel who wants a book out soon when I had insisted I am not in a hurry to put together a book of sort on which subject or topic, or title I’m yet to contemplate based on the surroundings that probably could facilitate what the title would suggest and how the project logically should make sense corresponding with the items that gives a book the right outlook as in its title and subtitles as the case may be, have not in his own opinion, based on what he thought from reading all my pieces, covering autobiography, biography, criticisms, drama, essays, fiction-poetry, journalism, interviews, documentaries, music analysis, fashion-modeling shows and book reviews; suggested a title, topic and subject to start working on; even if I may have made up my mind and concluded what area of titles, topics and subjects I should be targeting from whichever project that pops up.

Since I have written on a variety of subjects and covered a lot in my exchange of correspondences with friends, family members, well wishers, colleagues in the literary stock and several others from all walks of life, I had thought of a piecemeal take, and on the average, looked for public opinion by way of exploration and on the last call, after all options had been lost, locate Daniel’s ideals since he’d the one who “wants the book out now” rather than leaving crates of unpublished works for posterity.

On what to be expected with regards to my works out there which had been conceived at a time not much had been saved in my literary chest but stories of life’s endeavors growing up and becoming a man, studying and learning every aspect of our societal being. But Daniel wants something to be done real quick but with my own intellectual ambition and the love I have developed for writing, and the passion, I’m not in a hurry, thus working at my pace for the book release and not conformed to any deadline. I hope that works, Daniel.

On this book release stuff, Daniel seems to have been on my case, and I have just been wondering if Daniel wants a gig of our own bad self, pub-crawling the city, or the days two sisters lured us to the church Rev. Hartford Iloputaife was senior pastor, when our heads were still burning from the heavy metal-disco fever-pure funk-decorum rap years we had committed our lives to, not minding the consequences we knew would follow, and a time gone by. Or does Daniel want me to write about the days of the “melting pot” at Suya Spot, Caban Bamboo, Reggae Nights, and the push me, I push you movement when it became a daily hustle to the music at Astor? Maybe, he wants me to tell more stories of the blast when Ruth Ehirim, her brother and friends stormed that hell of a party jam during his visiting days in Los Angeles. There are more stories to tell than he could imagine, after all these years we evolved.

Daniel is now more of a philosopher, of the back years theory with “socio-capital” contract ideals, of which in our arguments I had talked about change, evolution, revolution and applications of different other methods demanded by change, not relying or bent on the status quo I had written off as archaic, backward thinking that never created any impact on the “new world” besides the dangerous politics that comes along with sex and money which I have always avoided.

And Daniel would confirm my attack on Igbo “elite” for not getting things done over the years, insisting the Igbo had at all times been far better off than her counterparts, the Yoruba-Hausa-Fulani stock, in every aspect of life since the fabricated nation’s founding. And, Daniel would agree with my consistent commentary and analysis what Igbo had on purpose ignored over the years after the post-civil war/”reconstruction-era” and supposedly lessons learned from the pogrom Igbos were massacred from every location they could be found

Daniel also agreed with me in what I have written extensively to near exhaustion; the tale of the anti-Igbo pogrom and evidences indicating that, and succumbing finally, “not sucking up to me,” but would concur to straightening up to the facts. Despite that, the book on the waiting list, the telltale would be the real and done deal with Daniel, when found sitting on the shelves in public and, graded with kind gesture from its long wait.

Daniel is waiting.

Having read too many books over the course of twelve months and reading uncountable newspapers, news-magazines and journal articles and texts in the same period, and having seen series of events all around the world one lives in, it shouldn’t take too much probing to elicit testimony that I have read myself to death and listing some of them makes it clearly so. I read Ngozi Achebe’s book “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter,” Eeefy Ike’s “Peering Through The Depths Of Life,” and Alretha Thomas’ “Dancing Her Dreams Away.” Going through all the stacks of books I read this year, I found the following African-related books very interesting: Gray Stewart’s classic “Breakout: Profiles In African Rhythm” published in 1992 by the University of Chicago Press as part of my research projects, where the African cultural maestro touched every base of the musical genres that had augured well with African musicians tracing the link of the connections and how it developed, coupled with the formation of Monomono, on a cast of Johnny Haastrup, Ben Okulolo, percussionist Candido Obajimi, guitarist Jimmy Lee Adams and Friday Jumbo. Stewart’s book, “first on African music to examine in-depth” the musicians themselves was a good and fascinating read.

Believe it or not, I read Condoleeza Rice’s “No Higher Honor: A Memoir Of My Years In Washington,” a retelling of what we in the press and public in general have already known from George Bush and his policymakers’ years. I read “Liberia: America’s Footprint In Africa: Making The Cultural, Social, And Political Connections” by Jesse N. Mongrue, where discovering the rich history of Liberia and America, and why Liberia remains relevant today and enriched with interviews of scholars, Liberian community elders and detailed research; “Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically With W.E.B. Du Bois” by Laurie Balfour on tales of Du Bois recommending words of his disciple, the Osagefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, saying for “political kingdom which must be sought first, one needed leaders with men and women, who could lead the struggle and expose;” “Life My Story: The Story Of A Girl’s Journey To Womanhood,” by Ebony E. Ferebee, in which Ferebee offers her victory over her own difficult, painful and abuse childhood as an example to offer young women, proving that it is possible to overcome your past and succeed as an adult; “And We Ate The Leopard: Serving In The Belgian Congo” by Margaret Baker-White of 1932, Dr. Lebia baker arrive at a mission hospital far up a tributary of the Congo River in Equator Province and Baker describing the unusual story of her family’s life in the Belgian Congo, and “Mirror Of Our Lives: Voices Of Four Igbo Women - Njide, Nneka, Miss Nelly and Oby - Narrate their stories of passion, deceit, heartache, and strength as they push through life, and each on a unique journey to attain happiness, self respect, and inner peace.

Also, on the list of my reading for pleasure and knowledge were, among others: “Zanzibar Kira Heri: Farewell Zanzibar” by Patricia K. Polewski, on the 1964 African revolt replacing the Arab Government - on Zanzibar and decreed that no unmarried woman could leave Zanzibar without paying 56,000 shillings; “Withches, Wife Beaters, And Whores: Common Law And Common Folk In Early America” by Elaine Forman Crane - Crane skilfully explores how deeply ingrained understandings of law and legal culture shaped the behavior of ordinary people in early America - whether the victims perpetrators, or neighbors; Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions happen,” and Appiah convingcingly points out, the ruling aristocracy was being superseded by a new class of economically successful men saying the popular press, working-class literacy, and democratic sentiments brought all British citizens into a unified community of shared knowledge and values; and “Dying Education: Necessary Reformation, The Nigerian case” by Alphonsus Emeka Ezeoke, stressing most of Nigerian schools are understaffed, especially schools located in remote towns and villages; that teachers shy away from going to remote or local towns and villages, and that the Nigerian nation must tap from its pluralism, and emphasize benefits therein.

Yes, Daniel is waiting on that book release. He do not want crates and boxes of papers somewhere archived for posterity. He wants it now.

I have collected a lot of materials - photographs covering a wide range of subjects, my own articles (published and unpublished), interviews, press releases, and several other related papers over the years, including correspondences I mentioned earlier, and I had thought the materials should be in shape enough for what Daniel had wanted me to do - “write a book” and nothing else. And as it did happen, I had thought of assuming a book as Daniel wants it, I might end up omitting a whole lot of stuff including what I had wanted to be a trademark kind of, something of its own unique style and stuff I always would be remembered for regardless of its take on commerce, flowing with its original intent and avoiding the intellectual mistakes which could be costly and probably diminish the entire process of my profound ideals.

I had also thought of the music industry, hiring musicologists I could use as consultants in the music machine projects starting from the “unconscious” years the vibes begun pumping into my ears and my eyes could not believe what it saw. And with all that on the trail by listening while suspending in “Limbo,” the obvious over the years I could lay claim on of entirely what had belonged to me knowingly, and what I had been known for from that literary point of view which I’d presume was how it should work, supposedly, as an independent thinker.

Independent thinking does not eradicate or suggest anything void of proper counsel. On that account, mainly, on the East-side bands during the post-civil war-reconstruction-era of which I have been well versed to a point being called a musicologist should not be an exaggeration, or hype, on the ground that, I have, too, written widely on the seventies hippie years of my time and culture in which I have been a living witness.

And I have thought of its compilation on a photo-journal kind of format, inviting Uchenna Ikonne, the vintage Nigerian and African music analyst who runs the Comb and Razor Blog and the Comb and Razor Music Group. Uchenna has done so much everyone would agree with me he deserves a national prize for the fact that he dusted off the Eastside bands’ archives and brought into light, vintage Nigerian sounds worthy of mention.

It doesn’t look good at all when much has been said and written about performing artists on the African continent - Dessoui Bosuma, Diblo Bibata, Doctor Dynamite, C.K. Mann, Nsala Mauzenza, John Nzeze, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Joseph Kabesel, Docteur Nico, Antoine Kolosoi, Antoine Armanso, O.K. Jazz, Manu Dibango, Fela Kuti, Sunny Ade, I’ Orchestre African Fiesta, Remy Ongala, S.E. Rogie, Francis Fuster, nana Ampadu, Babatunde Olatunji, I.K. Dairo, Orlando Julius Ekemode, Kanda Bongo Man, Remy Salohmon, Mimi Kazidonna, and the list goes on and on - and a little or none has been said or written about the casts of the Eastside bands dating back from the 1960s when many of the recording artists, too, featured through the Lagos 60s West African musical digest. Not much is known out there about the era’s Eastside bands' sensations of the time

So, if I should be bent to music, where do I begin? weighing back to the nineteen sixties I had yet to know in actuality any of the East-side bands that had begun before it was credited as an original of its own musical genre even though not understood fully in its surroundings within the West African regional coasts.

However, I had thought of running a full time schedule analyzing and interviewing some of the casts from the Eastside, alive today, which would have been enormous task in its capacity, but good to know an analyst had been around in what I thought was a very good development since I had not much travel time undergoing all the projects alone; that is, assuming I did initiate it in a way to involve others, others as joint group/partnership. I had only attempted putting the package through when I created Samaka Music and the Samaka Studios on the West-side of Los Angeles, sitting on the Washington Corridor, waiting for new acts and talents.

In any case, Uchenna had already developed the idea of Comb and Razor Group/Blog and record label on the trail to compile every sound of the era - 60s, 70s, 80s - that be, introducing the vintage years to a Hip-Hop generation with the blend for possibilities to coining a new musical genre for a generation that had been evolving to something else.

I did write some few lines at the Samaka Music Blog until I found no need for it since Comb and Razor, Likembe, Afro Funk Forum Music Blog, Voodoo Funk, Matsuli Music, Steve Ntwiga, Paris DJs, Benn Loxo, African Music, Pan African All Stars and Wrasse Records were spending quality time providing information on the vintage African collections. That break took me elsewhere to explore other areas. Regardless, I did keep up with the tally; attempts to locate Emma China (Wings), Keni St. George (Ozo), Bob Miga (Strangers), Ani Hofner (One World) and numerous other cats of the day. And also attempts for Emma China to release information on his colleagues at the EMI Recording Studios, Wharf Road, Apapa-Lagos; including Johnny Flemming, Charles Effi, Duke, Arinze Okpala, Dandy, Jerry Demua and Emma Dabro - the original casts of Wings during the post-Spud Nathan years, and the years of prosperity for the Eastside bands, which also included Founders 15, Herald 7, Aktion 13, Supreme Cee Jays, Super Wings and Ben Alaka as the best session man ever to play the drums.

Embarking into another area of research was not easy. I had diverted my attention to do something totally different, and this time around, it would take a lot of work; and it would be time-consuming. It also had to do with quality time to get some of the projects well situated.

So in the research for new directions and getting all the facts in order, especially when I had to deal with persons of interests in related interviews on one-on-one basis extracting information everyone needed to know that has not been told; and which as of its time seemingly had been way overdue and could not be told with time going by fast, and the subjects in question expiring and about to take along with them all the vital information they had. It is, in this way, in many occasions, that datas, archives, stuffs in storage for later future use like crates of papers, newsmagazines of years and decades, and other devices that had been used in keeping records, records most valued for references in centuries to come needed for inclusion into new ideas and lines of thought reexamining the importance of the old and the new reemerging on a totally different platform by way of accepting what had been as a new era surfaces.

I have quite often asked why we humans curiously keep the tabs of inventions and things like that, and all the challenges that demands our engagements. And when I found myself in research institutions and places of that nature, even not having to, but all put in a way that calls for directives for something positively drawn to achieve the intended results, and not to generate a premature publication which might be unnecessary like the kind of research projects that pops out and have nothing new or special to say at the moment, ending up a waste of time and resources.

This is what happens when one locks himself in to commit to do things benefiting humanity, as we all, of course, have been beneficiaries from one theory to another; from one invention to another and from one discovery to another, as the list of the purpose goes on and on.

I have mentioned at length the importance of collecting photographs, tapes and interviews which ultimately has been a work in progress, engaging and looking forward to conclude the series of projects which could be in any category, and while pursuing the project with caution for thoroughness, and at the same time “quiz-survey” the applications and objectives if the materials gathered would be good enough and presentable when released and when the whole idea in the long hurdle, is, eventually, known, accepted, endorsed and taken to be a work worthy.

Besides music, photographs and illustrations of sort in that order, essentially notes on historical figures of political, innovations stock, I had thought of including landmark interviews of persons who had shaped our culture in their time and how what they did changed the course of history. But again, I had thought about time, space, and convenience, coupled with what the people may want from the moment of research and surveying, and from the time of completion to general release.

Notwithstanding, I remember in January of a promising 2011, mapping out some strategy and with a little bit of consultation, worked to the execution of what had been laid down for the year, and while with a handful of moderated plans on the suspended works at Samaka Studios, the continuation of music compilation and a possible tandem with Naija Records run by Mike Egi out of the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota; I had also thought of adding a great number of West African musical icons over time even if it had to take series of volumes to put into perspective, and actually being a major score to a level that depicts paying homage to the acts that had brought West African music to the fore.

Musicology, I had thought, in any of my personal endeavors, unless collectively engaged, to be first included either by mentioning it and my fascination with a particular artist or performer, and either from my growing-up-kicking-it days, to the time I had begun to understand music patterns and the genre that accompanied it. Though since what I had originally conceived in January to getting it through as the year winds down, was, a conversion, the blending of music genres to one form kind of display and perhaps with a coinage introducing a revived or new musical genre which would open by testing the market to find out which vibe in what had been a mix would be appropriate and would go with the flow of the time.

When Egi and I had thought about this venture, I had not fancied the idea of “jamming” entirely the old stuff he had propped up when the combination had been realized to the point of adjusting and collaborating with the old stuff, which had to me, become old-fashioned compared to how the changes were wanted to be made. So, too, as Egi had talked about the “revival,” the adage of “old wine in a new bottle” with all that reggae compilation and jazzy tunes I had added to help give the project a different kind of flavor that would meet up with the original composition for our time and an expected blowout on the charts. That in line, I was writing other stuffs of great literature, too, especially, essays and articles related to the political environment of a troubled Nigerian national state, and particularly, the disturbing politically volatile Igbo related states, which happened to be my region of origin. I have written to be exhausted on arising matters in the area, my home state of Imo, and despite the attempt to engage for better management of “governmental” affairs through a compromising deal, it was not hidden that the state was clearly not workable.

Even with my backlog of unfinished and yet to be published essays, articles and journals, I made up time to go through the problems of the Igbo related states, and on the expedition, Imo State in particular, where a new administration/political party won the mandate to run the affairs of state promising a new dawn. We had agreed at a related meeting to be committed and honestly, engaged to make things work from a Diaspora standpoint showing a common bond with the home government for good governance. That aspiration looks more of a mirage and we may never get to find the promised dawn. What we seem to have found had been a continuity of a region still with the desire of state of empire and anarchy, and in retrospect, the very same state that had been previously battered beyond recognition with the hope that lessons would be learned from a regime that patently made it abundantly clear it did not care for the well-being of the state of affairs but rather to go by order of its intent - a succeeding regime to payback its “done deal” guaranteed pledge to hoodlums and political thuggish elements that helped put it in power, which now has the same resemblance by way of its operations - assassinations by contractors and consultants that has tripled in less than ten months of the new regime.

The war apparently is now waged between the state’s self-serving political and landowning classes which includes an “influential Diaspora” bunch that all of a sudden had become the generators of the chaos obviously inflaming the land on the grounds of their own personal interest. They are paying off security agents, night watchmen, the national police forces, their own hired thugs and hoodlums to create and unleash all sorts of mayhem, on purpose, in the state they had once pledged to protect and secure by all necessary means to bring about a governable populace.

Imo State troubles had just begun. When the Los Angeles area Imo Diaspora had gathered on a call for oneness and action for thoroughness of system in the state through its democratic practice, starting all over with a clean slate and with an ideal to make Imo a model of all states among her sister states from a platform allegedly written by its “Diaspora elite” on the basis of the American ideology they are adapting, little was really known that another gangster-like state was about to regroup and rethink its strategies. All the meetings, talks and quests to revive Imo from its bad governing image had been a front by a behind closed doors Diaspora to convince and compel its people that the state’s outrageous record and image was as is, would be a thing of the past.

Imo is a gangster state. The worst had just begun. Governor Okorocha’s hoped for firepower to keep the state in check had been neutralized with emergence of total chaos at an alarming rate and if not apprehended would be disastrously unbearable, and may lead to a state of emergency which could perhaps throw the state into turmoil in its administrative fabric, ushering in a mandate from a federal-run political party, if not a dictatorship by a military junta assigned from Abuja.

The reason I talk about chaos and the possibility of a military junta running the state is drawn from what has been going on in the region over time and as it becomes evidently clear the situation has not shown any sign of getting better rather getting worst and dangerous by the day as all that talk by Okorocha upon being sworn in to make drastic changes for a better Imo State wanes in about eight months that oath of office was taken.

Looking closer at it, Imo has been the worst administered state since the Fourth Republic, and with the combination of twelve years Achike Udenwa-Ikedi Ohakim squandered and an emerged Okorocha that is now full of uncertainties, the people are now concluding the state is going to hell by all accounts, and the assumption Imo was to be a model is definitely wrong and misleading. In as much as Imo has been used on purpose by the machineries that run the affairs of state and in disguise as the ruling party (PDP), in the country since the country’s latest attempt at an experimental democracy when the military juntas ran out of tactical options, Imo has been the guinea pig of the party corrupted from its inception by Obasanjo, it has been clearly understood that the indigenes - Diaspora and homeland - had been the ones to destroy itself, which affects the state, crippling it with the lost of hope and in its condition, no remedy.

By March 2011, every political animal in Imo on a different party affiliation talked about the need to fixing what had been a collapsed state resulting from Ohakim’s-led maladministration even as Abuja would not admit it, and the quest to reclaim the state’s good name from its first cut of the Balkanization process; and the people who made up the place on the set of tearing the Igbo nation apart when all about Imo and Anambra had been intentionally designed as opponents in a knockout game; and the addition of insult to dishonor when Imo had to be torn into two parts, and Anambra, too, having Enugu cut out on a continuation of the balkanization theory, a pattern to create political differences as strategy and a well orchestrated plan for enmity among a people of the same lineage. It was during this time of creating more states in what had been East Central State, even though East Central State, from around it, emerged Rivers State and Cross River State as another plot for division between the minority speaking Igbo states and East Central State that was a full Igbo stock. The confusion, henceforth, would not see an ending.

As very much intended, the March syndrome of being on the crossroads, on the premise of having to put an end to the state’s direction to nowhere, the magic game came into play, which would determine the seriousness of the people when time for the polls draws near to either elect a new governor or have the incumbent continue on the appeal to get the work done on a second term run as concluding part of projects planned to be completed on a “contract” of projected eight years to physically see the work done. It had been the only thing that gave hope to a gullible and vulnerable people, which held them together.

But that hope was an illusion, and with the concept of recycling the same people to run the affairs of state, the much anticipated hope may not come, which is now being seen in Okorocha’s much expected administration of good governance and getting things done in the state; the state’s most indigenes, if not all, gave up and could no longer live on empty promises, counting on Okorocha’s miracles, and that with their predictions of near certainty based on developments around the state, that Okorocha’s miracles of fixing Imo “is just another mirage.” What has been totally confusing is a Diaspora that had waited over the years as bad leadership took its toll on the state. The wait and the hope that all would come to form and play out naturally was a tactic of endurance and playing to the gallery of the handles, of a failed state, deliberately engineered from the center - a folly, inept, and corrupt administration from the moment it commenced operations. And with such attitude, the rest followed the direction of a central government that had no sense of purpose, which is where the center had to be held accountable.

But when Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan isn’t doing much independently to use his sense of judgement as the commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces; and, when known that the Islamic murderous gang Boko Haram are composed of people he should know very well, the “untouchable elite” that had thought the nation’s resources including its human capital had been their own personal tool they had every right to use for whatever purpose in demanding what they had wanted, anytime, from the country, and with Jonathan having no clue how to go about a situation only him and his kitchen cabinets could effectively trail and apprehend the moles of the bloodthirsty cannibals harassing the country in its claim of agitation for an Islamic state.

The irony, until the threats which Jonathan’s government should take seriously and the firepower of Boko Haram and other murderous gangs in the country are neutralized, Jonathan’s regime do not have answers, which is wholly mind boggling and, therefore, he should quit so the country can chart a new course. We’ve had enough drama and it’s no longer necessary. I’m sure Daniel would agree on this one while I shop around for publishers.

In my related discourse and exchange of correspondences over the months with Aloysius Duru, on a very old subject, Saint Saviours College and ts alumni that had nothing to show in lifting the image of the school founded in the 1950s by the locals and missionaries. I had argued with Aloy on the same topic that I raised awhile ago at a related forum when a complicated case of misappropriation of funds got into the hands of those trusted with handling of group funds, keeping it intact and viable took the opportunity to embezzle what had been secured with them, keeping funny books, which I questioned.

Aloy had connected me with folks we were all in class/school together at Saint saviours, but the thought of alumni had been distant in their current trend of thoughts - one of the many reasons most of the schools we left behind are in decay. I had contact with all except Malachy Ijemere whose lead somewhere in Alabama I’m yet to locate.

In fact, very few that I have talked to or encountered by other means of communication have I been able to exchange our ideas and intent on addressing the issues of alumni and Alma Mater, and the areas of academic discipline that needs attention from the time of abandonment no one remembers. I had also emphasized on the need to collect data as much as we could, locating “Old Boys” putting it into perspective and, laying out how to go about the projects and keeping up with tracking the conventions as they may arise. As it turned out, the interest was not encouraging and how the problems could be solved on its own and with such manners, beats me.

With education that has gone down the drain over the years as a result of neglect, coupled with a failed state where nothing gets done; and on the contrast, a whole lot could have been done considering the products of Saint Saviours in key positions and professionally accomplished folks all around the world, and yet, no single alumni or project dedication to show for it.

My final suggestion on a deteriorating Saint saviours looked at as “none of my business” kind of issue, and much the most important, time for all Saint Saviours Boys to start collectively and publicly, a network of awareness and intentions of projects ahead that would bring to the fore a standard learning academy fully equipped for broader intellectual development, preparing students for further academic pursuits which would generate the kind of orderly communities typical of organized societies with a resemblance of Igbo Republican ideals of our forebears.

Again, enter the cornered world of a memoir and what had been my take in that regard which would reflect all that one had done in the past, and which had to deal with tales of imagination, worlds of fantasy and, realistically, the simple truth. Checking all that list and a haul of accumulated literary works, a memoir’s almost done in my books when the time approaches, that is, if one had planned it that way which probably would fly with Daniel's demands even if as I intend to overlook the concept of commerce and leave it all for posterity - benefiting humankind. Daniel had agreed on that until lately when he begun the movement for a book now campaign to persuade me take the step and get the whole idea of book publishing rolling.

Meanwhile, I am still thinking about a documentary almost done, and which would cover a great amount of area in its capacity beginning from the pre-West African states, conquest, to the present state of the region and what had changed over time. But Daniel haven’t seen anything yet; he wants a not cozy line of thought for me, and also not one that I loathe; but the thing for me is what I had thought in the works of time dealing with issues of the future had been more important and not the commercial success which isn’t a guarantee, as Daniel Likes it.

As it had happened, again, on March 26, 2011, enter George “Olili” Ilouno’s 50th birthday bash at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood, California, while I had already been in communication with Innocent Osunwa, the radical teacher who talks robust Igbo politics and the trending stuff, he talked much about “me,” the subject, and book release that has been way overdue, and that regardless, the collection of essays and related commentaries binding together. It’s been overwhelming and Daniel had not been the only one on my case to pop out my literary works.

What had happened before Olili’s bash almost made me make a sudden 180-degrees about face to the event, asking myself if indeed my works should be more important to put together, or Olili’s one night, hard partying and joyous festivities. My works are a lifetime thing that goes with the territory.

I would be covering Olili’s party for Life & Time Magazine, and upon arrival, the ballroom had the biggest Igbo cultural crowd I had seen in a minute. I met folks not seen before. While partying with folks and exchanging pleasantries with loved ones, I found myself circled by the Los Angeles area house members, like mobsters who had been on a mission. I have committed a crime, so they say. My crime was an article written in July 2010, about an Igbo club in Greater Los Angeles that couldn't live up to its creed. During the time I was circled and a Case management Conference paper served me by Ifeanyi Ibediro, who allegedly had nothing to do with the lawsuit, these so-called house members were bumping fists, taking up hi-fives, bumping chests and jubilation on a case that’s yet to meet panels on the Case Management Conference and how to resolve whatever was Ephraim Obi’s (Plaintiff) beef with the article that I wrote. An article that did not mention his name in any way. I’m not sure what they did. I left it as is, and did not let it bother me or distract my attention for the purpose of the evening.

Also, what had happened that night, house members circling of a photo-journalist carrying out his assignment, covering Olili’s event, did not surprise me, but laughable considering their mood; high spirits of relief that they have got their victim who had been their nightmare.

“Yes, we got him,” they all would say to each other. “Let him write again, We have neutralized his pen writing firepower. He thinks he’s the only one who can write,” they seem to be saying. Like John the Baptist, in the biblical son of Elizabeth and Zacharias, and before Herod, the ruler of Jewish Palestine under the Roman Empire, was imprisoned and beheaded for blasphemy. Like Socrates, the Greek philosopher whose philosophical ideals was alleged to corrupt the youths and when asked to recant his principles which he wouldn’t, was executed. And like Jesus Christ before the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, seeing no crime that Jesus committed, washing his hands off the trial of Jesus who was crucified by the Jews.

Such was the atmosphere at Olili’s bash, in my case with Ephraim whose motive had been to use me as a guinea pig in his years of unproductive law practice in California, and his Case management Conference call as a litmus test, who was at the gathering and part of the circling culture that poured out to see the decimation of my writing career. As it turned out, Ephraim and his clueless gang of law-suing colleagues who as I may presume had no clue of what they had proffered on the basis of contents of the said write-up, wanting me dead or alive by way of subduing my literary work, in their 2011 quest for Igbo elitism and oppression of peoples and denial of the First Amendment Rights.

2011, so to speak, was a year of ups and downs, of turmoil and triumph, of tragedy and blessings, and of new discoveries and fortunes. I learned some tricks though never would get into it, never; on the British press and News of the World in the scandalous phone hacking burst involving the deputy features editor, Paul McMullen, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. It was a tabloid sensationalism and “gutter-snipping” journalism which told how newspaper publishers goes to any length to get its staff paid handsomely digging out the nastiest news-holes out there on the hangers of its reading public.

For 2012, Daniel wants a logical, intellectual discourse on “What Nigeria Owes Nd’Igbo,” “What Nd’Igbo Are Doing To Themselves,” “What America Owes The Blacks,” and “What The Blacks Are Doing To Themselves In America,” which I had thought should be fascinating and on a firmer ground of argument.

On a year, overall, a world in economic crisis never seen before since the Great Depression; a world changed dramatically in technology; a world we now live in, that has become closer and closer; a world full of uncertainties with crisis in all of its surroundings, and a world now armed with weapons of mass destruction with the capabilities to end time, we surely hope it becomes crisis free, hunger free, full of love and a place we all could dwell together.

And let’s begin on that sound note. One World, One People and One Destiny. Peace and no more wars!

Should President Goodluck Jonathan Resign?

2011-12-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

It has been noted in some circles that President Goodluck Jonathan should resign for his feeling very irresponsible and not showing possible leadership of the country by not demonstrating his ability to manage crisis - which case he is not intuned with the sadness being caused by the suffering Nigerian people. That the Christmas Day simultaneous bombings was not the first time, second time or third time it had occured in the country.

That by not doing much, he is giving credence to the perpetrators of injustice. That his statements demonstrates his lack of sense of leadership and very apathetic about the suffering of his subjects - the Nigerian people. That he needs to show more responsibility to handle every situation protecting Nigerians. That if he cannot perform to secure his own people from his ineptitude, he must resign.

Have your say/opinion

Odumegwu Ojukwu's Message on the Pogrom to Biafran Students in America

2011-12-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

“The people of the former eastern region of Nigeria had believed, as if it were an article of faith, in the concept of a united Nigeria. No section of then Federation of Nigeria worked assiduously for the attainment of this ideal as did Eastern Nigeria and her people. No section made as many and varied positive contributions toward the realization of true unity.

Having, over the years, spearheaded the movement for closer union, having demonstrated our faith in Nigeria in concrete terms by allowing our sons and daughters to sojourn in other parts of the country, thereby contributing tremendously to the development of such areas to the neglect of our own, it was a hard decision for us to opt out of a federation in which we had invested so much. But we had no other choice.

Over the years, our erstwhile compatriots made it clear in unmistakable terms that they did not want us in the Federation. Since the 1950s our people were expropriated and discriminated against in parts of Nigeria other than their own. Furthermore, the experience of three harrowing waves of remorseless genocide in 1945, 1953, and especially in 1966, involving a total of nearly 50,000 dead and countless others maimed or destitute, provided an object lesson which could not be but taken seriously.

Self-preservation is probably the strongest human instinct, and it is this that has compelled the harassed and prosecuted people of eastern Nigeria to seek refuge in their own home and among their kindred. As a proverb of one of our Biafran languages has it, “A man who is rejected by others cannot reject himself."

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu's "Message on the Pogrom to Biafran Students in America," November 24, 1967

How Shagari Granted Ojukwu Amnesty

2011-12-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

The late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu’s former media aide, Mr. Kanayo Esinulo, today concludes his account of life with Ikemba Nnewi
Saturday December 17, 2011 - Daily Sun

Gowon’s pardon

By 1981, particularly after President Shehu Shagari granted amnesty to General Yakubu Gowon, Emeka, who was fond of calling Gowon ‘Jack,’ felt that their ‘two cases’ could have been considered in tandem, but because the people of Plateau made a strong case for Gowon, while ‘the East’ was not able to present a united front on his case, it would appear to Shagari that Gowon’s case was a more pressing national issue. He then suggested that we pursue a new initiative by making the necessary contacts with those within the listening range of President Shagari and others outside of this orbit. The primary targets were Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, Dr. Ibrahim Tahir and Chief Victor Masi.

Okadigbo was to be the arrowhead, since he was the Political Adviser to the President. Tahir, then Chairman of the Board of Nigerian Telecommunications, was chosen because of his influence and political pre-eminence within northern political circles. Masi was an important Minister of Works in the Shagari administration and a brilliant Army Captain with the Biafran Army Engineers. General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu gave these as his reasons for preferring that we worked with these eminent Nigerians.

The meeting with Tahir and Obiano

In part two of this narrative that appeared last week, I traced the initial involvement of Okadigbo in the project of Emeka’s homecoming, and how I took him and Obiozo to Bingerville to meet and discuss with the General. Soon after we returned to Nigeria, we tracked Dr. Tahir at Ikoyi Hotel, where he was temporarily accommodated. He was very warm and polite to us and Okadigbo had tutored Vincent Obiano and I how to present the case to Tahir. As he chain-smoked, he listened us out and made promises he so dutifully fulfilled. We then moved to Victor Masi’s official residence in Ikoyi. He was waiting for us. Obiano had contacted him, for they knew themselves at the University of Nigeria in the early sixties. Here, again, the reception was warm and friendly. Before we knew it, Emeka called Chief Ike Onunaku, a top management staff of the United Africa Company (UAC) (I mean the UAC under Chief Ernest Shonekan), who was a part of us and who hosted so many of our meetings in those difficult days, to say he was getting feelers on how effective the team had become. By this time, Emeka had asked Colonel Joe Achuzia to join us and to handle the security component of the project. We continued to meet regularly at Onunaku’s Bourdillon Road, Ikoyi residence – Bless his soul.

Ojukwu met Shinkafi in London

One early Saturday morning, Onunaku sent his driver to bring me to Ikoyi. ‘What about’? I asked the driver. He wouldn’t know beyond the instruction to get to my Ikeja residence and “get Kanayo here before two o’clock.” When I arrived, I was told that the General wanted to give me a new brief by 3pm, and since I didn’t have a telephone at home, Onunaku’s place at Ikoyi was the best option. At exactly three o’clock, the call came through and Emeka said he had just returned to Abidjan from London, where he had “fruitful and rewarding discussions” with the Director-General of the Nigeria Security Organization (NSO), Alhaji Shinkafi. I was to constitute a strong media team to start working on softening the ground for his journey home. His meeting in London with Shinkafi had increased his optimism that his days in exile were, indeed, coming to an end, he said. He sounded slightly excited, and I was happy and so was Chief Onunaku.

The media campaign

Two days later, I traveled to Enugu on a Nigeria Airways flight, in the company of Vincent Obiano. We were in Enugu to ask for the support of a good friend and colleague, Obinwa Nnaji, who was then Editor of Sunday Satellite of the Satellite Newspaper Group in Enugu. We confided in him and told him precisely how the General wanted the media aspect of the project handled from the East. After getting his advice, support and firm commitment, Vincent and I came back to Lagos. The following day, I drove to Iwaya Road Yaba, Lagos to brief and request the support and sympathy of veteran journalist and editor, Gbolabo Ogunsawo, the former editor of Sunday Times. Emeka knew him by reputation and specifically advised me to reach out to him. In his days as the editor, the weekly was reputed to be the highest circulating newspaper in Africa, south of Sahara. And from exile, he was a loyal reader of Sunday Times.

We secured Gbalabo’s sympathy and through him the understanding of the Unity Party of Nigeria, as well as access to as many editors in the Lagos/Ibadan media axis as possible. Obinwa Nnaji also inherited the duty of getting his editor colleagues in the South East to step up the media campaign. Before we all knew it, Ojukwu’s return to Nigeria had developed into a huge national discussion and conversation. Indomitable Tai Solarin added his voice in an article that was published in both the Nigerian Tribune and the Daily Sketch.

The debate was now widening and going in the direction we had planned. And Emeka was letting us know that he was following developments closely but warned: “You must not relent until Shagari pronounces the magic word ‘Emeka, Come Home.’” Dr. Chuba Okadigbo was doing just fine in the political turf. He called me one day to say that the media tempo must not go down at all. Gbolabo, Obinwa and I were taking care of the media angle. Colonel Achuzia (now a chief in his native Asaba and its Ochiagha) was making progress with security arrangements. Everything was going good. Everybody was cooperating and the end of Emeka’s days in exile was nearing its terminal stage.

Shagari’s declaration

In a terse statement issued by the presidency, Shehu Shagari allowed Emeka to come home and a huge volley of joy and jubilation were unleashed. Preparations for his trip home began in earnest. Individuals and groups that were afraid to mention Emeka Ojukwu’s name in public since January 1970 began to come out of their holes, like termites. I remember one fellow who refused to touch the letter from Ojukwu to him in 1972, and even warned Emeka Enejere and I never to mention that we ever saw or came to his office located in central Lagos, was busy granting elaborate press interviews soon after the amnesty announcement. He was hailing the General as “my infinite hero,” who is on his way back home. Such is life.
At the end of it all, however, many genuine Igbo groups made contacts with us and began to donate time and buses that would convey people to Lagos and back.

The Cote d’Ivoire angle

Many Ivorians, too, voluntarily donated huge sums for the printing of thousands of T-shirts. Emma Ackah, an Ivorian presidency staff, was in-charge of that. Emeka had instructed what should be written on the shirts – simple Igbo words, ‘ONYEIJE NNO.’ What happened at the airport the day he arrived Nigeria is now history. The day his body arrives Nigeria will record yet another history.

It is on this note that I say, with tears in my eyes, to my General, mentor, adviser and ogam: sleep well and good night – Chukwu nabata mkpuru obi gi. Ka emesia!

Interview: Ojukwu Never Repeated His Instructions - Orderly

2011-12-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey Anyanwu, Awka - Daily Sun Exclusive Interview

Sixty-five-year-old Elder Chief Godwin Okeke-Ejim was the Police Orderly to the late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu for three years when he was Head of State of Biafra till the day he left the shores of Nigeria to Ivory Coast (now Cote d’Ivoire).

In this exclusive interview with Saturday Sun at his Enugu residence, Elder Ejim confessed that he felt terribly bad on hearing the news of the death of his former boss, saying, “My father died, my mother died I did not shed tears, but when Ojukwu died, I shed tears.

Elder Ejim, who hails from Ugbawka in Nkanu East Local of Enugu State, was 25 when he started working with Ojukwu. The orderly revealed some intimate aspects of Ojukwu including the fact that the late Ikemba never repeated his instructions.
He also graphically related a day Ojukwu had a brush with death. Excerpts:

Posting to Ojukwu

I served as a police officer and retired in 1978. I came to serve Ojukwu in 1967 till the last day he departed to Ivory Coast in 1970 as his personal and police orderly. I was so close in a way that he trusted me so much. We were seven of us slated. We didn’t know why we were called, because in the police force, we had a routine called Daily Order. We go there every evening to pick or know where you may go or about anything at all that might concern you. In the course of that day, we read the Daily Order; we were seven short-listed sergeants and it said we had to prepare for special duties tomorrow morning and to report to Commissioner of Police’s office by 8 o’clock. The Commissioner of Police of the Eastern Region then was P. I. Okeke, now late. When we assembled, seven of us that day, around 10 o’clock, the Commissioner of Police arrived and addressed us. He said: “Well, I’m tired of sending orderlies to Col. Ojukwu. Each time, none serves up to one month to three months before he comes back for one accusation or the other”, that now, he was taking all of us to go and see him in his office at the State House. Whoever he picks, it’s his luck because this was a man that when his name is mentioned, you begin to shiver.

We were driven to that place from the Police Headquarters, Enugu to what is now the Orthopedic Hospital where we had the State House. We got to that place around 11a.m. Ojukwu arrived. We were marched before him as he sat down and when we lined up, they introduced us and he looked from left to right and immediately he pointed at me and said, “You, come out, the rest can go”. That was the verdict. Every other person left in jubilation. I didn’t know how I felt, it was a mixed feeling but I thank God. He told the ADC, who was the Major, to tell me what to do. He told me exactly why others left; that I am the 7th person now, that I should look very sharp because I am serving him directly.

His job

From there, the job started. The next thing he did by the time he was retiring by 6pm in the evening was that he gave me one key to the office and said: “Look, I am having one key to this office and I am giving you one. So, make sure that nothing leaks, make sure that no information leaks from my office and that nothing is being searched for, otherwise…” he nodded. I said that by the grace of God that nothing will go amiss. So, he said okay. He didn’t even ask me questions about where I come from. We have worked for almost two to three years before one day he asked me: “Where do you come from, Edwin?” He calls me Edwin instead of Godwin and I said, from Ugboka.

Our movement from Enugu started when Enugu fell. We were the last to move. He likes truth and he likes cleanliness. He told me that whenever he calls me, I should be at least one yard away from him; that he need not be shouting to me. I agreed and I maintained that. Even if he was in a meeting and you know he always stays at the extreme, once I hear him through the signs he made electronically, I will march and go there, greet him and then he will give me the instructions.

It so happened that, throughout my service with him, he trusted me and I maintained it. The instructions made me to deny every other association with everybody even friends. He gave the instruction, I feed from the kitchen; they give me food three times or as much as possible because I wouldn’t have time to go to my house to do anything. I prepare, anytime he goes out or has occasion to wear military uniform, I do it because the ordinary squad wouldn’t starch it well or do maintaining because this is what I was trained for as a policeman. I maintained my own uniforms. As the war developed, I wouldn’t go to war because I was not a war cabinet member but he made sure that every other domestic matter, I take care of them, he instructs me and he never repeats his instructions. He was very strict. He liked me so much that, throughout three years, he never for one day scolded me; he never scolded me at all, having learnt what made others to be brought back. Even as I was there, my promotion ran up to the ASP within the war period. I was promoted. You know, after the war, you have to abandon your old rank and go back.

The man Ojukwu

He was a man who loved work more than anything; that is why, when I got to hear that his eyes were bad, I knew exactly that he overstressed his eyes even though I’m not a doctor. He was always reading, he was writing always, he was always there buried in books. Imagine a man who read in Oxford, obtained a Master’s degree and everyday he was there – day and night – holding series of meetings, writing, doing all these and giving out instructions. So, the much I can remember is that we worked very cordially as much as I could and the family members all know me. I know the mother, the father; I got to know him when he died at Nkalagu. That was where he passed on. Maybe he didn’t want to be carried overseas because the money was there. I liken Ojukwu to Jesus Christ because he was a man who obtained his degrees from overseas and shunned every other work only to join army and in the army, he proved beyond every reasonable doubt that he liked the job.

He rose very well in rank and because of his love for the Igbo people, he denied himself of everything and later became Head of State of Biafra as mandated by the people then. You can imagine how he ran that war, using everything; I think he might even have used his father’s money. But what I’m sure of is that he used every opportunity he had to see that the war progressed, aimed at making his goal to be achieved by establishing the Republic of Biafra. But due to the fact that so many things were against him, it had to be abandoned. You know Jesus came into this world, abandoning the best things God set for Him in heaven only to come and suffer and die for us. So the man, Odumegwu Ojukwu, picked that attribute of Jesus because, with his wealth and his father’s wealth, he needed not suffer for us at all. He was as a sacrificial lamb, which people are now realizing. In fact, his actions tended to stabilize Nigeria, otherwise it would have been a different matter. I don’t condemn him for the actions taken, otherwise you and I would not have been talking. We would have been decimated long ago.

Close shave with death

I met him when he was just three months old as the administrator of the Eastern Region. Everything was going normal until the Biafran was declared. That time, we never slept again. The moment Biafran nation was declared, there was no rest for him; there was no rest again for anybody serving him. Wherever he was, I will be at the door. I screen anybody entering to see him. You do not enter unless I announce you and before then, I must have searched you and announced you and he said okay, come immediately or give me five minutes to finish up. I took up security at the doorpost before you go to meet him.

We were close to death on one particular day due to aircraft bombing. We would have perished at Madonna, Mbano area because that very day, during the heat of the bombing mission by the Nigerian aircraft, we were there. He was interviewing people and doing his normal duties, suddenly an aircraft zoomed in around 12 noon. When the aircraft came, myself and the security officers zoomed into his office because the canon fires were too close, even the aircraft bombed the Mercedes car with which we arrived. I know exactly that it was targeting us and the car was very close to the office. We pushed him (Ojukwu) down and all of us lay on him as protection but when this aircraft became desperate and the bombing became intense, we remembered there was a temporary bunker. We said, let’s go into the bunker and he reluctantly rose up and we walked into the bunker. The moment the last of us entered the bunker, there was darkness everywhere. His table, chairs, books and documents, which were on the table where he was working, all got shattered and burnt. That could have been a calamity. This happened at Madonna near Isieke, Mbano in the present Imo State.

That was the only close shave with death I witnessed by myself and you know that whatever happened to him that time will affect us. I wouldn’t have been here with you by now. That was the day I shivered. When we came out, there were so many casualties. I remembered that one European came to our office in the name of offering relief few days before the attack, I suspected him. It was when the aircraft took the first dive; it was so low that I noticed his face. We didn’t know that he came to sabotage us and it was less than a week. He was an Egyptian pilot because it was a Russian-made aircraft that could have destroyed us, but we thank God really. That was an incident that was touching.
The next one was when Ugwuta was falling; he (Ojukwu) went there too. I was there and he was at the war front. He taught me how to load HMG. Until water bomb finished our cars there, the cars we took there, we had to retreat. We came back in the night with another car. The man suffered. He took strange actions, which a Head of State wouldn’t even take. So, these were the sacrifices he made. It would have been a tragic event for us.

Lessons from Ojukwu

You know, he is not a relation, he is not a friend, and my approach with him was always instructional. You do this, you go there, and so, we have no social contact. He was a man who didn’t drink. He takes coffee and by then he was a chain-smoker. 555, that’s what he takes. He never tasted alcohol and he wasn’t eating too much. He never told me anything that was not instructional or related to my duties. He kept me at a distance and I kept him at a distance, knowing that there were other people ahead of me and his immediate brothers who he could always converse with.

Ojukwu’s departure

We sojourned longer at Umuahia. We got disorganized. We even ran to Ogwa in now Mbaitoli Local Government of Imo State in the house of Iheanacho. After about a day or two, we moved to Nnewi and that was in January. The last day, all the dignitaries you can think of in this Biafran setup, they all went in and held a meeting. I don’t usually stay in their meetings, I can’t be there. I will be at the corridor. Eventually, that meeting held for a whole day; from morning till around 1 O’clock in the night. Suddenly, vehicles were set up, heading for Uli Airport. I normally sat in the front to open the door and close it as an orderly. On getting to Uli, it was just like a market, filled with people with a very large plane; Super Consolation, stationed. He entered with most of these dignitaries that went out with him and I realized he was leaving.

Before the door of the aircraft was shut, he sent somebody to the door of the aircraft to say I should come in. I replied to that man to tell him that I didn’t know we were leaving here. That, in fact, I cannot enter the plane. If my wife had been around or if I had known that it was a movement of that nature, I would have joined him to fly. That was the last I saw him and that was the end of my service to him. That was also the end of the war. Since then, I was communicating with his brothers and at a certain time; they wanted me to come to Ivory Coast because when they come, they would say they want that honest orderly.

Yes, that’s what they branded me honest orderly. They came to my house and said my master wanted me to come to Ivory Coast; that there is a job I will do for him. I told them that my family has expanded and that I can’t just be moving like that. They needed me then but I said no because I know it was either to take care of some of his businesses there or things like that.

Ojukwu’s return

When he returned around 1983, I went to him. He was happy. He received me and asked me to take lunch with him. When it was announced that that orderly came, he left every other thing, came and embraced me. He said I shouldn’t go until I take lunch and I obeyed. You know, he was not a person you visit anyhow without having something serious. He was down-to-earth, he likes you to come but the duty of the work wasn’t really giving him the chance to be receiving people anyhow because he was not a man you go to gossip to about anything. He was a very intelligent man. I later became President of the Customary Court; writing and doing other court duties. I saw him when he was at Hill view area this Independence Layout. There was a day he was passing through this area, eventually he stopped at a suya spot. I raced to that place and called him ‘master.’ He said ‘orderly.’ He came down and we embraced. People converged and were surprised. After asking about my welfare and family, he bought what he wanted to buy and left. He was a very brave man. When he went into politics, people were skeptical about his involvement in politics. When you have your facts at your fingertips and you know that God is with you, you can go to your enemies’ camp and come out. He will tell you the reality; he will tell you exactly what happens.

After Ojukwu’s depature

Immediately he left, there was order for me to return to police. I rejoined police and I got resposted like every other person. Along the line in 1970, I was in Lagos where I was posted, I attended an interview on two occasions and I was confronted with “you served the rebel”. They threw the accusation to me during Board members promotion interview in 1976 because we used to have annual Board Interview. I said how, sir? The then Commissioner of Police said, “look at your picture with Ojukwu.” I said, “yes, I served him, sir, but I was there on posting. I did not apply for it.” He said but why didn’t you refuse it? I said that if I declined it, I would be declared a saboteur; that was why I had to be there. I didn’t apply.

In 1977, they confronted me in Lagos again when I went, “you are a rebel agent” and I told them I didn’t apply. I was on posting by the Commissioner of Police then, later IG. So, there was noting I could do. My situation was defenceless. Immediately after that interview, I planned to leave before I would be dismissed, because there were people who could take action against you. I had to quit the force at least to have a good record that I wasn’t dismissed. Till today, I get my pension with the little rank that I held, otherwise by then, I was having more than 15 years to serve and by then I would have risen but today, I thank God, its no longer an issue.
So, that ended my career abruptly. I didn’t think of it, there were no consultations. I said why should I be defending one thing, instead of asking me questions on my police duties, why do you then come to blackmail me? I can’t defend what is indefensible and I thank God because now, I’m not indebted to anybody. God has blessed my family. I have children and almost all of them are now graduates and they are doing well. It’s God who leads. He provided and He makes provisions for my children.

News of his demise

I saw the news of his demise as I was watching CNN. I saw only that Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran leader is dead. The spoon with which I was taking my jollof rice, I didn’t know when I dropped it on the ground instead of the table, I dropped it on the ground. I shivered. I felt it to the marrow of my bones. I thought he would have made it. I never expected his death now. I did not; if he had been in Nigeria, maybe but in overseas? No. But I am praying that God never abandons him in His kingdom. When Jesus came, He liberated the oppressed, He gave the blind sight, Ojukwu followed that example, he liberated the oppressed. Igbos are being desecrated, I was there; from time to time, we will go to the airport to receive corpses during the pogrom. He had the mind to carry the people, unshaken for that period of three years. God didn’t want him to go beyond this.

So, I thank God for his soul because God will not abandon him because His ways are not our ways, His plans are not our plans, His thoughts are not our thoughts. It’s there in the Bible; people might condemn you but God will not do so. God is a powerful God and He gave him the chance to do all these things. He could have been eliminated during the war, but no, he did as a human being, Jesus is a Spirit. I’m only sorry that much time was not given to him so that he would eventually live to see more progress in Nigeria.

Utterances of Bigotry and Hatred against the Igbo, Northern Nigeria House of Assembly, Feb-March 1964

2011-12-17T12:28:00.000-08:00

“On the allocations of plots to Ibos, or allocation of stalls I would like to advise the minister that these people know how to make money and we do not know the way and manner of getting about this business. We do not want Ibos to be allocated with plots, I do not want them to be given plots.”

---------------Mallam Muhammadu Mustapha Maude Gyari

“I would like you, as the Minister of land and Survey, to revoke forthwith all certificates of occupancy from the hands of the Ibos resident in the Region. [Applause from the assembly floor].

--------------Mallam Bashari Umaru

“I am very glad that we are in Moslem country, and the government of Northern Nigeria allowed some few Christians in the region, to enjoy themselves according to the belief of their religion, but building of hotels should be taken away from the Ibos and even if we find some Christians who are interested in building hotels and have no money to do so, the government should aid them, instead of allowing Ibos to continue with the hotels.”

--------------Mr. A. A. Agigede

“I am one of the strong believers in Nigerian unity, and I have hoped for our having a United Nigeria, but certainly if the present trend of affairs continues, then I hope the government will investigate first the desirability and secondly the possibility of extending the Northernization policy to the petty Ibo traders. [Applause].

--------------Prof. Iya Abubakar (special Member: Lecturer, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria)

“I would like to say something very important that the Minister should take my appeal to the federal government about the Ibos in the Post Office. I wish the members of these Ibos be reduced. There are too many of them in the North. They were just like sardines and I think they were just too dangerous to the region.”

---------------Mallam Mukhtar Bello

“Mr. Chairman, Sir, well, first and foremost, what I have to say before this honorable House is that we should send a delegate to meet our honorable Premier to move a Motion in this very Budget Session that all the Ibos working in the Civil Service of Northern Nigeria, including the native authorities, whether they are contractors, or not, should be repatriated at once.

--------------Mallam Ibrahim Muse
“There should be no contracts either from the government, native authorities, or private enterprises given to Ibo contractors. [Government Bench: Good talk and shouts of “Fire the Southerners.”] Again Mr. Chairman, the foreign firms too should be given time limit to replace all Ibos in their firms by some other people.”

--------------Mallam Bashari Umaru

“It is my most earnest desire that every post in the region, however small it is, be filled by a Northerner. [Applause]”

-------------The Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sarduana of Sokoto

“What brought the Ibos into this region? They were here since the colonial days. had it not been for the colonial rule, there would hardly have been any Ibo in this region. Now that there is no colonial rule the Ibos should go back to their region. There should be no hesitation about this matter. Mr. Chairman, North is for Northerners, east for the easterners, West for for the Westerners, and the Federation is for all. [Applause}.”

--------------Alhaji Usman Liman

“Mr. Chairman, Sir, I do not like to take up much of the time of this House in making explanations, but I would like to assure members that having heard their demands about Ibos holding land in Northern Nigeria, my ministry will do all it can to see that the demands of members are met. How to do this, when to do it, all this should not be disclosed. In due course, you will all see what will happen. [Applause]”

-------------Alhaji Ibrahim Musa Cashash, Minister of Land and Survey

(Statements on the floor of the Northern House of Assembly on what to do about the Igbos - [Feb-March 1964] presented by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu at the OAU Special Session, Addis Ababa, August 05, 1968.)

C. Odumegwu Ojukwu on "The Future Of Africa"

2011-12-15T15:59:00.000-08:00

“...Colonial state generates a colonial posture. This automates a series of complexes which remain with the African long after the colonial stimulus has ceased to have direct contact. The continuation of these complexes is seen in a state of mind which permits colonialism as a reflex. During this period the remoteness of the stimulus is often misinterpreted as nonexistent, thus generating a false sense of security in the minds of Africans lately out of bondage. The stimulus exists, its virulence undiminished. In fact, what happens is that the imperial power at this time, finding itself undisturbed, conserves energy, spreads its contagion, prepares the ground, and concentrates all its efforts toward the achievement of its main objective--that of economic exploitation.

These were my views as a student, discovered in a pile of my student-days essays. Today, after fifteen years, my views remain sunstantially unchanged. The future of Africa depends entirely on the ability of the African to overcome his own colonial mentality, which permits his erstwhile colonial masters to manage him by impulses generated from a remote control station, usually some European capital.

For the African, therefore, to measure up as a man in the full sense of the word, for him to be truly free, it becomes imperative that he must first understand himself, his psychological disability, then recognize his enemy--still his erstwhile colonial master--recognize the fact of neocolonialism, its destructive potential, and then take urgent and drastic steps to rid himself of this malignant blight which, if left unchecked, will surely destroy him. This is why I believe that the Black man will not emerge until he is able to build modern states based on a compelling African ideology.

The need for an African ideology arises from the fact that the withdrawal of the colonial masters and the effect of a long period under tutelage left most emergent African countries with an ideological vacuum. In order to fill this vacuum, the battle for men’s minds continues in Africa today. The African leaders is often left with very little to choose between one ideology or the other, each designed to serve needs other than his own. It is this that creates in Africa a state of instability, and this instability is bound to continue until Africa generates from within an ideology of equal dynamism that can fill the vacuum and act as a bulwark against foreign imposition. Our struggle, therefore, is African nationalism conscious of itself and fully aware of the powers with which it is contending...”

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Biafra Lodge, Owerri, May 30, 1969

Ojukwu on "Our Role In The Development Of Nigeria"

2011-12-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

Christian education and Western training stimulated and enriched our native resourcefulness, industry, and dynamism and so contributed in no small measure to the leading role we played in the development of Nigeria during the half century before 1966. In all spheres of life in the former Federation of Nigeria--economic, social, cultural, political, and constitutional--we were in the forefront of the struggle for unity and equality, justice and progress. Economically, down to the late 1950s, our territory was relegated to the backwaters as a destitute area. national institutions, projects, and utilities were deliberately sited outside our territory.

Nevertheless, we invested confidently in the development of whole of Nigeria. We unhesitatingly built houses, hotels, shops, market stalls, etc,. in various parts of the country, sometimes on the strength of mere certificates of occupancy which could be, and indeed often were, revoked at will in Northern Nigeria. We provided intermediate and high-level manpower for the development of Nigeria, only to be later frustrated and expelled from positions we had earned on merit.

After the fashion of the Christian missionaries, we built schools and colleges and supplied teachers and lecturers for general education throughout the country. In the same manner, we established hospitals and nursing homes and provided doctors and nurses for healing and tending the sick. We strove in every way to identify ourselves with the peoples of the areas in which we settled. We spoke their language; we intermarried with them; and Northern Nigerians even declared that, because we wore their dresses, they had conquered us culturally. Yet, in spite of all this, in Northern Nigeria we were physically and socially segregated from the indigenous people. In contrast, the people of Western Nigeria who shared the same education and cultural experience, took pride in being “traditionally reluctant” to settle in and contribute to the development of places outside their region...”

In the field of political and constitutional development, while we advocated a strong united Nigeria and had for our watchword one country, one constitution, one destiny, Northern Nigerians consistently and openly maintained that the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914 was “a mistake.” Not surprisingly, in January 1950, at the General Conference Summoned at Ibadan to discuss proposals for the review of the Nigerian Constitution, the Northern Nigerian delegates announced that “unless the Northern Central Legislature it would ask for separation from the rest of Nigeria on the arrangements existing before 1914.” In other words, Northern Nigeria would secede. Eventually, to avoid breaking up the country, we conceded this demand.

At the Ibadan conference of 1950, also, Northern Nigerians insisted that “only Northern Nigerian male adults of twenty five years or more, resident in the region for three years, should be qualified for election to the Northern House of Assembly.” In reply, our delegates were obliged to enter a minority report in which they raised an issue of fundamental principle. They asserted:

“It is our view invidious that any Nigerian could under a Nigerian Constitution be deprived of the right of election to the House of Assembly in any region in which he for reason of the accident of birth or ancestry.”

Three years later, in May 1953, during one of the recurrent constitutional crises of those years, Northern Nigeria again agitated for secession. They published an eight point proposal for the establishment of a “Central Agency” to maintain what was in effect a Common Services Organization. To secure the implementation of this proposal by force, Northern Nigerian leaders organized and carried out violent demonstrations, during which they slaughtered and wounded hundreds of our people then resident in Kano, Northern Nigeria, acts of genocide which they had perpetrated at Jos in Northern Nigeria earlier in 1945. In the end, we had to abandon the idea of a strong and united country which we had been advocating and, with difficulty, persuaded Northern Nigeria to accept a stronger federal system of government than that which was envisaged by them.

The following year, as a result of its failure to absorb Lagos, Western Nigeria also threatened to secede and was only prevented from proceeding to make good the threat by a stern and timely warning from the British Secretary of State for the colonies, Mr. Oliver Lyttleton (afterward Lord Chandos).

Address Delivered at the OAU Special Session, Addis Ababa, August 05, 1968

Interview With Los Angeles Fashion Designer Porscha Starr

2011-12-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

Tell me about yourself

Porscha Woodard was born in Los Angeles, California. She is a 22 year old entrepreneur. Her interest is designing Lingerie. She is currently the CEO and Founder of Porscha Starr.

What inspired you into fashion and modeling?

For as long as I can remember I have been interested in fashion. I can think back to being a little girl and playing dress-up in my mother’s clothes, shoes and accessories.

I used to wish that I was old enough to wear her clothes and imagine my friends and myself going out and wearing the hottest clothes and driving the fanciest cars to accent our wardrobes. For Christmas I would get lots of dolls in all shapes, heights, colors and sizes and lots of clothes to dress them up in. My friends loved coming over to play and to see what amazing new thing that I have done to my dolls. As I got older, my friends began to call me up and ask if I could go shopping with them and assist them in finding the perfect outfit, especially at the beginning of the school year.

So what is fashion modeling to you?
Fashion Modeling is Classy, Sexy and very Edgy. Fashion Modeling introduces all the new hot and upcoming trends to the public eye.

What’s your take on the fashion industry?I believe the fashion industry is changing to a more futuristic style. The two female artists that have a huge impact on the fashion industry are Lady Gaga and Beyonce.

What are your best moments in the fashion shows you’ve featured?

My best moments are watching the models walk the runway; I love the walk, the wardrobe and the energy.

Do you play any musical instruments?
No

Who is your favorite performer?

Beyonce. She is an amazing performer, brings lots of energy to the crowd, and has awesome wardrobe and hairstyles.

What are you working on now?
Porscha Starr Lingerie new designs and upcoming events, currently preparing for Porscha Starr Launch event.

Any clothing line yet?

Yes. Clothing line is Porscha Starr.

www.porschastarr.com

Porscha Starr Lingerie Fashion Photo Shoot by Arthur St. John

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933-2011)

2011-12-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

“Our struggle is a positive commitment to build a healthy, dynamic, and progressive state which will be a bulwark against neocolonialism, and the pride of Black men the world over. The failure of the Nigerian experiment was a tragic result of a refusal by both Nigeria and the world to recognize, accept, and accommodate the obvious and painful fact that Nigeria was not and could never be a nation. The nations comprising the Federation lacked all the necessary factors for cohesion, and her peoples the necessary will. The center, therefore, could not hold.”

----------------------Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, 1969

Mississi, ele ebe umuazi gara? where have the kids gone, my father would ask my mother upon his return from his daily routine of trading at Mokola market in Accra, Ghana. My father never called the woman (my mother) he spent his lifetime savings to marry, by her first name until death did them part. It had always been mississi, and my father never added the letter “m” to lay a claim. It was just respect for the lady who bore all his children. Mma and Mpa, we hope you are all doing well out there in the environment only our Creator knows, and, still, beyond our reasoning.

We talked a lot about a country and ethnic group we knew nothing of; just that our parents spoke the language to us even though we talked back sometimes in Ga, having identified themselves as a people with distinct language and culture, way far from where we lived.

We were little brats, diversified in culture and ethnic origin, growing up, playing together on the playgrounds and amusement parks at Ruga, Nima and Kanda Estates. We watched all the television movies and knew all the casts by their names, including the sports telecasts--Bonanza, High Chaparral, “Marverick,” The Lone Ranger, The Saint, Ghanaian National Football League engagements and often times, the Black Fire card playing games in our neighborhood--together with my childhood pals; Theodore Onyeji, Eugene Onyeji, John Bull and Hellistus and on occasions, with Chukwu Egbejimba.

While growing up in that multi-ethnic, multicultural multireligious community, I watched my father and his Igbo kins in the neighborhood, gather and talk about developments in their homeland, the fate of their brothers, sisters and relatives. I had noticed something out of the ordinary brewing in my native-land as my father’s gestures and expressions obviously indicated, which as it appeared, was full of uncertainties. It was not to be pleasant; the consequences would be ominous when Yakubu Gowon’s-led genocidal campaign quest against the Igbo nation was all over.

Afrter my first experience during the time Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in Ghana, February 1966, some five weeks before the military juntas carried out a coup that would fail in Nigeria from around which the Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and a few northern Nigeria politicians and military personnel lost their lives. My father and his kinsfolk within the Accra metropolis wore troubling looks, and had been restless on what they have been hearing over the air waves and reading all along from the news reels, including the speculations which spread all over, in form of propaganda about declaration of war.

Major General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi had been flogged, kidnapped and brutally murdered in a counter coup, organized by a Murtala Mohammed-led northern Nigeria military mutineers, six months after taking the nation’s affairs of state, during which time he sacked the regional administrations and appointed military governors, promulgating new decrees, particularly Decree no. 34, also known as the Unification Decree in attempt to unite the country after the January 15, 1966 coup.. Lt.-Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu was assigned to the Eastern Region. “Decree 34 was intended to establish a National Executive Council for the whole country with the regional military governors as members and to unify the top cadres of the civil service to ensure the efficient administration of the country for the duration of the military regime. Ironically enough, it was this decree that sparked off widespread rioting and violence directed against the lives and property of Eastern Nigerians in Northern Nigeria. It did not seem to matter to the leaders who planned the riots that Eastern Nigerians were in a terrible minority (3 out of 9 members) in the Supreme Military Council that too the collective decision.”

But the pogrom which would erupt in the aftermath of Ironsi’s assassination by the bloodletting nihilists would be a case of a shocking realization to my father and his kinsfolk who had become worried on the sudden about face in the country’s state of affairs that would place Nd’Igbo in fear, being sought from place to place, persecuted and murdered in the most brutal way; and which would eventually lead to the thirty-month civil war Igbos would be desperately starved to death, outnumbered, plundered and demolished.

While my father and his folks focused on the next line of action as to the fate of their country men all around Nigeria, coupled with the fear of what was unfolding; we, the little kids, also, wondered what was going on, even though we were clueless of what had become of my native-land, especially on relatives in a far away land we knew nothing of or have seen, and yet to encounter.

However, it came to a point when we got the drift--that war had broken out in my native-land between the federal Nigerian vandals and a newly created sovereign nation of Biafra. The chant of Biafra begun to fill the air in our neighborhood with my father and his folks clung on to the transistor radio my father used to check for updates and the goings on in and around a war torn Biafra-Nigeria world. A new nation had been born and, Ojukwu had justified the declaration of Biafran nationhood from series of consultation with the international and diplomatic community; his regional kith and kins; the Consultative Assembly and Council of Elders and Chiefs; and a war-mongering Yakubu Gowon-led federal Nigerian invaders and vandals who would not respect and uphold the decisions reached at Aburi, Ghana.

Ojukwu was born on November 4, 1933, in Zungeru, Northern Nigeria, a very small town the colonial administrator Frederick Lugard picked as capital over Jebba and Lokoja on the basis Zungeru was in the center. Before the crisis of 1966, many Igbo people lived in its proximity. Zungeru, also, the birthplace of the Great Zik of Africa, the nation’s keystone founder, as well, had a population of about 3000 by then.

Ojukwu’s military conversion took place in 1957 when he joined the Nigerian Army as the first indigenous university graduate. He would enter Eaton Hall Cadet School in Chester, England, that same year, and would be commissioned with the rank of second lieutenant. He would later attend officers courses at the Hythe and warminister and would return to Nigeria in 1958; and would be appointed Company Commander of the Fifth Battalion of the Nigerian Army, in Kano, immediately. In May 1969, he was promoted to general by unanimous decision of the Biafra Consultative Assembly. Upon his return from the Ivory Coast on unconditional pardon by President Shehu Aliyu Shagari in 1982, countless honors were bestowed on him. Among the honors, the first title granted an Igbo by his kith and kin, the Ikemba 1 of Nnewi; Dike Di Oranma 1 of Igboland; Eze Igbo Gburugburu and numerous other titles as title holding in Igboland had become paramount.

Ojukwu had been the subject of uncountable literary works by writers, journalists, documentaries and scholarly projects. Practically everything known about Ojukwu up to his return to Nigeria from exile through his jail time under the despotic Muhammadu Buhari-Tunde Idiagbon military juntas, had been based on what he said and wrote in his books, and countless newspaper articles by writers and journalists; and speeches and interviews.

And like in his book “Biafra: Selected Speeches and Random Thoughts,” (Harper and Row Publishers, New York: 1969) he talked about a Nigeria the Igbo had given much to in order to make it work only to be faced with bigotry and hatred by a collaborative Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba and foreign backed nihilists who had proclaimed Igbos to be the nation’s problems. Nevertheless, as it was clearly known that the Hausa-Fulani northern Nigeria had been the architects of secession with a mandate to opt out of a Nigerian national state they had said was not workable, until they ate up their words from a British guided thinking to stay put with the opportunity to take control of the fabricated nation, in its time of uncertainties and foreseeable conflicts leading to the pogrom of May 1966 through Declaration and then a terribly costly civil war which by all accounts could have been avoided had Gowon and his murderous gang heeded to the genuine mandate at Aburi.

And despite all the efforts for Nigeria to work, avoiding the current trend of friction in the country after the July 29, 1966 murder of Ironsi and a continuous pogrom that followed, which had begun to spread all over the country from region to region as Igbos flee wherever they were and a federal Nigeria guaranteeing no Eastern Nigerian lives, the Consultative Assembly and the Advisory Committee of Chiefs and Elders of eastern Nigeria in its ever tasking assignments after its August 31, 1966 session, passed the following resolution:

1. We the representatives of the various communities in Eastern Nigeria gathered in this Consultative Assembly, hereby declare our implicit confidence in the military governor for Eastern Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, in all the actions he has so far taken to deal with the situation which has arisen in Nigeria since May 29, 1966.

2. In view of the grave threat to our survival as a unit in the Republic of Nigeria, we hereby urge and empower and advise him to take all such actions that might be necessary to protect the integrity of Eastern Nigeria and the lives and property of its inhabitants.

3. We advise constant consultation by His Excellency with the Consultative Assembly.

4. In view of the gravity of the present situation, we affirm complete fault in and urge the need for solidarity of eastern Nigeria as a unit.

On September 12, 1966, Ojukwu’s broadcast with regards to the Eastern Region delegation to the regional conference in Lagos was seen as a move to seek mediation to the crisis in the country and possible agreement on agitated confederation. As it turned out, all said and endorsed was negated by a preplanned Gowon’s-led nihilists, erupting a new cycle of pogrom in Makurdi, Minna, Gboko, Kaduna, Kano and several other cities agains Eastern Nigerian indigines, killing thousands of people in a body count that included women and children.

It was not until January 1967, that after much bloodshed and, looting and coercion and theft of Igbo properties by the bloodthirsty cannibals of northern Nigeria, that another mediation was sought by the international community on advisory and, on how the pogrom brought to an end; giving peace a chance. Gowon’s-led genocidal campaign to wipe out Igbo from the face of the earth had agreed to submit to a meeting that probably would amount to cessation of the widespread killing of Igbos in the north and elsewhere in the country with resolutions seeking and mandating moderate ways and means to living as neighbors. Ojukwu had organized his entourage in an occasion to be chaired by Ghana’s Joseph Ankrah, who had called for the meeting in Aburi, Ghana. The meeting was well attended and a resolution reached after presentations were made from both sides.

I remember the time when the federal Nigeria delegation and and Ojukwu’s-led Eastern Nigeria entourage had arrived Aburi, and my father and his kinsfolk listened and watch each other talk about the conference, and the ongoing conflict in Nigeria; being bold and confident that a presentation so compelling and posturing brought along by Ojukwu and his eastern Nigerian delegates presenting its case of pogrom, an act carried out on a wholesale enterprise to eliminate the Igbo nation, would come to an end and bot sides could move on until a path to good and normal governance was generated. But that wouldn’t be the case; Gowon and his murderous gang would change their minds disagreeing with the decision, and would fire the first shot to declare a full blown assault on the Eastern Region.

Even as little kids, we were conscious of these things and able to read the dailies including the late editions. I remember the day Teddy’s father walked in one evening with a copy of the “Evening News” its headline read, “Ojukwu wants Gowon.” I had read out loud the headline as Teddy’s father held the newspaper. Teddy’s father was uplifted in spirit though somehow astonished that a kid my age could read and perhaps knew more about the forbidden war.

The year was 1967, and Biafran troops, in a minute, on August 9, had overrun Benin, and had mounted a flag, proclaiming the Midwest a republic of its own, the Republic of Benin, with Lagos, its next target of invasion to end the unnecessary war, had a simple resolution held at Aburi was respected and upheld; which was what begun all the betrayals. First, the Igbos were determined to distance themselves from their Igboness by collaborating with a federal Nigeria initiatives on the quest for pogrom ideologically well ingrained it became so plausible like telling a child misleading stories by way of good ideas being planted in the child’s brain which ultimately becomes difficult to erase. The case of one of Igbo intellectuals in the likes of Anthony Ukpabi Asika who had taken up the assignment of administrator of the East Central State Gowon had mapped out as war strategy to plunder and demolish the Igbo nation, was a typical example of intellectuals of Asika’s magnitude who succumbed to gullible, vulnerable rhetorics in a situation their own people were massacred anywhere they were found by the British-Russia backed federal Nigeria vandals. Asika was in Lagos as absentia administrator of the East Central State when his own very kith and kins had been denied access to the outside world, capsulated and destroyed beyond comprehension, Ojukwu compassionately mentioned of those who had betrayed “our” confidence in a blink of an eye to wipe out Igbo in its totality, and from its existence. Asika would turn out to be the worst thing ever to happen to Igbo people when he had returned to Enugu after the war to sit in as administrator on his own slogan that “onye ube ruru le ya rachaa” which was the beginning of bribery and corruption in post-civil war Igbo nation.

The Lagos government of Gowon had panicked on Biafra’s fast pace development in catching up with federal Nigeria war of annihilation which extended to the military governor of the Northern Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Usman Hassan Katsina, “not ruling out compulsory military service for Northerners” bragging Biafra would cease to exist in “a matter of hours.” A very long war and the most blood soaked event in the entire continent’s history, would continue apace, even when the Midwest governor Lieutenant Colonel David Ejoor had sworn while addressing Asaba people, said he would not live to see a Midwest turned into battlefield, while Gowon, in his so-called “tactical move” warns against tuning in to Biafra radio, arresting “500 people” in its violation.

The external service of the Broadcasting Corporation of Biafra (BCB) was indeed a powerful tool by way of its efficient, effective and thorough broadcasting, announced by Ikenna Ndaguba, among others. My little neigborhood on the outskirts of Accra would be unusually spooky and normal when Ndaguba is on the air proclaiming that:

“Nigerian troops had entered Ogoja. Chief Awolowo, leader of of the Nigerian delegation to OAU meeting in Kinshasha, leaves Lagos for Congo. He tells the press that before the end of the meeting Biafra will be crushed and the Biafran government will be overthrown.”

Though such announcements did not fly, it was something serious and a more formidable, strategic Biafra, well placed to resolve the drama, ending the war after Major A. Okonkwo had made the “Declaration of the Republic of Benin.”

But there would be an interference in that major breakthrough which gave Benin its sovereignty as Biafrans were Western hinterland bound to Ore and then in a move that would have closed the ugly chapter. On September 20, 1967, the Biafran Liberation Army under the order of Brigadier Victor Banjo would withdraw Biafran troops from Benin to Agbor for no apparent reason which would bring about the fall of Benin to federal Nigerian troops, shattering all the hopes of liberation and “ceasing hostilities” by “offering peaceful settlement and by publishing proposals for a future relations bewteen Nigeria and Biafra.”

With the unfolding events as Ojukwu had prepared to present to OAU in its next meeting to be held in Kinshaha, Congo, a coup plot would be uncovered to overthrow the Biafran government through a high profile Biafran intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel Emmanuel Ifeajuna who would collaborate with Banjo and two others in their command, would be apprehended while leaving the compound of the British High Commission. During the course of Biafran intelligence work, thousands of Nigerian pounds would be found at Banjos apartment given to him by the British High Commission as fee to mastermind the overthrow of the Biafran government, with intention to abrogate the sovereign state of Biafra.

As it happened, Ojukwu would make a national broadcast with the notification of the fall of Benin because of the “deliberate withdrawal of our troops by the coup plotters.” On September 23, 1967, the four major actors of the coup--Banjo, Ifeajuna, et al.--would be court-martiled and summarily executed, which begun a whole new chapter in a war that was almost done with a Biafran victory--liberation, jubilation and celebration.

Upon the summary execution of Ifeajuna and his sabo-colleagues, traitors, the name Ifeajuna instantly became a notoriously household name as the brother who sold his own brother on the way to fight the enemies. There was a song for it: “awee mu na nwanne kwuru gaa ogu, Ifeajuna di na uzo ree nwanne ya...”

Ifeajuna had fled to Ghana on the warmth embrace of Nkrumah (who had applauded the first coup of January 15, 1966 masterminded by Ifeajuna and his colleagues in the Nigerian Army) but would return home an Ironsi’s amnesty.

As seemingly the war would drag on accounts of banjo, Ifeajuna, et al. betrayals conniving with the Gowon-British High Commission deal, and the recapture of Benin by federal Nigerian troops, Ojukwu, before addressing the joint meeting of the Council of Chiefs and Elders, January 27, 1968, to introduce Biafra’s new currency in circulation, compiled the following in his diary:

December 25, 1967: Pope Paul VI sends two representatives to Lagos on a peace mission.

January 1, 1968: Gowon gives March 31, 1968, as the deadline for crushing Biafra...Lagos government announces change of currency as an economic measure against Biafra.

January 5, 1968: Gowon boasts about his “biggest military machine in Africa” which is to crush Biafra by March 31, 1968.

January 6, 1968: Collin C. MacDonald, Headmaster, Hope Waddell Training Institute, Calabar, in a letter to the London Times, accuses the Lagos government of not providing the “fundamental requirements” of security of life and property of law abiding citizens. This letter arouses protest from the International Red Cross against the conduct of the war by Gowon’s troops.

January 16 1968: Poisoned foodstuffs being smuggled to Biafra by Lagos government are seized by Nigerian troops at Ena Ora (Midwest) and mistakenly distributed to areas in Benin, Western Nigeria, and Okene in the North. Cases of death.

January 22, 1968: Nigerian currency notes cease to be legal tender in Biafra.
January 27, 1968: Biafra new currency introduced at meeting of the 7th Session of the Consultative Assembly and the Council of Chiefs and Elders.”

The nasty war would, however, rage on; losing all options to have overcome a British-Russian backed vandals, until formal ceasefire in January 1970. The war, would be declared “no victor, no vanquished,” by the leadership of a blood-lust Gowon. Ojukwu would leave and seek exile in the Ivory Coast, where he would spend thirteen years.

In Accra, the reactions was a cold feeling for a lost battle, and warmth feelings of euphoria for a bitter war begun from the pogrom, eventually ended with staggering casualties. Without much ado, my father summoned meetings, like he had done during the course of the conflict, to monitor and analyze the effects; but this time around by which the war ended, the meetings had been on body counts, family loses and what would be next step to follow. Apparently, every of my father’s kins residing in the Accra metropolis lost at least one soul to the civil war. Some had left immediately back to homeland while some had stayed for reason or the other. My father did not leave for reasons behind his children’s education until he was able to figure something out, especially for this writer who had to be homeward bound; and getting to know a people whose history had been unique and profoundly rich in culture, and whose history would turn out to be of political impotence and violence, of late.

As the relative discourse of the war and the wondering of Ojukwu’s plight which took center stage in every aspect of life among my father’s kinsfolk, and with the mental exhaustion of a pogrom-civil war era, and a downsizing Ghana’s workforce and collapsing economy due to an inept, corrupt and mismanaged Ghanaian resources by the Emmanuel Kotoka-Joseph Ankrah-Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa-led military juntas, upon overthrowing Nkrumah’s administration, most Igbo residents in Accra made up their minds to leave with their families back home and start life anew or seek life elsewhere.

Ojukwu would arrive lagos on the coach of Chuba Okadigbo, the presidential adviser on Political Affairs to Shagari, and who also had been Ojukwu’s personal friend and counsel, and chief negotiator and spokesman on matters of pardon to the erstwhile Biafran leader. Okadigbo had left a legacy during the political debates and series of television interviews that led to Ojukwu’s pardon. And when asked why Gowon had to be pardoned before Ojukwu on the basis Ojukwu was the first casualty of the nation’s most wanted men. Okadigbo, in a nutshell, came up with the riddle of the African continent where big trees falls on one another, on the road, and that lifting the one on the ground one must start from lifting up the one on top of the one on the ground.

Lagos had to be “bursting loose” upon Ojukwu’s return clouded all around the coast by Igbo men and women from all walks of life, gracefully appreciating a pardon and return that was seen in some circles as politically motivated. Ojukwu’s pardon was preceded by that of Gowon, who, too, had been declared a fugitive for masterminding on February 13, 1976, the brutal murder of Mohammed, who had relieved Gowon of his post in a coup, six months earlier, and had begun the immediate purge of the civil service that had no sense of purpose and mostly corrupt.

Within the trend of inexplicable events, Ojukwu would register his membership with the ruling party, National Party of Nigeria (NPN) that granted him unconditional presidential pardon, declaring his senate candidacy for Nnewi Senatorial District, his home base, on the platform of the NPN. There would be shouting matches, fights organized on political thuggery, deadly gangs road rage in bitter political campaigns at Nkpor Junction, incitements of division among the Igbo elite, and all sorts of friction between Ojukwu and his political opponent, Dr. Edwin Onwudiwe, in the senate race.

Ojukwu would lose in that bitter election, and the administration that had granted him pardon would be overthrown in a bloodless coup three months after the incumbent, Shagari was inaugurated for a second term.

Ojukwu’s political rebirth would surface again in the Fourth Republic when the Abdulsalami Abubakar’s-led military juntas had lifted the ban on political activities. In Ojukwu’s political reawakening, Chekwas Okorie, who had founded a new political party, All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) with intention of Igbo stock, had shopped around the United States for a Igbo Diaspora alliance and stalwarts to add flavor to the party’s agenda. I was in many of the meetings on the arising matters regarding the direction of APGA before Okorie went back home to place APGA’s agenda on table and ballot for the presidential election.

As it also happened, Ojukwu was nominated APGA’s presidential candidate and a shot at the presidency with incubent President Olusegun Obasanjo, and numerous other parties’ presidential candidates. Ojukwu lost the presidential election to Obasanjo and would henceforth be active in all Igbo-related politics which came with making political enemies along the way, typical of the saying, politics makes strange bedfellows.

Ojukwu would be struck with a major stroke and would be flown to a London hospital for treatment. On saturday, November 26, 2011, Ojukwu died after more than a year battle trying to recover from the stroke. He was seventy-eight years old.

You paid your dues and will be missed. Adios, Amigo!

Ambrose Ehirim

The Anti-Igbo Pogrom--Wole Soyinka

2011-11-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

“And there, with the shift of power, the nation hoped that the bloodletting would cease -- but no. A progressive pogrom of the Igbo erupted in October the same year, a hunt for Easterners of all ages who were unfortunate enough to have heeded the call of the new regime to return to their places of work and residence in the North, reassured that all was well. They were gruesomely mistaken. Not merely from the North but from every corner of the nation, the Igbo fled homeward, wheeled contraptions every kind bearing their dismal remains and possessions into Igboland. The trainloads of refugees from the North bore pitiable cargoes; some survivors with physical mutilations, some women in such a state of shock that they clung to the severed heads of their spouses or sons, cradling them on their laps. Even within Lagos, the hunt for the Igbo continued unabated, in their homes and at roadblocks. The depletion of my wife’s wardrobe during the months of October and November was only one of many private testimonies to the desperation of one’s Igbo male acquaintance--not all of them soldiers--who resorted to female disguise to escape detection as they fled eastward. Images of death and mutilation in eastern journals and the television coverage of a savaged humanity erased the final sense of belonging in a people who saw themselves isolated within the nation and catalyzed their resolve to secede.”

Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka from his memoir “You Must Set Forth At Dawn.” The Random House Publishing Group; New York: 2006

Story Never Ends For Igbo Writer In America

2011-11-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

Just like any other day in Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the universe, and a world that stomps on the Hollywood Walk of Fame twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and three hundred and sixty five days in a year, sightseeing and appreciating the good things of life brought about by inspiration and the wisdom of humankind.

With a flexible schedule and as things happen, and with all the stuff in my head -- some mysterious voices -- the projects I carry on my shoulders keeping up with time, thinking that I have it all together and figured out, not knowing it’s a whole lot of bunch untouched; that kept piling up as I lay pretending to be unperturbed; that it’s all fine, when a caseload of stuff yet to be done, drives me crazy.

Now overwhelmed and all mixed up; looking more and more like going through stuff I have crossed in the past while shuffling. But again, I was only visualizing from what I had been encountering all these moments, I dabbled myself into something of a long, packed closet boxes, that now needs to be dusted off; going back to the past like starting all over again.

Like one of the days back in the day, I usually keep the tabs of the goings on within my schedules every popped out events I had imagined was worth the take for keeping up toward the scheme of things in making the surroundings one lives in, a place that should be known for what it produces, characterizing it as trademark and universally accepted.

It has been a year or something now I have not been that outgoing due to the circumstances I found myself in -- diverting my course of direction, devoting more time on projects I had thought should get going before not catching up anymore and wasting all the precious time that may not be regained again; coupled with a whole lot of writing assignments -- notes on the facts and logic about a complicated Nigerian national state, affairs of state of a jumbled and bellicose Igbo nation I have been weary of pointing out, an all time Igbo Diaspora life, the African Union and an organization without rhythm, African Americans I have encountered in Los Angeles and all around the United States.

Moreover, it also did not keep out my contribution to creation, knowing my value by way of growth doing scholarly work, helping folks at public institutions who needed me on a variety of their quest for knowledge, and meeting new people in a new era; going with the flow as filmmaker, actress and friend, Esosa Edosomwan would tell me.

In my own world, what I thought I had accomplished in this day and age of madness in a dramatically changed world I have been very slow catching up.

The times of turmoil and triumph-trending women in my life; experiences with Igbo professionals, accomplished scholars and intellectuals; my colleagues in the media and generally the entertainment landscape I never imagined in a lifetime would be so, as in thoughts, passion, and actively the way it streamed along to my liking.

Reflections and the streaming days of the playgrounds at Ruga Park, by 37 Barracks of the Ghana Army at Accra; the childhood buddies -- Eugene Onyeji, Theodore Onyeji, Edward Chukwumezie, Hillary Akabuilo, Chukwu Egbejimba, Ijeoma Egbejimba, Hellistus Eke, Fanmi “Polo” Ahmed, Oko Ahmed, Emmanuel Kudjo, John Kudjo, Zakary Ibrahim, Adamu Ibrahim, Manma Sani, John Satorji, Paapa, John Bull whose Mary Go Round crash got us all cracking up but with feelings for the spoiled brat who could not hang with us at the Kanda Estate playgrounds, the Adangbe friends, Akan friends, Ashanti friends, Hausa friends, Wangara friends, Tamale friends and friends too numerous to mention, including Said Usman whom I had bumped into some few months ago while on research work and he looking for an ideal place for recess before his routine prayers at the Mosque on Exposition and Vermont, just by the corridors of University of Southern California. Usman was the last guy I could have thought grew on the same block with me in Ghana, I would meet after all these years.

With all that interest, friends long lost I have found and friends long forgotten that found me in this new age of social networking -- Silas Onyeiwu Snr. (during our Lagos days of uncertainties and our future), Gordy Ekechukwu (our Lagos days of projected higher learning pursuits), Kendryx Alfadoh (colleague in disc-jockeying, rooftop dancing, pub-crawling and partying all around Eko), Emmanuel Okafor-Ize (my hangout guy at FESTAC Town who shovelled me around and showed me the way of Los Angeles upon my arrival), Pius Obasi Totti (from the high school days of NASCO and Ikeji Arondizuogu), Aloysius Duru (from high school to the days of invading my village and me paying back invading Umuowa in return, just for the girls), Tony Ike Okpara (from high school to bad bay image days in Los Angeles), Destiny Anorue (my little cousin who saw me last when I bid the village bye), my nephews Tobechukwu, Kelechi, Iwgebuike, Ezenwa, Chika, Chidera and Uchechi (who finally caught up with me and getting it straight, eventually, in the long run.

The hurdle, inspiration, motivation and getting orderly coming to terms with reality on life being what you make it.

And, of course, that little boy about to be six-years-old in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, held to his hand by his father while they walked down the street to Nima Roman Catholic School in what would be a journey to eternity, commencing his first day at school, learning every day of his life that he would be an obedient boy and become the youngest ever to receive the Holy Communion and Confirmed according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The little kid talked about in the Diocese -- Rev. Fr. Lobianco, Rev. Fr. Tonti, Sister Mary, Brother John, and Arch Bishop Joseph Bowers.

The little kid on his way to school on that morning of February 24, 1966, grabbed by soldiers of the Ghanaian Army. Not scared and having no clue what the siege was all about, the soldiers comforted him just by the barriers of Flagstaff House and Nima, telling him that Ghana has changed, heading toward a new order on a calculated operation for a better Ghana. Nkrumah’s regime had been toppled by the Emmanuel Kotoka-led military juntas (upcoming memoirs), and a new era in the nation’s history, which would lead to many, many inexplicable events -- the counter coup, Arthur-Yeboah, Ankrah, Afrifa -- and the Afrifa transition -- to the nation’s Second Republic taken away by Kofi Busia.

Life’s journey -- the trails, good, bad and ugly -- never ceases to be amazing, amusing and fascinating. It has been what kept humankind going, the inspiration and hope of getting it straight that the future is well abound, the expectations -- high and fortunate -- not to give up.

It is with these high expectations that humankind continues to explore, work very hard to meet these goals on the ideological bearings there is no substitute for hard work, which pays off, eventually.

So, as I sat down in my little study with heaps of junked literature, neglected newspapers and magazines needed to be dumped in the waste bin, clipped articles, abstracts from archives culled from libraries around my state and other channels open for learning and research work elsewhere in America, I venture into using what I have acquired by way of the endeavors to gather and provide, in order to appreciate and extend to others what had been given to me, which makes a better world that we live in today -- the gift of sharing.

Through the gift of sharing and things like that, I have approached many institutions noted for collaborative works on research, philanthropy, welfare and other related social programs, to stand by my worthy causes as the chain and community grows.

So, as it happened, I bumped into folks while snacking and freelancing at the Wilshire Corridor hangout around the Miracle Mile in Greater Los Angeles, meeting diversified folks and going through “L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema,” the ongoing project playing for about a month now and ends on December 17, 2011 with closing remarks and special presentation by Ben Caldwell of “Spaces Looking In Looking Out” taking place at the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum, in collaboration with the Pan African Film Festival; and also initiated by the Getty Foundation, bringing together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene with presenting sponsors -- bank of America, The Getty, Pacific Standard Time: Art In L.A. 1945-1980, The warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, California Council for the Humanities and the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences.

What had captured my attention in this phenomenal epic project launched by UCLA School of Theater, Film And Television were: “Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification,” directed by Barbara McCullough; “Penintentiary,” directed by Jamaa Fanaka; “Sankofa,” directed by HaileGerima; “To Sleep With Anger,” directed by Charles Burnett, featuring Danny Glover; “Daughters of the Dust,” directed by Julie dash, about the story of descendants of escaped slaves living on the Southern coast of the U.S. in 1902 preparing for qa move to the mainland; “Bush Mama,” directed by Haile Gerima, inspired by seeing a Black woman in Chicago evicted in winter which he developed as his UCLA thesis, and many others.

“Penitentiary,” in particular, I had watched at the Roxy Cinema, Apapa-Lagos, upon its release, reading the movie’s preview in the Right On Magazine, way back when the movie premiered. Seeing it gain took me back to this Fanaka film, depicting prison as a microcosm of African Americans, seeing the prison system as a site of continual violent struggle against bot external (the prison itself) and internal (fellow prisoners) forces played out on the bodies of inmates, who are either sexually exploited or “beasts” (the exploiters).

As the historical event unveils at UCLA through December, the African American community, the African American Association of Journalists, scholars in film, television and the arts have focused on the need to bring forth the awareness of the history and origin of Black cinema, including the director of the project, Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak who had called it “seen the amazing expression of a unified and Utopian vision of a community and in “over three years getting to know the filmmakers, collecting their work.”

In one of my travels to see a couple of films at the event and while poking around the complexes before heading home I met South African born Razianna Myeni, Cassandra Pinson, Julius Baxter, Britney Johnson, Dee Dee Richardson and Ted Calloway who had just walked out seeing “Daydream Therapy,” directed by Bernard Nicolas while we sat on the balcony of one of the eateries talking about the festival over some coffee and light drinks, applauding Horak, the events director and Shannon Kelley, the events head of public programs for collectively coordinating with the filmmakers Haile Gerima, Zenaibu Irene Davis, Barbara McCullough, Charles Burnett, Fanaka, O. Fumilayo Makarah, Jaqueline Frazier, Billy Woodbury, Ben caldwell, Larry Clark, Julie dash, Carroll Parrott Blue, Allie Sharon Larkin, Alicia Dhanifu and many others, for the approach and allowing their works to be used at the festival.

Britney, who had been working on a documentary about inner city youths in South Central Los Angeles, simply put by Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak as “there are projects that take on a life of their own, as if reality suddenly asserts itself, grabbing an idea and shaking it so that it grows and grows,” which was the case when Britney took center stage in our round table discourse giving us a hint on one of the best documentary texts, pulling out from her bag Jack C Ellis and Betsy A. MClaine’s book “A New History Of Documentary Film,” in which every discussant (besides myself who’s yet to have a take on documentary films of sort), acknowledged Ellis and MClaine’s book being a guideline for those in documentaries and stuff of that nature.

Britney, who aspires to take her projects to the shores of Africa which would be part of her knowledge-based programs in the near future, with focus on Africa and its ever growing turmoil and cases of sad reality in the continent on varieties of complicated, ethno-cultural and religious issues and differences. As related, we begun to cite series of the continent’s problems from its precolonial state to its present day, in which, I, personally, have seen many unfold -- Ghana and Nigeria -- the many coups and counter coups I bear witness.

Within this very perspective, the troubled and unstable nature following independence of the number of nations in the continent and the purpose of that pursuit being able to rule on its own standard and based on its culture, I am compelled to ask, who are the Africans? How did they get there? How was it fabricated?

In reading Ali A. Mazrui’s “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” with regards to the African question, I came across a passage of inquiring minds and the conduct by which the continent named Africa came into being, popping out the question, “Where is Africa”? and Mazrui’s explanation:

“It could be said that Africa invented man, that Semites invented God and that Europe invented the world, or rather the concept of the world. Archaeology indicates that man originated in Africa. The Semitic people gave us the great monotheisthic world religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Europe developed the concept of the world in the wake of its voyages of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it even imposed its form of that concept on the outlook of peoples in other continents including Africans.”

And:

“ It is not possible to overestimate the enormous impact of Europe upon our perceptions of ourselves as Africans and upon our view of the universe...Even with regard to the size of the African continent, it is quite remarkable how far European ethnocentrism has influenced cartographic projections over the centuries.”

Mazrui would go on to be mad at African ancestors on considering the actual names of the different continents of the world. Mazrui, wondering about the political stupidity of Africa when other nations and continents had chosen its own name that conforms to the nature of their being, noting on the consequences and tragedy of the African continent and with a close look, may have provoked the ancestors and obviously could be seen all around “us” by which ancestral voice could be heard in the curse depicting neglect and abandonment:

“Warriors will fight scribes for the control of your institutions;
wild bush will conquer your road and pathways;
your land will yield less and less,
while your off-springs multiply;
your house will leak from the floods,
and your soil will crack from the drought;
your sons will refuse to pick up the hoe,
and prefer to wander in the wilderness;
you shall learn ways of cheating,
and you will poison the cola nuts you serve your own friends
Yes, things will fall apart...”

Of course, it all fell apart and the walls came tumbling down. Nkrumah predicted the fold, saw the debacle in and around the African continent which he forewarned in his earlier fear of a linkage between nuclear tests in the Sahara, racism in South Africa and recolonization of the entire continent; and astonishingly revealing from what he had said over fifty years ago. In April 1960, Nkrumah had addressed an international meeting in Accra on what he had seen with his two naked eyes in vision, which would be exploding sooner than later. Nkrumah said:

“Fellow Africans and friends, there are two threatening swords of Damocles hanging over the continent and we must remove them. These are nuclear tests in the Sahara by the French Government and the Apartheid policy of the Government of the Union of South Africa. It would be a great mistake to imagine that the achievement of political independence by certain areas of Africa will automatically mean the end of the struggle.”

In a statement made by the sage half a century ago and twenty-first century African continent, should it not be mind-boggling that Nkrumah who engineered the concept of a Pan African national state and had he been around today seeing the sorry state of the continent, would he not be worried and would he not be asking, what happened?

In Wole Soyinka’s “The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness,” lectures the Nobel Laureate delivered as the inaugural for the Dubois Institute Macmillan Lecture Series at Howard University in April 1977 citing President Nelson Mandela’s open confrontation with African National Congress (AFC) on “its own dismal record of needless cruelty and abuse of human rights, especially in prisons and detention camps run by the movement within friendly front-line states,” when the legendary Mandela had launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human right abuses during the Apartheid era on which Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison. The commission was established to heal the nation’s wounds through fact findings of the demons engaged in the human enterprise of unnatural taste, and to seek resolve by way of apologies and reparations.

And Soyinka had asked on such grounds, and in retrospect using the South African post-Apartheid model, if the same could be said of post-dictatorships in other African countries with its new democratic order, following in the foot steps of the Truth and reconciliation Commission. Soyinka writes:

“Would the Truth and Reconciliation ethic have been applicable, even thinkable in post-Acheampong Ghana? In post-Mobutu Zaire? Will it be adaptable in post-Abacha Nigeria? That circumstances make such a proceeding expedient is not to be denied, but we must not shy away from some questions: would it be just? And, more important, how does it implicate both the present and the future? The crimes that the African continent commits against her kind are of dimension and, unfortunately, of a nature that appears to constantly provoke memories of the historic wrongs inflicted on that continent by others.”

No question, I too had seen many documentaries, stories and newsreels of most atrocities in Africa by Africans. In my native land on which I have written extensively to near exhaustion on too many of the subjects. I weep each time I reflect to the atrocities, with the never ending question; Is humankind alert and would it happen again? Of, course, given the necessary circumstances, it would, and still happening, and would continue, over and over again while the world watch it unfold.

And my reaction to this had always been that when the unthinkable happens in a world that deliberately inflicts wounds on its own with the thought that at the end of every tragedy, there must be a moment of reconciliation. But what would reconcile what Elemi John Agbomi, in what he had told me not too long ago when I had interviewed him (this part not published) and narrating to me his experiences as a little boy in high school, then Government Secondary School, Afikpo, and how the federal Nigeria vandals invaded the land, sacking the place and cutting short his secondary education upon declaration of war by the vandals, thus firing the first shot. “Certainly, the Biafran War was a tragedy,” Agbomi would say. And what he had seen as a nation that deliberately ignored the ominous consequences of the pogrom and civil war, Agbomi begins to talk about his experiences during the war.

At barely fifteen years old when the vandals invaded and sacked his hometown of Adadama in what is now Cross River State, and while in refugee camp at a location near Mbano in what is now Imo State, he had been drafted and enlisted in the Biafran Army with badge number BA 30 400. He talked about all sorts of atrocities committed by the vandals upon arrival to any village or town they seem to have run down. Rape, looting, kidnapping was just the order. Agbomi, just young as to not knowing what had cut his education short, a full blown assault on his homeland and all the displaced persons he could not fathom how it came about “as people like “us” were all put together at one place (refugee camp) with rationing meals, not knowing when the next order will be made for evacuation as enemy attacks draws near and becomes imminent.” “Us” means Biafra, the Igbo speaking people (Ibibio, Kalabari, Efik, etc.)

Even with hunger and food rationing, some no doubt, at the camps, hopeless and having lost some of their relatives, held on, despite all the uncertainties, until the end of the war when he had felt liberation in a war torn eastern Region; and starting life anew, all over again, with a clean slate. But Agbomi’s eyewitness account of an Orwellian drama, did not stop, short of tales horrific in human nature -- the widespread raping of Igbo women, looting of properties, demolition and plundering of the Igbo nation by the vandals.

In Minna, then northern region of the fabricated Nigeria, and under the premiership of Ahmadu Bello, the Sarduana of Sokoto who ran the affairs of state and controlled the power block of the nation even though the central capital, Lagos, was the seat of government with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as prime minister on the platform of the Northern People Congress (NPC). Minna was another town of orgy revenge for the assassination of Balewa, Bello and other northern politicians who perished in the first military coup of 1966.

Michael Achebe Okongwu, only six years old, was in a Minna classroom as a primary school pupil when elements of the northern Islamic Jihadists, who were also hoodlums and nihilists, struck, invading the primary school where Okongwu attended, attacking every Eastern looking persons. In Okongwu’s classroom, where they were taking lessons from their teacher, a female and Yoruba by tribe, mistaken for Igbo, was brutally slain in the presence of her pupils by the nihilists who had been instructed to kill every Igbo. Even if the bare facts were known, almost no one understood the full intentions of the Hausa-Fulanis, including their Yoruba allies’ attempt to exterminate all Igbos. It was simply beyond the power of most peoples imagination. Okongwu, who now calls Southern California home, still cannot fathom the chaos, callousness, bigotry, hatred and ignorance of the premeditated pogrom of 1966 and 1967. In most times that we speak, and especially on the related pogrom and what he saw with his eyes as a little boy beginning the long walk and hauling, from Minna to Ogbunike and the continual assault by the vandals who violated every order, bombarding every enclave in Igboland, until vanquished, indicated there no such thing as one Nigeria. “I will never, ever forget,” Okongwu would always say.

Or the case of the late Egbebelu Ugobelu, born Samuel Obi, in Class 2, at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Grammar School, Abagana, when, also, the vandals invaded the land in the quest to wipe out the Igbo nation from the face of the earth through its war strategy of economic blockade, hunger, starvation and stone-walling. Growing up in Port Harcourt before admission to Nnamdi Azikiwe Grammar School for his secondary education, Pot Harcourt was an Igbo dominated town and had flourished with Igbo men of commerce and industry; higher education, academia and intellectuals.

During Gowon’s genocidal campaign against the Igbo nation, Ugobelu was enlisted in the Biafran Army and stationed at the Umuahia Brigade Command before Umuahia fell to the federal Nigeria vandals. The post-civil war would see him through National Grammar School, Nike, Enugu, completing secondary school and obtaining his West African School Certificate (WASC); employment at the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, Lagos; and selection for the “Crash Program” during the Murtala Mohammed-Olusegun Obasanjo-led military juntas’ projected courses, getting a shot at the United States and studying Accounting and Management Science before returning home and coming back to the shores of America four years later on the grounds of a failed state.

Ugobelu and I spoke uncountable times, and each time was about the pogrom, the civil war, Nd’Igbo and their place in history, and his experiences during the disturbances and conflicts that swallowed over two million people.

In his book, “Biafra War Revisited: A Concise And Accurate Account Of Events That Led To The Nigerian Civil War,” Ugobelu had suggestede “Biafra War,” on a title based on his notion that the war was “virtually” fought on Biafra. In many of our related discourses, he had thought I was one of the child soldiers, just from around my narratives of the northern Islamic nihilists and Gowon’s-led genocidal campaigns, until we had both begun to know each other very closely as we continued to learn from one another, detail by detail, what happened in the killing fields, the refugee camps, Obafemi Awolowo’s orchestrated “Economic Blockade,” the starvation to death of women, infants and children; and the aftermath of the projected pogrom --the horrific rape of Igbo women, and where many of the women (some tired, some reduced to animal and skeletal nature from being desperately starved), having no choice but to embrace the vandals, proclaimed liberators, to the chagrin of the survived Igbo men, who were too tired, poor, plundered and inhibited to take part in anything like that when the women were taken away, becoming the vandals’ stock.

And yet, after all these acts of human tragedy perpetrated on a people by the vandals, the Truth and Reconciliation commission created by the Olusegun Obasanjo-led regime in the Fourth Republic modelled after Mandela’s earlier commission in South Africa, under the chairmanship of Justice Chukwudifu Oputa was laughable and had no intention from its set up to investigate and find, arriving to conclusions acts of genocide committed by the blood thirsty cannibals. It is ironic, that most of these blood-lust vandals could not be asked to testify during the Oputa commission.

During Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Nigeria was already going through the hands of the despot, Sani Abacha. Soyinka’s W.E.B. Dubois’ Lecture at Howard University, particularly bent on the Truth and Reconciliation anticipating similar situation in his native country while on exile trooping the planet promoting his movement of democratic dispensation, and away from a country that had been ravaged by the despot Abacha, wishing it was the other way round. Abacha had wanted Soyinka dead or alive for inciting a pro-democracy movement that generated all the anger and frustration which was actually not concretely grounded because of its original base, and with that base, centered, on a section of the country that Abacha sought, to which they have been Abacha’s victims, and by which in the name of democracy, advocates for democracy joined without regard to the particular section being persecuted or looked for reasons behind the friction.

In “The Open Sore Of A Continent: A Personal Narrative Of The Nigerian Crisis,” Soyinka indeed lost every hope of a Nigeria that would one day become an entity again. However, I was not sure why the movement had assured itself of victory when most of the staunch advocates had already fled the country, and could not stay to have faced the consequences, for freedom and democracy does not come by a distant pen alone, but by proxy movements, relative activism and fighting in combat.

Many did not align with the movement on the grounds of its related, fractured foundation which had a lot to do with the interest it protected, and again, the generators of the movement were not viable and intact to have gathered enough following being one of the reasons the platform of the movement was not taken seriously, at all, until luck struck, leaving Abacha dead, and a swift transition that would usher in a fabricated Fourth Republic.

But Soyinka bent on the annulled “June 12,” 1993, election his cousin Moshood Abiola was allegedly said to have won in a landslide, suddenly to be reversed and cancelled by the Ibrahim Babangida-led military juntas on the grounds of election wuruwuru and magomago, rigging, which in a 180-degrees about face erupted a set of civil disobedience resulting to Gestapo-like regimes which inevitably chased the junta, Babangida out of power in a twist of transition through Ernest Shonekan, then civilian administrator, paving way for Abacha to usurp power which chased all the pro-democracy backers out of sight.

Soyinka, in series of his books, essays and lectures, had been about frustrated efforts and anger, on the continent in its leadership woes having no sense of purpose to have propelled the states to the forefront of democratic orderliness. And, like Soyinka, I, also, ask why a continent, first in natural resources, first in human capital, second most populous and second largest in the world could not utilize its overwhelmingly abundant natural resources and its unquestionable, enormous human capital to have formed a one, strong unified entity to have subdued colonial conquests of peoples and cultures, by all accounts?

And, angry Soyinka questioning the kind of country his native land was, lamented:

“In a world tormented by devastation from Bosnia to Rwanda, how do we define a nation: is it simply a condition of the collective mind, a passive, unquestioned habit of cohabitation? Or is what we think of as a nation a rigorous conclusion that derives from history? Is it geography, or is it a bond that transcends accidents of mountain, river, and valley? How do these varying definitions of nationhood impact the people who live under them?”

And, as developed, just like the African Union and its Organization of African Unity (OAU) parent could not take any serious measures in all the years the entire continent had problems fixing and putting all its loopholes together beginning from the first shot opening the doors for coup plots and assassinations of government officials and heads-of-state in the Republic of Congo, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, etc. And, looking at South Africa and, Apartheid, why was OAU not able to form an army to liberate South Africa? Why could OAU not to have form an army to liberate the Congo from the mess well orchestrated by the West and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in savagely axing Patrice Lumumba? Why could OAU not swiftly to have reinstated Nkrumah in Ghana when the military juntas wrestled power from him? And why would OAU to have sat idly and watched Samuel Doe forcefully remove William Taubman from power in a bloody coup? And why would OAU do practically nothing when Tafawa Balewa and some of his cabinet members were kidnapped and shot execution style by a murderous gang of mutineers? And why would OAU, the most powerful union in the continent’s history allowed and endorsed the diabolical nature of the anti-Igbo pogrom, when Igbos were sought from place to place and murdered in the most brutal of circumstances? Why would OAU, upon Hassan Katsina and his northern Nigeria blood thirsty Islamic nihilists could not be stopped in its genocidal campaigns against the Igbo nation? Why in what had erupted in Sierra Leone, the chaotic civil war, OAU could not arrest the situation until a terribly, costly price had been paid? And, all in all, why could OAU not seize the moment to have stopped the Western Hemisphere’s consistent dominance of Africa through coercion and theft? And as the case goes on and on, and on, what is OAU/AU doing?

The Nigerian crisis and the rest in Africa during the sixties was very unique with a OAU that had no alternative, especially with the first military coup in Nigeria and all the stories that followed when Aguiyi Ironsi was flogged and murdered in what OAU could have stopped from spreading. Even when Joseph Akahan, according to Frederick Forsyth in his book, “Making Of An African Legend,” the northern nihilists under Akahan had concluded that its by the brutal murder of Ironsi that he (Akahan) and his group of mutineers at the Government House, Ibadan, agreed that it has been made even and there should be no more bloodletting, “balancing out” the act in allegedly what the top Igbo Military brass had begun, the “Igbo Coup.”

And never minding the fact that it had been made patently clear the first military coup was not an instigated Igbo coup from its plot, the mutineers would continue in their widespread wholesale massacre of Igbo personnel and military officers. The air force aide-de-camp who witnessed the brutal murder of Ironsi while fleeing into the bush and other slaughtering campaigns of the Igbos around the Ibadan area recorded the following account:

“At Lemauk Barracks, Ibadan, the commanding officer Col. Joe Akahan claimed at sunrise that he had known nothing of the midnight movements against General Ironsi. But it is unlikely that the troops, transport, arms and ammunition used for the siege of Government House were, removed without the C.O’s knowlede. At 10 A.M., Colonel Akahan called an officers’ conference, from which he himself stayed away. When the officers were assembled the Easterners were taken away to the squadron, then later to the taylor’s shop. At midnight, that night, thirty-six hand grenades were lobbed through the windows. The survivors inside were shot down. Eastern soldiers were then made to was the blood away, before being taken out and shot. The easterners in Ironsi’s retinue were also finished off. On the afternoon of the 30th, Colonel Akahan called together the northern soldiers and congratulated them, saying at the same time that there would be no more killing since events had been balanced making it even.”

Ironsi’s murder would be the key ignition to bring about the wanton killing of Igbos around the nation in a “premeditated and diabolical” act which continued apace through the Civil War until now, with an end not yet in sight. Despite Ironsi’s attempt in assuring the northern nihilists that he was for the stability of the country announcing the shuffle of the military governors and ordering the immediate transfer of several military units trading places with the Fourth Batallion in Ibadan and the First Batallion in Enugu, putting away fears of another possible coup, which would pave way for a unitary government he promulgated and was declined by the northern hoodlums and Vandals, and with too many blood in their hands, rounded Igbos, torturing them and killing all execution style.

Such would be the case and Nigeria would not be the same again. In Ghana, there were similar cases, too, but short of wholesale massacre, pogrom and civil war. The overthrow of Nkrumah in February 1966, by the Kotoka-led military juntas was followed two months later by the bloody assassination of Kotoka by a group of mutineers from the Ho, Volta Region Camp led by Moses Yeboah. In the Congo, similar events had occurred previously when Patrice Lumumba was captured and assassinated. Such had been the pattern; the assassination-coup-war dance in the 1960s Africa -- the aftermath of Independence.

Like Ironsi, whose story had never been told at length by those who were close to him and knew him very well, things like his life before the combat in Congo, his series of casual and not casual affairs, his increasingly heavy drinking days as told partly by some of the stories, while most of his counterparts elswhere in the continent whose tenure and era had been covered and written by close friends, relatives, haters, admirers and authors of varied flavors, I requested a copy of Ironsi’s biography “Ironside,” written by one of the nation’s finest journalists, Chuks Ilogbunam.

Ilogbunam, this past September 15, on wishing me well on my birthday told me that “Ironside” had been out of print, and that no immediate plans to continue since Ironsi’s story had been told in many ways, that he could embark on “second edition by next year”, and that the copy he had, had been worn out. Ilogbunam writes;

“I throway salute. Ironside sold out "centuries" ago. But if I locate a tattered copy anywhere, might just send it on to you. I chose not to do a reprint because about 10 books dealing with the same period have since appeared. It will make little sense, I think, to reprint without due scrutiny of alternative opinion. But I scarcely had the time the past five years to do anything connected to scholarship. Now that I am in some "freedom" I should redo Ironside for a second edition by next year. Regards.”

Iloegbunam, I will look forward to that second edition, and I do hope that more is yet to be known in what had been the most blood-soaked event in the entire continent where the major actors, some still alive, living in denial as if those innocents that perished was a mere political dance on which Igbos have to start all over again, which was the case in a Nigeria that had been doomed to fail.

But nevertheless, despite all the failed talks resulting to Gowon’s-led assault which shouldn’t have erupted in the first place had the Aburi Accord been respected and upheld, followed by related faile meetings, the British-Russia aided Nigerian vandals did not find the combat easy. Biafra fought. Against all odds, in what President Julius Nyerere had seen as worthy and on the principles of self-reliance, the government of Tanzania recognized Biafra as a Sovereign National State. That profound recognition was followed by Ivory Coast’s President Houphouet Boigny on May 08, 1968; President Omar Bongo of Gabon on May 14, 1968 and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, May20, 1968.

Several other countries in and outside the continent had planned to join the league recognizing the new nation, but were dissuaded by a contingent led by former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, Alfred Palmer, who had met with these country’s leaders and public intellectuals, charging that a Biafran recognition for sovereignty would not be proper at the moment for the ongoing conflict, which was upon Ojukwu’s Special Squad “S Brigade” invaded and captured the Mid-West, which sent shocking waves to the rest of the world.

The shocking waves resulted to the failed talks in Kampala, Uganda, when the Biafran delegation led by Justice Louis Mbanefo went back home on a breach of the peace talks. The Nigerian delegation which was obvious of deceit and betrayals was led by Anthony Enahoro the traitor, Aminu Kano and the three “Biafran renegades”--Dr. B.I. Ikpeme, Brigadier George Kuruba and Anthony Ukpabi Asika, with proposals meaning a ceasefire should be on the terms of the conqueror, mandated by a British-Russian support.

Thus a whole lot happened, a whole lot is still happening and a whole lot will be happening as time goes on. The question here is, what should be done? Evidently, the saga continues and the Story Never Ends For Igbo Writer In America!

Ambrose Ehirim

Notes: See;

Apologies, Reparations and the Path to Healing; Ambrose Ehirim, BNW/Igbonet/The Ambrose Ehirim Files, (2000)

L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema; UCLA School Of Theater, Film & Television. (2011)

The Burden Of Memory, The Muse Of Forgiveness; Wole Soyinka, Oxford University Press, New York: 1999

The Open Sore Of A Continent: A Personal Narrative Of The Nigerian Crisis; Wole Soyinka, W.E.B. Dubois Institute

The Africans: A Triple Heritage; Ali mazrui; Little Brown and Company; Boston: 1986

The Igbo Of South Eastern Nigeria: Victor C. Uchendu, Holt Reinhart and Winston, New York: 1966

Without Bitterness; Nwafor Oritzu, Creative Press, New York: 1944

Making Of An African Legend; Frederick Forsyth; Pen & Sword

Remembering 11.11.69 On 11.11.11

2011-11-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

By Ike Chime

It was like every other morning since my ordeal started. I woke up from the cold bare concrete floor that had become my bed from the day I was thrown into the guardroom in the quarter guard of 1st Div Nigerian army in Enugu in February 1969. I have earlier spent some months in the concentration camp further down the main street of the army barracks, ironically, a long house with barbed wires I have known since my childhood as we usually walk through the barrack during our usual childish adventures. Little did I know that the gruesome abode we often wondered what it could be used for will one day become my prison.

The concentration camp was the first place I was brought to after long tortuous interrogation on the very day I was apprehended. When I stepped into the overcrowded house, the first thing that hit me was the raw smell of human filth, an odour I have come to get familiar with. You live with it during long operations. It is a combination of body filth, due to many days without bath, rotten skin from the stockings and boot, decaying wounds, and putrefying dead bodies.

Most of the inmates were suffering from malnutrition. They were mostly bones and hollowed, but determined eyes. I was greeted by most of them with smiles of courage. They urged me to be strong, that whatever the case, victory will be ours. I was marvelled by their courage despite the hopelessness of their condition. I was in handcuffs, indeed the only one in handcuffs among hundreds of inmates in the camp.

We lay packed like sardine in the open hall; everyone kept to his little space for lying down, and sitting or standing in the day. It was the most inhuman of a situation reminding one of situation in boats during the middle passage. I have never been exposed to a situation like this before.

As a new entrant, I was taken to the inner room which was more crowded, and I could not find any space for myself as most of the inmates there were standing. I realised that in that room there was a trash can with a cover which served for the offloading of human excrement. On top of its cover I found myself the comfort of at least sitting down, but I had to get up intermittently as someone is pressed to use the can. The concentration camp was organised by the inmates, and as usual there was hierarchy. The veranda section of the house was where the seniors stay, then there was the main hall, and the smaller inner room where the newest entrants stay. The GOC of the camp stays in a comfortably spaced area in the corridor. In the evening there was a call for silence that the GOC was coming. He came into the central hall with his retinue of lieutenants. He announced that there was a new entrant today, and according to their custom, he has to introduce himself and tell what led to his coming to the house. I was nudged forward by some of the boys, and I introduced myself and what led to my ordeal. This way I was formally initiated. In the evenings, we sang and said prayers, the song that stayed with me up till date, and brings tears to my eyes when I think of it, an Igbo song that translated thus-

See that child sitting on a rock

Sitting on the rock, weeping

Rise up my child and wipe your tears

For everyday is not made for weeping

Jesus commands you to rise up and dry your tears

Every day is not made for weeping

I did not last long in this human dungeon, for I was taken away one day to the front gate of the barrack, the quarter guard area in a military guardroom where offenders of the Nigeria army serve their term. It was an open hall with three narrow rooms, one, much narrower with an iron bar. It was in that one with bars I was locked in. The soldiers were one by one taking out their frustrations on me. They will call me unprintable names, pii on me, spit on me and so on. I had to keep to the end wall of the room to avoid their humiliation. Some of them compete on whose pii can hit me from the distance.

A few days later, an elderly man in his 70's I guess, was brought into my cell, and was made to share the hand cuff with me, me on the left hand, and him on the right. It was an awkward situation as we eat and use the toilet tied together. Think ot, waiting on him to poo-poo and vice versa. He told me his story, he said he went to the bush to ease himself in the bush behind the Holy Ghost Cathedral when he found some shiny metal objects and thought they will be nice for putting snuff. He collected them and displayed them for sell in Ogbete market. I was really touched because I knew what the objects were, I knew the location he got them from, but what can I do about it? Well we were interrogated and tortured on a daily bases. The guards were instructed to beat us with bulala (horse whip) every morning. My back was so sore that it was difficult to bend down. The wounds could not dry as they were opened up every morning with fresh flogging. But there was this tall gentle provost whom whenever he was on duty will take me behind the house and ask me to start shouting while he hit the bulala on a bundle of tarpaulin by the corner. He was a very kind and fatherly type and will always smile at me. I was always happy when he was on duty, and often look forward to that.

This was the routine until 11.11.1969.

It was like every other morning during my ordeal. Our cell door was opened and there was among the regular guards a military police officer dressed in a ceremonial outfit. He exchanged some words with the guard who ordered us to come out. Outside was a waiting military Land Rover with about seven fully dressed military policemen sitting in rows holding their rifles upright with the butts on the floor of the land rover. We were aided to sit onto the floor of the vehicle. I found this kind of wired and I started feeling butterflies in my stomach. We were quiet as the vehicle left the guardroom area and started heading towards the gate. It turned right towards the city, and turned left at the New Haven junction and then right into a compound that was in those days used as the military police headquarters. There was a bevy of activities going on as I suspected they have just dismissed from their morning 'Stand to' parade. The vehicle stopped in front of the main building and turned to face the way out. This way I could see what was going on the grounds. The military policemen sat still in the Land Rover as I noticed another Land Rover being loaded with shovels and a large coil of rope. Also there was a constant communication going on with the officer who picked us up and the people loading this other vehicle. I simply put two and two together to understand what was going on. I turned to Baba and said "Baba, I think they are going to kill us"

Our vehicle left the compound with the second Land Rover trailing behind. The convoy drove back towards the barrack gate and stopped in front of the gate but along Abakaliki road. The officer in the front seat by the driver came to the tailboard and spoke some words in Hausa to the military policemen. Then it happened, we were both blindfolded. I mumbled to Baba, “Baba, you see, I told you, they are going to kill us! they are going to kill us” I shouted. Then he spoke for the first time, and that was also his last words “Nwam kachie obi” ‘My son be brave’ he said to me.

From this moment I felt cold sweat run down my body in constant waves. My mind was racing from one place to another, from one issue to another. It was more like the fast scrubbing rewind while editing a video. I was having flash memories of faces of dear ones, my parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends. I mumbled their names and tell them I am going home. This experience I find very hard to fully describe. Also at the same time I was consciously trying to trace where we were being taken. I realised that the vehicle turned left after a while, registering in my mind that we were heading towards Abakpa Nike. After a while I felt the hollow echo you get while on a bridge, this further strengthened my hunch that we were heading towards Abakpa. Then after a while there was sound of increased human activity, suggesting a market area, and I thought this must be Abakpa market. After that it became very quiet except for the sound of the moving vehicle, and I thought we are now in some Nike village.

After what seemed several minutes, the vehicle stopped and we were led out of it. We were dragged through some bush and I remember falling into a ditch, probably an abandoned trench, and was dragged out of it. We went further into the bush until we stopped. I started hearing more voices, and there were some activities going on of which I could not phantom with my eyes blindfolded. Then suddenly the blindfold was removed, the blaze of the sun dazzled my eyes, and when I managed to focus, a voice said, “Hei you boy look in this direction”. I recognized that voice. It was that of the senior officer who had once interrogated me, a major by rank. I looked in the direction he ordered and saw Baba firmly tied on a stake.

Then the major continued “You are a condemned man already, the GOC have signed your death warrant, I am the only one with the power to save you, only if you will give me a reason to do so by telling me the truth and everything regarding your operation. You are too young to be wasted. If you play along I will make sure you are sent to Lagos or Kaduna to continue you education........” Then he added “But if you fail to cooperate, what will happen to this Baba, will happen to you, the ball is in your court”

All the while he was talking my mind was racing, what to do, spill the beans and expose other operators. But if I do, how do I guarantee he will keep his side of the deal. Then I remembered what happened the year before when one of us got caught in action, he spilled the beans and his two accomplice where arrested. Three of them were shot by firing squad and people were forcibly taken to the field in military trucks to witness it, and I was there. That was it, I am going solo on this, if this is my fate, I am accepting it with honour. Then I spoke thus, “You people have tortured me enough, i have told you all I know, I have nothing left to say” “ Okey o!” the major said, “ I have tried my best”

That moment there was an aircraft flying overhead, and for some reason I can’t explain, I looked up at it, and the major said “Yes you can look at an aircraft for the last time, yes, look”

He then spoke to his men in Hausa, and the military police officer took over from there. He shouted some command and the seven armed men fell in line facing Baba at the stake. At a second command they knelt down and cocked their riffle, “fire” and seven gun barrels roared, and as I watched, Baba did not flinch one bit. I thought this could be a show off; maybe they were using mock bullets. The military police officer was mad at his men for some reason I did not understand, maybe they missed their shots. He commanded them to fire again, and the guns roared one more time. Then I noticed something. Baba had a netted singlet on, and I noticed that it was split at several points, that was when it dawned on me that this was for real. I became agitated. I knew he was innocent, and they should know that. Here is an illiterate old man in his 70s selling used wares he picked from things people abandoned while running for their lives from Enugu. It is simple logic that if he knew what he picked from the bush behind Holy Ghost Cathedral was a dangerous explosive; he wouldn’t display it for sale. Now they shot him.

The soldiers quickly untied his body from the stake after the medical personnel inspected and declared him dead. This was when I saw his blood all over the stake and I could not control my emotions anymore. I shouted “You bloody vandals, you have killed an innocent old man, and you will all pay for this. The man did nothing why kill him” I was totally hysterical and out of control, I knew I had nothing to lose. The whole place was a bit out of control at this time. My shouting, the major shouting at me to shut up, the military police officer shouting to his men to dig Baba’s grave and mine at the same time. It was totally a crazy moment.

It was a hot mid morning and during the dry season. The hamattan season was early that year. In that heat I was feeling cold sweat running down my whole body, and I could not stop talking even as the major kept shouting at me to shut up. As the confusion continued, I started walking towards the stake and shouting, “Come on, let’s get this whole business done with, let’s get it done with. There is no need wasting my time, I cannot wait any longer, the die is cast, the die is cast” and some other stuff like that. To be honest I did not know what was pushing me, but I was so determined. Suddenly the major shouted “Hei! You stop there, shut up and stop there” and I obeyed. He walked over to me and said “the die is cast, the die is cast, where you got that nonsense from”. Then after staring me in the eyes for a moment while tapping his staff on his leg, he took a deep breath and gently asked me, “Are you really sure someone gave you that bag” to which I defiantly replied ”I am tired of repeating the same thing every time, I have told you this time without numbers and I took your men to the home of the fellow that gave the bag to me, I am tired, just get this done with, the die is cast” He shook his head, walked away from me and motioned to the other three officers among them. They came over to him and they put their head together in a kind of mini emergency summit. They nodded their heads, and he then raised his head and ordered “Pita de shi” Hausa word meaning, bring him out. He quickly reminded them to put the blindfold back on me.

This way I was again taken, this time out of the bush to the waiting Land Rover and put to sit on the floor, flanked by armed military police firing squad, but without Baba.

May his gentle soul and those of other innocent victims of the Biafra war keep resting in peace.

[Nigeria] State creation: Bottlenecks, agitations, new challenges

2011-11-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

By JUDE OSSAI, STEPHEN GBADAMOSI and BANJI ALUKO -- Sunday Tribune

That new states are on the agenda of the National Assembly with respect to expected constitution amendment is no longer in doubt. The focus is on which of the new state movements is likely to get the nod, even as new realities from the Senate appear to stand against the target. Regional Editor, OLAWALE RASHEED, writes on the politics of state creation from the country’s inception and likely new states to emerge from the impending exercise.

MANY justifications have been advanced for the push for new states out of the existing 36 in the federation. Similarly, countless reasons have been canvassed to support non-creation of states. Indeed, a couple of days ago, calls had been made for some states to be merged. The argument had been that some states were becoming non-viable. Politics of the time is, however, driving fast towards the emergence of new states between now and 2015.

Many citizens worry about the effects of further balkanisation of the federation. Those in support of new states, however, regard it as part of national restructuring to ensure equity and justice.

Since the amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates of what now is Nigeria in 1914 and the subsequent creation of states in the country, the issue of state creation has always been a strenuous and delicate matter. Instructively, all the states in Nigeria, apart from the Mid-Western State, were created by the military government that had ruled in the past.

The last National Assembly took the bull by the horn as it started a process for the creation of new states. Although the Assembly could not complete the business, the new and present National Assembly has picked it up from where the last Assembly stopped. Shortly after its inauguration, Senate President, David Mark, and the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, gave indications that creation of new states would feature prominently in the proposed amendment of the 1999 Constitution. A stamp of legislative authority has been given as the presiding officers of the two chambers have declared their commitments to the project.

There also appears to be a presidential support. President Goodluck Jonathan, while seeking the presidential mandate, had cause to promise new states in some zones of the federation. What is more, some Ijaw leaders see the Jonathan presidency as an opportunity to add another predominantly Ijaw state to Bayelsa. Checks also revealed that key actors in power and out of power are resolutely behind the project.

The framers of the constitution are conscious of the possible agitation and so the procedure was deliberately complicated. The constitutional requirements for creating a new state are as follows:

According to the 1999 Constitution, to create a new state requires that such creation be supported by at least two-third of members (representing the area demanding the creation of the new state) in the Senate, House of Representatives, the House of Assembly in respect of the area and the local government councils in respect of the area that the state will be created in. That is not all; a referendum on the new state must be approved by two-third of the people in the area where the state is to be created and the result of the referendum approved by a simple majority of all the 36 states of Nigeria supported by a simple majority of members of the Houses of Assembly. After all these stages have been completed, the state is then approved by a resolution passed by two-third majority of members of the Senate and House of Representatives.

This stringent guideline has not deterred successive civilian governments from commencing moves towards state creation. In the Second Republic, A Senate committee set up in 1981 under Senator Abubakar Tuggar shortlisted 50 new states to be created. The then National Assembly approved the list for subsequent referendum in accordance with the provision of the constitution, but the process was aborted when the military overthrew the Sheu Shagari-led government in December 1983.

In the current republic and even with those stringent constitutional provisions, the legislature has received more that 40 requests for state creation. Among such proposed states are Igboezue, Adada, Aba, Njaba, Orlu, Orimili and Orashi (South East); Anioma, Oil Rivers, Ogoja, Afemaiesan, Toru-Ebe and New Delta (South South); Oduduwa, Ijebu, Ibadan, New Oyo, Oke-Ogun (South West); Apa, Idoma, Edu, Okun, Oya (North Central); Amana and Savannah, Katagum (North East); and Gurara (North West).

The underground scheming is almost akin to what happened in previous state creation exercise under the military. Most states created under Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha were due largely to the influence of highly placed people from the fortunate states. Even new state capitals were determined more by who was closer to the military rulers. Osogbo, for instance, got the capital of Osun due to such figures as Dr. Olu Alabi. Dutse upstaged Hadejia just as Asaba got the nod due mainly to influence peddling factors.

In the subsisting scenario, some of these personalities have promised their kinsmen a state of their own. What is more, some are hoping to emerge as chief executives of the new states after the expiration of their existing tenure. Hence, there are elements of personal and tribal agenda in the on-going exercise.

Conditions
But part of the criteria used in the past for a state to be created included the economic viability of the area demanding the new state, especially the ability and potentials for sustainable internal revenue generation, provable cases of demographic strength and underdevelopment arising from denial of access to human development; provable evidence of socio-cultural affinity and geographical contiguity; the need to redress lopsided cartography and boundary lines resulting in endless border and resource-based conflicts; provable instance of consensus among the demographic groups demanding the new states.

Others included the ability of the new states to provide their structure and resources to take off; ability to ensure internal security and cohesion and peaceful co-existence with their neighbours and the existence of human resource and personnel to run the state.

Talks of merging current states emerge
Some of these conditions that, perhaps, seem to be witnessing erosion in some states and this might explain the alarm raised by the Senate last Thursday where it claimed that some states in the country were on the verge of bankruptcy.

The development pushed the upper chamber of the National Assembly to mandate its committees on National Planning; States and Local Governments; and Finance to study the situation and make recommendations on possible remedial measures to avoid total collapse of the economy of the states.

Some of the states said to either in critical conditions or unhealthy are Ekiti, Plateau, Benue, Edo, Adamawa, Cross River, Enugu and Taraba.

Others are Ogun, Kogi, Yobe, Ebonyi, Ondo, Kaduna, Oyo, Bauch, Bayelsa, Nasarawa, Gombe and Rivers.

Against this backdrop, some senators have suggested the merging of some of these states, though there have also been other suggested solutions, such as readjustment of the revenue sharing formula. The question now is with the current agitation for more states, how does this new development affect the process believed to have been set in motion to actualise the goal?

Current agitation
A zone by zone analysis focussing on the politics of the exercise can be done as follows:

South East zone
Of the six geopolitical zones, the South East has been the most vociferous in the agitation, citing the need for zonal parity as it has only five states, while others have six or more. To the advantage of the zone, it currently has the deputy Senate president, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), the deputy speaker of the House of Representatives and, strategically, the coordinating minister for the economy.

This connection within the administration is, however, generating divisions, rather than the unity needed to make the project a reality. The deputy speaker, Emeka Ihedioha, is believed to have his eyes on a Njaba/Orlu state to be create from Imo and Anambra states. But the deputy Senate president, Ike Ekweremadu, and the SGF, Chief Pius Anyim, appears to be poles apart on this issue. Anyim is reported to be interested in the creation of Old Ohaozara/Igboeze Orimili out of the present Anambra State. Senator Ekweremadu hopes a new state can emerge from Enugu State.

An Igbo writer attempted to resolve the riddle when he analysed the history of state creation in the South East. According to him, South East zone was first divided into Anambra and Imo states. Anambra got divided again into Enugu and Anambra states, the same time Imo was divided into Abia and Imo states. At last, Ebonyi State was created from Enugu and Abia states. So, the next or sixth state in the South East is obviously to be created from both Imo and Anambra states.

Apart from the above, there are those who also believe the Igbo can never agree to get a new state, even as the race is being blackmailed based on alleged ruling presence of Igbo in Delta and Rivers states. Interests from the North which are waiting in the wing to stop a new state for the Igbo cited the notion that the Igbo, indeed, have seven states as they are substantially present in controlling stature in Delta and Rivers.

But only last week, the Ambassador Ralph Uwechue-led Ohanaeze Ndigbo rose from its meeting in Enugu and reiterated its quest for an additional state in Igboland.

In Enugu State, agitators for Adada State creation have called on the National Assembly to stick to the guidelines spelt out by the Senate President Mark who emphasised that the exercise should be an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past which have resulted in perennial misgivings among many Nigerians.

Adada State also prominent
Leading the Adada group was a former speaker of the defunct Eastern House of Assembly, Igwe Charles Abagwu. Also in the lead of agitators were chairman of the state Committee on Actualization of Creation of Adada State, Major General Godwin Ugwuoke (rtd); chairman, movement’s Tactical Committee, Chief Cletus Opata; and the spokesman for the group, Chief James Ugwu.

Who will have the upper hands among these heavyweights spearheading the Igbo cause is only a matter of conjecture. Anioma state, from current Delta and Anambra states is, however, being touted as a likely option.

Why Anioma is likely
The creation of Anioma State is, perhaps, one of the oldest in the country. Records show that agitation for the creation of the state dates back to 1951. It is an attempt by the Igbo-speaking people of Delta State to have a state of their own. The word, Anioma, was a coinage used by the late Anioma state agitator, Osita Osadebey, to group the Igbo-speaking people of Delta State in Aniocha, Oshimili, Ndokwa and Ika areas.

According to Emeka Esogbue, a native of Ibusa in Oshimili North Local Government Area, the proposed Anioma state will also bring together other Anioma communities, such as Ndoni in Rivers State, Igbanke and Ekpon in Edo State and other Anioma communities in Edo, Imo and Rivers states.

Igboezuo State
Perhaps, the most convincing of all the agitations for state creation in the South East, agitators of Igboezuo state just want the creation of a state from the five states in the region to make up for the imbalance. By not citing cultural affinity or historical antecedents as reasons for its creation, it appears proponents of Igboezuo state have demonstrated correctness of perspective and have placed the overall interest of the Igbo nation before any other mundane consideration. What is their argument? To them, Igboezuo is like a union of the five Eastern states; the new heartbeat of the Igbo nation.

They are proposing that some existing local governments from the five states of the region be excised to form the new state. From Anambra State, Orumba North and South local government areas; from Enugu, Awgu and Aninri local government areas; and from Ebonyi, Ivo and Ohaozara local government areas. Abia will cede Isuikwuato and Umunneochi, with Imo producing the bulk of the local government areas by giving up Okigwe, Onuimo, Ideato North and South, Isiala Mbano and Ehime Mbano. With these, the new state will be ready to take off with 15 local government areas with headquarters at Okigwe.

Njaba State/Orlu State
In the vanguard of Njaba state is former Governor Achike Udenwa, while Senator Hope Uzodinma is behind Orlu state. The proposed Njaba state, according to its promoters, should be carved out of the 12 local government areas that make up Imo West (Orlu zone) of Imo State and Ihiala in Anambra State. The local governments are Orlu, Orsu, Oru East, Oru West, Oguta, Ohaji/Egbema, Nkwerre, Nwangele, Isu, Njaba, Ideato North and Ideato South. Njaba state, according to them, will ensure fairness as regards state creation in the former Eastern Region.

They recalled that the region was split into Imo and Anambra and from Imo; Abia was carved out while Enugu was created from Anambra and out of Abia and Enugu, Ebonyi later emerged. They, therefore, maintained that equity demands that the sixth state for the area be carved out of the present Imo and Anambra states. In the same senatorial district, agitators of Orlu state want the 12 councils that make up the zone to be accorded a state status.

South South zone
The zone, though with six states already, seems also set to get additional state. Those in the know said the president is under pressure to ensure the creation of a new state for the Ijaw in the Niger Delta. The argument is that as the fourth largest ethnic group in Nigeria, Bayelsa alone should not be the only predominantly Ijaw state. This is the genesis of the proposed Toru-Ibe state which is generating heated controversy between the Bini people and the Ijaw of the Niger Delta.

The Bini and Itsekiri recently accused the Ijaw of annexing their riverine areas to increase the land areas of the new Ijaw state. The opposition has been very vociferous. The Ijaw have also responded, claiming that the said riverine areas belonged to them as the Bini met them while on migration.

The Ijaw of Edo State said their demand for the creation of Toru-Ibe state from Edo and Delta states was to save them from the oppression they claimed to be suffering in the hands of the Bini people, which they said was more than what the Israelites suffered while in bondage in Egypt.

They described the claim by the Bini that all Ijaw riverine communities in the state belonged to them as “a bundle of lies and deliberate falsehood carefully crafted to bamboozle, misinform and mislead governments of Nigeria, especially members of the National Assembly who must be very wary.” Spokesman for the Ijaw in Edo State, Professor Christopher Dime, insisted that the Ijaw would never cede an inch of their land to any ethnic nationality in the country, adding that “the Ijaw had been the aborigines and the customary owners of all land covered by the proposed Toru-Ibe state.”

He said “despite their posturing, blind guessing and recent attempts at historical revisionism, it is clear that the Bini do not know and, indeed, cannot know when the Ijaw came into the Ijaw lands of present Edo State because the Ijaw were on the land long before the Bini migrated from Yorubaland.

“That the Ijaw were among the oldest ethnic nationality in Nigeria and, indeed, in the West African sub-region is not in doubt. That they are indigenous to the Niger Delta and its fringes to the West, East and North is equally no news. There is a pool of incontrovertible scholarly evidence and documentations in support of these claims. Among them is Chief Jacob Egharebva of blessed memory, the best known and celebrated Bini historian with Bini royal blood, who in his A Short History of Benin, said, ‘many, many years ago, the Bini came all the way from Egypt to found a more secure shelter in this part of the world. After a short stay in the Sudan and Ife, tradition says that they met some people who were in the land before their arrival.”

Agitators of Toru-Ebe State are said to aim to bring together the Ijaw in Delta, Ondo and Edo states. The demand for the creation of the state is, therefore, aimed at satisfying the long-standing yearnings of the people for self reliance, peace, stability, self-determination and development.

According to Dr. Felix Tuodolo, the clamour for the Ijaw to have a state of their own did not stop with the creation of Bayelsa State in 1996 and that agitation for the creation of Toru-Ebe State dated back to 1976. They are also insisting that Ijaw in Edo, Delta and Ondo states have become minorities in these states, a situation they believe can only be remedied if they are given a state of their own.
Appartr frome Dime, some of the other prominent Ijaw leaders agitating for the creation of this state include Chief J. O. Mieyebo, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Okokolo Carter, Mr. V. B. Bamuza-Mutu, Brigadier-General Broderick Demeyeibo, Chief Edwin Clark, Rear Admiral Festus Porbeni (rtd), Chief Joshua Fumodoh and Chief F. J. Williams.

They asserted that the proposed Toru-Ebe State was viable with abundant minerals, oil and gas, river-bed sand and gravel, oil palm produce, timber, raffia palm for the production of industrial gins, mangrove trees for salt making, deep sea coastal and river fishing, shrimp and also farm produce in commercial quantities. The proposed state has natural landscape with beautiful beaches which can be developed into revenue generating tourist industry. The proposed state is also said to have enough human resources.

Beyond historical disputations, many insiders appear sure that if new states are created, Toru-Ibe is certain to be one of them.

North Central zone
Many are clamouring for new states in this zone as earlier listed. A factor very potent in the exercise is Senate President David Mark, an Idoma from a Tiv dominated state of Benue. Mark is seen by his people as the one to liberate them from the alleged hegemony of the Tiv.

This is why the creation of Apa state is very central to the political life of the Senate president.

His detractors were even as mean as to suggest that Senator Mark is to secure the creation of the new state and emerge as its first governor. This is if, as rumour mongers noted, he fails to secure the presidency come 2015.

According to the Senate president, the Assembly would break the jinx that states could only be created by the military. He assured Nigerians that the committee on the review of the 1999 Constitution would be fair to all in the consideration of states to be created.

The Mark factor is, thus, seen as set to stop a very historic opportunity for the Yoruba to have another state in the zone. In the North Central, Apa state and Senator Mark hold the key.

South West zone
The agitation for new state is also very strong in the South West. Three prominent expected states exist in the zone namely, New Ijebu, Ibadan and Oduduwa.

Oduduwa state is facing challenges due to change of government in Osun state, in addition to other associated development in the state. This is especially so in view of the constitutional requirements.
The two leading movements are basically those of Ibadan and Ijebu. Minister of State for Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Ms Jumoke Akinjide, was upbeat about the chance of Ibadan state. According to the minister, the creation of Ibadan state is realistic and nobody should doubt it.

“Ibadan state, when created, will be one of the most viable states in the country. The reason, as you know, is that we have the Ibadan metropolis and the Ibadan less city. We also have strong economic potentials in view of the large number of people in Ibadan.

“In terms of economic viability, population and landmass, Ibadan ranks number one in terms of earning state position. If any state will be created, Ibadan state will certainly be one of them,” she stated.
But some analysts are pointing at change of government in Oyo state with a rationalisation that he minister may not be in a position to be so hopeful. While not doubting her good intention, the thinking of some pundits is that Ibadan state will be a mirage, unless the incumbent governor, Senator Abiola Ajumobi, pursued it as his agenda.

There is also the doubt as to whether Ibadan can stop the highly influential Ijebu from getting a state of their own in the new dispensation. The Ijebu are anchoring their agitation on records of history.

According to proponents of the new Ijebu state, its creation was long overdue because out of the old 24 provinces in Nigeria, only Ijebu province was yet to get a state, while three states had been created out of the old Sokoto province and two out of Kano.

But will the Egba let the Ijebu off the hook by backing the creation of the new state? Analysts premise that question on the history of rivalry between these two great ethnic stocks of Yoruba race, a competition a prominent Egba writer traced to political power struggles after the fall of the Oyo Empire and commerce, as to who controlled the slave market or route.

Interestingly, Ijebu and Egba lands extend beyond the present Ogun State with Ijebuland reaching up to Somolu and Epe and Egbaland extending to Oyingbo, Mushin and Abule Egba in the present-day Lagos State.

Sunday Tribune was, however, told that Egba and Ijebu elites are unanimous in the drive for the new Ijebu state. What remains, according to pundits, is for the new state governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, to publicly support the bid for the new state.

Proponents of the new state are, however, very hopeful of having a new state possibly rich in oil and gas, good sea port and a rival to Lagos State. Unless the state government opposes the new state, insiders are sure Ijebu state will beat the proposed Ibadan and Oduduwa states, if new state were to be created from the South West.

Oke Ogun State
But there is also the issue of the proposed Oke Ogun state. The creation of the state from present Oyo State is among the most prominent agitations in the South West. With a land mass constituting about 60 per cent of the present Oyo State and a population of about 1.4 million, the Oke Ogun area in Oyo North Senatorial zone believes it deserves a state of its own. Other reasons being given is that the area has for long suffered neglect as a result of the distance between the area and Ibadan, the state capital, which is as much as 130 kilometres, as well as lack of development in the area.

But according the proponents of Ibadan state, which is the main road block to the proposed Oke Ogun state, of all the former regional capitals in Nigeria—Enugu, Kaduna and Ibadan—only Ibadan has not got a state of its own. It is based on this historical fact that backers of Ibadan state believe that it will become a reality if the National assembly eventually considers state creation.

North East zone
Two new state creation movements are very prominent in this zone, namely Katagum, wanted out of the present Bauchi State; and Savannah state, out of present-day Borno State.

Historically, Katagum is a province which leaders have been agitating for a state for long. Possibly due to geopolitics of the state, Katagum, despite producing key national leaders, has not been lucky in the quest for a new state. It was one of the 50 states shortlisted in 1981 and one of the 20 recommended during the Abacha-led regime.

In the present scheming, Katagum is truly strategically placed to realise its dream. A likely new Emir of Katagum is a prominent leading player in the present power structure in the country. Additionally, decision-makers are bending towards the scarce values of equity and justice in treating the Katagum request.

But there is a possible new equation to the situation in the North East. With low-level insurgency ongoing in central and Northern Borno, many are proposing the creation of a new state of Savannah to cover Southern Borno, which, interestingly, is predominantly Christian.

Leaders from Southern Askira/Uba, Bayo, Biu, Chibok, Damboa, Gwoza, Hawul, Kwaya-Kusar and Shani local government areas of Southern Borno had constituted committees to pursue the ambition. What is hard to determine is whether the mainstream Borno political elites will support such a move.

The Savannah state proponents are facing the same challenge as those of Gurara state in North Western zone. The leader of the movement, Bawa Magaji, said the creation of the proposed Gurara state was approved by the Kaduna State House of Assembly in its resolution on November 18, 2009.

“The proposed Gurara state, with headquarters in Kachia, has a population of 3,383,207 and a land mass of about 28,393 square kilometres,” he said.

But will mainstream Kaduna elites allow the separation? And again, can the North West have another state, since the zone is already with seven?

In the meantime, Katagum holds the ace in North East zone.

North West zone
Agitation for the creation of Southern Kaduna state from the present Kaduna State has been on for a very long time, but the aspiration has never yielded any positive fruit, despite that many states were created by the military governments. Their cry received further impetus after the religious crisis which rocked Kaduna State in 2000. As a result of the crisis, a committee (leaders of thought) formed by former governor of the state, Ahmed Makarfi, recommended the splitting of the state. Motion for the creation of the proposed state was also moved in the Kaduna State House of Assembly in 2002. Upon the declaration by the National Assembly to create additional states in the present dispensation, agitators for the creation of Southern Kaduna have returned to the drawing board.

One issue that comes up each time the debate for the creation of Southern Kaduna state is raised is about where the state capital will be located. It was even said that this singular issue prevented the creation of the state by the government of the late General Sani Abacha in 1996. Although the proponents of the state seem to have accepted making Kaduna metropolis the capital of the new state, they are still undecided over the choice of the capital between two towns—Zonkwa and Kachia.

Options for National Assembly
Again, the process is complicated and allows for unhappy elements to spoil the realisation of the project. For the National Assembly, many are suggesting the creation of five new states, one per zone, minus North West. But the former leadership of the National Assembly suggested 10.

If new states are to be created, the nation may well be expecting the following states: Ijebu, Katagum, Apa, Anioma and Toru-Ibe.

But with the new development over the unhealthy state of some states, which is sending jitters down the spines of stakeholders in the affected states and has made some notable Nigerians to call for the merging of some states, the death knell of new state creation might have been sounded.

[Nigeria] Nd'Igbo, Persecution, Etc and Random Thoughts

2011-10-31T17:09:00.000-07:00

I am not the only one who had thought the whole idea was crazy, even though I had overlooked it as a rhetorical garbage, hearing about it as a speculation and what the news outlets had gathered.

I am not the only one who felt the pain that a brother in a new line of attack wants his own brother permanently out of his face.

And I am not the only one who had seen the order from Theodore Ahamefula Orji’s administration in Abia State asking non-indigenes of the state to leave his government office jobs alone drawn from the deadly Boko Haram incidents Vanguard’s Pini Jason called ‘Tufiakwa,’ an outright abomination in Igboland.

I am not the only one who had thought the decision of a 21st Century persecution of a group of people profiled for some inexplicable events I’m yet to fathom, was bizarre and should be condemned in its entirety.

And, for sure, I am not the only one who is seeing the ridiculous measure as a tactic to change its subject, hijacking the peoples mandate to run a regime typical of banana republics.

And what would have amounted to such unimaginable action as a move beyond reasoning by Orji asking non-indigenes in his state to leave his civil service alone?

If this clueless ‘executive’ and his action is not an indication of madness and psychological problems, I don’t know what else is.

After giving a thought to Orji’s weird decision, I had hoped it was like another sensationalized story and, thus have this to say: One, I really hope Orji’s cabinet reverses its decision. Two, I hope the decision is not true and had been taken out of context through its legislative process before becoming law. Three, I hope it’s like one of the practical jokes picked up by the tabloids targeting its reading audience for some cheap shots. Four, if indeed it’s true that Abia State had a plan to sack her own kith and kin from a land that was once one entity and a land once a whole before the mean strategy of divide and rule by the colonization powers and military juntas, Igbo, then, should forget about its own national state. And five, if as it has become true and all the Igbo-related states are now bent, watch the forbidden decision unfold in Abia, and do nothing by way of mass movements - demonstrations, sanctions and other related measures to proclaim Abia a pariah state - Igbo should forget its national state, living as predicted and appears; a peoples disappearing cultural heritage and natural being, coupled with the landscape that identifies it as a national state.

That would mean Igbo is done with its nationhood, eventually. It would mean no such thing as Igbo. It would mean Igbo would be extinct as a people, evolving to a blend of other people, culture and languages. And it would mean what its culturally heritage rivals had haggled on, over time in terms of its exceptional culture and tradition, that Igbo never had a unique culture, was never distinct as had been thought, which evidently had become the simple truth.

It is pointblank in this regard that no one should come after me as in the past on my essays, reports and views which caused all sorts of outrage from related events over time, and the analysis following the thoughts I had penned into perspective; issues concerning Nd’Igbo and how to screw in the nuts and bolts needed for a permanently structured place, appropriately. As those thought-provoking papers were directed toward effective leadership which had been lacking, measuring the capability and the capacity of the seriousness in which organized people gets things done. Even though it came with reasonable and logical responses from a very few on the subject matter, many, beyond imagination, chipped in with their ideological views, unrelated and incoherent to the topic in question with quantities of angry mail that flooded my mail box. Some of the bunch were sociological anger by its expression. “Who is it you are writing for?” How much are they paying you for all these your write-ups?” “You have been sent to destroy my political career.” “When you collect, you write good and when you don’t collect, you criticize.” “What did Nd’Igbo do to you?” “I like the way you write but people are complaining that you only criticize Nd’Igbo,” read some of the angry mails and comments.

And with all that hate mails popped out due to the magic pen I had used to write about a peoples social ills, not too many are now raising hell to the line of profiling, bigotry and hatred instituted by the government of Abia State on a people it shares the same lineage. A people culturally and linguistically bonded. A people known to have shared the same ancestors. A people commonly bonded by way of its worship until the advent of the missionaries and the colonial mandates; and a people that have lived, prayed and worked together for onward objectivity.

Many are now tight-lipped for having nothing to say on a variety of reasons - not wanting to be disturbed - being preoccupied with personal obligations, got bills to pay, not the one to fix Igbo problems, none of “my” business and besides, “they should put their own acts together,” and things like that.

Many do not want it mentioned in their face, the in-your-face kind of attitude, for problems heavily accumulated and problems requiring little or nothing, best known to them. Gestured moves like, I don’t have a job and why should I be worried about something that is not going to fetch me a job or pay my bills. Who cares and why couldn’t those non-indigenes stay in their respective states of origin or relocate elsewhere no such laws of eviction exists? Why are all the brouhaha news when there are numerous overwhelming challenges facing them ahead? Why are they in such a bad shape, anyway, and why would all these nonsense stick out when the sitting governor was not legitimately elected in the first place?

Many are moving on, doing their own thing as it pleases them; for their property, life and wealth comes first before any social ills sort of, that will not contribute to their welfare.

Many gave a thought to Abia State’s newest proposition, writing and talking about it as a taboo and should not be allowed to be implemented in the said state; for it would ruin the foundations of Igbo cultural heritage.

And many, as obviously may have been the case, indicated the sanction did not target Igbo indigenes but non Igbo indigenes, and no matter what the decision may have seemed to be, that it included Nd’Igbo on its eviction notice to proclaim the action was not bias, and that realistically, no Igbo had been affected or evicted from the state’s franchise following the strange decision.

Nevertheless, when a government respects the rule of law, upholding democracy its legislative body makes, it should be known that a legislative process in any democratic order involves representations from districts/zones in which proposals are tabled or set in motion for legislation, and when passed on the terms of required figures favoring the proposition which then becomes law, and despite the negating party which may be short of gridlock or fails to garner enough counts to kill such proposition, the yays takes it away, thus making its sponsored motion law, as in all democracies, unless otherwise.

So, as it happened, Abia State in what it had claimed as events that led to evict non indigenes from its governmental offices, the Boko Haram terrorists, it saw threatened the state from its relative bombings elsewhere which ignited the deal of persecution and justifying it with action “timely taken” by Governor Orji.

Persecution had been a classic case of human endeavor. But persecuting a cousin is way out of fashion. I would have been less worried if the Abia State government had been concerned on the mounting pressing problems in the state - widespread scandals of kidnapping, rape, assassinations, civil unrests resulting from related socio-economic problems as part of unending tragedy in the state, rather than its new measure, taking its woes on a people of its kind, moving to where they find life sustainable and comfortable.

In analogy to persecuting people on reasons of faith, language, religion, culture, economics and what have you - the Spanish Inquisition; Adolf Hitler’s persecution of Jews and Gypsies in Europe; and persecutions in related African countries, draws Abia’s “non-indigenes must go” into perspective with a whole lot of questioning, though.

“If we had some sense of shame, I mean even a little, some people called traditional rulers in the state should know they have no business in this matter, and it is totally out of place for them to log unto this dirty side of politicking to champion a cause,” writes Ikenna Emewu (Daily Sun). “So base and inane as this discriminatory policy of a state against its own blood. If indeed, this list of traditional rulers – about 10 of them and some others in the list is real, I really sympathize with the communities they rule.”

The traditional rulers had been something else but total blame should be irrelevant when a cast of administrative personnel lumped together would endorse an arbitrary measure which makes it scary. The traditional rulers, to be precise, are the architects of destruction in Igboland, in every aspect of its civil liberties, even though the enlightened ones among them sit idly and watch these ridiculous measures unfold. What unfolded in Abia State should not be of a “stunning gig “ based on how Ndigbo operates, remarkably with the traditional rulers who have no business in a just, representative and accountability government but the desire to put in monkey wrench to cause havoc in every of its dealings, adding insult to dishonor. And on the claim that Imo was not nice to Nd’Abia on the breaking down and carving out of the state from a previously dissected Eastern Region to East Central State, to Imo State - Yakubu Gowon and Murtala Muhammad military juntas - a plot orchestrated to keep Igbo divided; which should be taken that Abia had declared its isolation from Igbo in its entirety and no longer care..

The point is, nobody seems to be paying attention as to where Orji’s executive order may lead to and when that decision had been to kick the rest of Nd’Igbo out from its civil service, that could also be making a whole lot of stuff clear for Nd’Igbo: that, say, for instance, an Arochukwu is being savagely axed or murdered in the most brutal way, and a fellow Igbo who stood by watch the horrific event take place must not be questioned or blamed in an act of feud across state lines among brothers, because Orji had fired the first shot in what would be a long battle of a brothers war. That when an ethnic slur is rained against an Ngwa at a market square, it would be fine to cheer on remarks of bigotry and hatred, because Orji started it all. That assuming a Bende man got into squabbles of civil unrest in the northern landscapes and about to be lynched for simply being Igbo while an Igbo at the scene could have intervened but didn’t on the grounds of an irrational executive order by Abia State government.

As the list goes, that an Abriba girl happens to be hijacked by a gang of cultist rapists and another Ihiala man was well positioned to have stopped the rapists and wouldn’t do it just to retaliate by way of personal vendetta, getting even as a result of the actions by Abia government against Nd’Igbo. That an Mbano trader could not meet a fellow colleague of Njaba descent on business related talks over pounded yam and ofe olugbo, bitter leaf soup, at an eatery around the block because the restaurateur hails from Ohafia.

Or as we may have discovered the tragic events of our time, that Nd’Igbo whose history has been of political impotence and victims of genocidal campaigns; and all of a sudden, the northern Islamic Jihadists and terrorists begins to sound positively bloodthirsty again, as in the Sharia Debacle of 2000, and had turned en masse against Igbo women, men, children and their properties in another cycle of wanton killings, and demolitions; and as in a new balkanization theory begun by the state of Abia which would justify the gruesome acts of the Islamic “Jihadic” nihilists and hoodlums on the basis “Igbos have no business to where they don’t belong” in supposedly a Nigerian national state having no restrictions on the free movements of peoples.

What message would Abia State be sending to the rest of the nation when it creates a platform encouraging the northern Islamic terrorists that its acts of terrorism is justified for the purpose of deliberately eliminating its own kind by walling.

Igbo, from generations, not even recorded, has been spoken within the borders in predawn Southern Nigerian Protectorate, a colonial schedule by fabrication - Umunede, Agbor, Asaba, Okpanam, Okitipupa, Igurita, Auchi, Lagos, Abeokuta, Omoku, Ikwerre, Ogoni, Bonny, Okirika, Nando, Ugep, Adadama, Degema, Ogoja, Iva Valley, Enugu, Enugu Ukwu, Ohaji, Egbema, Diobu, Yenagoa, Ahoada, Umuapu, Osina, Akokwa, Umuobom, Arondizuogu, Ikot Ekpene, Nsugbe, Otura, Nnewi, Ogidi, Abagana, Obodo Ukwu, Orlu, Amaigbo, Abba, Ore, Benin City, Warri, Abonema, Obigbo, Umuahia, Uzuakoli, Ogbunike and the list goes on and on - identified with its roots, accent, way of life and tradition.

During the Sovereign National Conferences debates upon the birth of the Fourth Republic when Olusegun Obasanjo who came close to death under Sani Abacha’s gulag, was handed the mantle to take over the affairs of state in a fraudulent election conducted by the Abdulsalami Abubakar’s military juntas, series of groups surfaced on ethnic and tribal lines suggesting the necessities of a sovereign national conference as a road map to a working document for the country. Obasanjo singlehandedly killed that motive.

By then, many groups erupted, waxing stronger save for an Igbo-related group, though the late Stanley Macebuh had earlier founded Post Express, first online national newsreel that provided all around the clock news-related analysis to the nation’s readers. It was during this time I was able to connect with my colleagues piecing together stuff for North Carolina-based Chuck Odili who emerged stronger with the Nigerian World website and the Naijanet discussion group which ignited a new political era for the Fourth Republic with political discourse at its best, before folks who joined lately and hijacked the forums to something else, seeking relevance.

It was also then, that every Nigerian sought the Aburi Accord, the first post-independence conference to resolve the nation’s internal strife and would be breached by the federal Nigerian vandals in its quest for genocide and occupation of Igboland.

Mobolaji Aluko, then Yoruba mouthpiece in its social network began corresponding with me with regards to the Aburi Accord.. Aluko lectured at Howard University, Washington, D.C., and had appeared at Nigerian World related political discourse in an attempt to sell his sovereign national conference campaigns to a young, radical audience that declined to buy his product. Aluko, irratical, angry, mischievous and tribally bent political salesman, left the forum, and in a nutshell, created his own website to promote his agenda and the Yoruba ingrained Awoist principles.

The irony during this period a “reborn” nation was seeking its path to a sound democratic order, Igbos were hovering, knowing not what to do until the Dallas Igbo elites, spearheaded by Acho Orabuchi, founded Igbo Forum, a platform that was way overdue and applauded gracefully. As it happened, it would not be long when the rascals would hijack the place ridiculing the place beyond imagination. Igbo Forum and its sister discussion groups never would be the same again, henceforth.

Sadly, as it developed, Igbo happened to have fallen into a country widely known for its philandering politicians reason why nothing works in its endeavor to get things straight - a brutal police and military force, an Islamic “Jihad” terrorists, a murderous gang of militants, a failed state, collapsed culture and corrupt leaders - virtually in everything that is bad, including the churches all across the land purportedly to have followed the Gospels accordingly, but deviated, misinterpreting the Biblical principles, taking the whole concept to a whole new heights and blown out of proportion. And in some of the bizarre cases, they hold their mouth while the congregational leads are engaged taking advantage of their victims, the gullible and vulnerable ones who had been left with no choices, and who are eventually castigated for attempt to destroying God’s House of Worship by seducing and charming these congregational leaders, offering them what they couldn’t refuse. Such has been the dilemma of these congregational worship centers.

Moreover, as these atrocities and moral outrages are been unveiled, taking other parts of the world, for example, the social media have had a part in changing all that - in their leaderships like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now all around the world with Occupy Wall Street, demonstrations, denouncing corporate greed; with an impact already felt and a big ups for digital social media - Facebook, Twitter and other networks.

Are Nd’Igbo using these social media networks effectively?

The answer would be an “absolutely not!” In June of 2010, twenty-eight-year-old Khaled Said from Alexandria, Egypt, was beaten badly by Egyptian Police while witness and several hand held cameras documented the assault. Despite police denial and cover ups by the Egyptian state, contrary evidence was posted by Egyptians on Facebook and Youtube. It was this disturbing development that that twenty-nine-year-old Wael Ghonim, Googles marketing big wig took his expertise to work. He created the Facebook group “We Are All Khalid Said,” for people to join in protest for the case. Ghonim was arrested returning to Egypy from Dubai where he started the movement that eventually ousted Hosni Mubarak. The Internet movement spread elsewhere in the Arab League becoming a phenomenon all around the globe.

Similarly, there has been cases of murder, extra judicial killings in all the Igbo states, corrupt politicians and scores of atrocities all over the land, and yet the only tool left could not be utilized to effect changes as seen in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, the ongoing strife in Syria, Yemen, and several parts of the globe, using the Internet as a force of change and “liberation.”

The arrival of the rascals at Igbo Forum when Igbo elites took things for granted - the inability to set standards with guidelines for decorum and topics to be posted and discussed relative to current trends on all Igbo-related political debates and engaging the politicians in a sense of belonging to their best in providing the structural needs of the people they had been elected to serve.

While Igbo Forum emerged, its counterparts had already concluded its phase of its charter and ready to present its recommendations to the much, looked forward to Sovereign National Conference. By this time, the forum had begun to fall apart for lack of keeping up its archives resulting from non payment of dues. As it happened, a series of Igbo forums begun to surface since the breakouts wanted to go on to the local level - remotely to their enclaves - Nd’Ngwa Forum, UmuAnambra Forum, ASA-USA Forum, Akah Forum, NdiIgbo Forum, Old Orlu Province, Waawa Forum, Njaba South, World Igbo Forum, Igbo Events, Igbo Worldnet Forum and the list goes on and on.

Quite disturbing, typical and indication of a people divided. And when one looks at all the nonsense coming out from Abia and the gang of Orji’s election fraudsters who stole the peoples mandate, one would be wondering if Abia’s really the part of Igboland and origin where prominent Igboist in the likes of Michael I. Okpara, Alvan Ikokwu, Francis Akanu Ibiam and numerous other good men came from.

Until now, Igbo seems not to be getting it, regardless of the ongoing pathetic thirteen years of the nation’s fledgling democracy in the Fourth Republic; that after thirteen years the experiment seems not to be working and an alternative should be sought; which brings to mind Aluko responding to an article I had written years ago giving references to the Holocaust, Apartheid, the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the Russian Pogrom and Revolution, all all related human atrocities in which the anti-Igbo Pogrom bears the same resemblance, and using the Aburi Accord as an analogy the Nigerian vandals negated; thereby, a sovereign national conference of that nature would not work in a situation no formal apology came forth, effectively. In that regard, I cited sections vii, viii and ix of the Aburi Accord for reference to weigh in the irrelevance of a sovereign national conference. Sections vii, viii and ix of the Aburi Accord:

(vii) With a view to promoting mutual confidence, all decrees or provisions of decrees passed since January 15, 1966, which detracted from the previous powers and positions of the regional governments should be repealed. Law officers of the federation should meet in Benin on January 14, 1967, and list all the decrees or provisions of decrees concerned, so that they may be repealed not later than January 21, 1967, if possible.

(viii) A meeting of Permanent Secretaries of the Ministries of Finance of all the governments in the federation should be convened within two weeks to consider ways and means of resolving the serious problems posed by displaced persons all over the country.

(ix) Displaced civil servants and corporation staff (including daily-paid employees) should continue to be paid their full salaries until March 31, 1967, provided they have not secured alternative employment. The Military Governors of the East, West and Mid-West should send representatives (Police Commissioners) to meet and discuss the problems of recovery of property left behind by displaced persons.

Aluko had written extensively on a working document on behalf of the Yoruba elite, and had concluded it was only principles based on Awoism that would work in a Nigerian entrapment, and considering a modelled Western Nigerian framework, through the profound leadership of Obafemi Awolowo.

At this time in question, Igbo had already been divided on its cause of action in determining if a charter drawn from the various sections of its grouping, suggesting what and what not should be included in the charter. Orabuchi, Francis Elekwachi, Nkem Ekeopara’s “Nd’Igbo Generation 1960-!970, Ralph Uwazuruike’s Movemen for the Actualization of Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Oguchi Nkwocha’s Biafraland even though he had consistently been against any decision on a Nigerian national state, Okenwa Nwosu, Iselle Obikpani, Ekwe Nche, Enyimba, M.O. Ene’s Kwenu, Cornelius Akubueze and the rest, took part in what had been an arduous task to bring forth a binding document by way of joint sessions with the related factions. Town after town, hamlet after hamlet, village after village, brothers after brothers and cousins both near and far after cousins of the same lineage, raised their voices and said thus far and no further; that Igbo must come up with a charter in the event of an endorsed sovereign national conference, submitting its own line of constitutional guidelines to be deliberated in what the opposing sides had called “conference of sovereign nationalists.”

I had connected with Elekwachi on a series of hiccups relating to the document he had presented on behalf of Pan-Igbo Constituent Assembly in Diaspora (PICAD), the committee he founded in collaboration with Obi Nwakanma, Cornelius Akubueze and others. Elekwachi had commended my insights when the confusion on who is an Igbo and the full definition and meaning of Igbo Proper, which fired up another cycle of debates and symposiums. I had already been exhausted with these debates that had been mind boggling, looking at how the Yoruba nation fair with its stanby, ready made document to keep a Nigerian national state intact and viable.

With respect to what was about to explode among Igbo elites and the ones so distrust of an Igbo charter on the bearings of the document prepared without appropriate and adequate consultations; I gave a deep thought researching and studying the facts and logic about a Igbo Charter to be submitted on behalf of PICAD and a very few other committees. In an exclusive article which was bordered on a profound Igbo national state, putting together analysis and all the stuff detrimental to a healthy Igbo nation, laying empahasis on Igbo as one infinite, indivisible people. Thus I wrote:

“the Igbos are a people whose origin is of one lineage, their genealogies can be traced back through many generations of forefathers to a common ancestor. This type of societal identification is not the same as a national or linguistic grouping. One can join a nation; one can learn a language; both are voluntary. But in blood heritage, it implies Igbos have an inherited customs and traditions which led to a particular order of social organizations. The Igbo of Nando has the same socio-cultural structure as the Igbo of Abakaliki, Ikwere, Obigbo, Nkwerre, Igurita, Okpanam, Ibuzo, Elele, Omoku, Orlu, Abriba, Waawa, Obowu, Nnewi, Idemili, Ihiala, Nsugbe, Amazano, Awkuzu, Nteje, Okigwe, Eziama Obiato, Onitsha and Abagana, Arochukwu, Ohafia, Amaigbo, Arondizuogu, Owerri, Mbaise, Umuohiagu, Oko, Diobu and any community where Igbos can be found. It is in this vast genealogical structure that provided a simple basis for alliances and inheritance. Lands and rights go to sons and brothers on the paternal side. Residential groupings, too, are familial. Villages, kindred and hamlets are made of men descended from a common paternal line women marry in, though many also are of the same paternal line linked by a lineage traceable back to a primal patrilineal ancestor.

So, too, is the traditional way of marriage as no dating occurs when a man expresses his interest in a woman, parents and relatives arrange marriages. As custom dictates, the groom to be has to go through series of interviews and other custom-related events such as paying dowry to the bride to be family before the marriage can be arranged and finalized.

By this order and method, and as we head to the conference table to write a charter for the Igbo nation, we must bear in mind the above particular order when our decisions and resolve begins to climax. We must also bear in mind Igbo nation is a nation state, and that Nigeria must not be included in her principles. In choosing this method, of not including Nigeria or any other entity in her preamble and the entire document, and by not mixing any political principle that varies with the ideals, customs and traditions of Nd'Igbo, treating at great length the needs or rights supposedly appropriate to Igbos everywhere.”

The article was followed by an overwhelming line of commentaries and rejoinders at a time the simmering sovereign national conference proposals had begun to wane, losing steam from a burnt out flame under Obasanjo’s watch and on the premise there was ultimately no need for sovereign national conference as long as a legislature was in existence, a legislature as in all democratic orders to rewrite the constitution through its representatives. The SNC died a natural death the way Obasanjo wanted it.

As the case turned out, the SNC fizzled out for many reasons. Obasanjo, a Yoruba should continue with running the affairs of state, and with the applications of SNC, Obasanjo’s presidency might be jeopardized on the grounds of presiding on a constitution fabricated by the military juntas, and not through normal constitutional conferences procedure. And also, the Yorubas, in respect, should grip firmly on the presidency on the course of its two-term llimitations, and for the first time in the nation’s history, a Yoruba president that could be costly if given away. Obasanjo knew very well the implications of a dim wit sovereign national conference. He alerted his kinsfolk to relax the pace of their desperation based on complications of the agitation on a so-called “better ways to govern ourselves.” Forthwith, Yoruba and Afenifere backed off.

Some weeks ago, I had gone to Town Hall Meeting in my district on related community projects that would create more jobs within the district and with the only community bank in the neigborhood --Union Bank -- and a long standing commitment to help small businesses grow in the community, hoping favorably on the takes of Councilman Bernard Parks (8th District), Councilman Herb Wesson Jr. (10th District), and Mark Ridley Thomas (Supervisor, 2nd District) in a series of ground breaking projects, all in the community.

While exiting the meeting, I bumped into Derek Brown, pastor, the House of Judah Christian Center, who had recognized me from when we met sometime ago in Los Angeles. Brown was classmate to former Kansas City Chiefs running back, Christian “Nigerian Nightmare” Okoye at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. Brown, later would move on transfer to University of Oregon, Eugene, to finish up his college scholarship sports program. We spoke at length on gists surrounding his college years at Azusa with Okoye, and how Okoye talked him into Igbo dishes which he is now fond of, patronizing West African-related restaurants in Greater Los Angeles, from time to time. Brown had asked where to locate a Nigerian community in Greater Los Angele, and my answer to his question was a capital “Nada!”

Brown and I talked about a whole lot. His days of flirting with Igbo girls in college and all that cultural stuff; how his dates’ brothers and relatives were always around protecting them. He finally gave up as his routine dating became a trend, the frustrating run around, playing hard to get delay tactics. We also talked about politics and the failed African states. We talked about sports in general and how African athletes were shopped for and picked up at Azusa, for professional and international engagements; and one of the reasons Azusa still stands out for its excelling sports programs in small town San Gabriel Valley. Our hangout was a full historical discussion describing the magnitude of our bonding as one, infinite, indivisible people, never mind the past, that we should work in unity because “working together works!”

Igbo is one, infinite, indivisible people!

Ede chaa nam!

Notes: See;

* “Igbos, Igbo Charter, Etc. and the Igbo Nation,” by Ambrose Ehirim. BNW Magazine, September 06, 2002

* “The Igbo Charter Project- A Commentay,” by Francis Elekwachi. Igbo Forum, July 09, 2002

* No Need For Sovereign National Conference,” By Max Siollun

* “Biafra: The Making of a Nation,” By Arthur A. Nwankwo and Samuel U. Ifejika; Prager Publishers, Inc. New York, 1970

* “The Internet: For Better orFor Worse,” By Steve Coll. The New York Review of Books. (The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire by Tim Wu, Knopf; The Next Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Ellegeny Morozoz; Public Affairs).

Nigeria: Imo State Meetings In Los Angeles, A Baby Talk?

2011-10-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

The last time I was at any Imo State-related meeting was in 2007 when former governor of the state, Ikedi Ohakim had “just” been elected into office and the Southern California chapter of Nd’Imo, in a quick fix, organized and confirmed Ohakim’s formal visit to Los Angeles. I was in the said meeting and questioned the validity of the governor's visit when he had “just” been sworn into office.

In this modernity, four years would storm by and Ohakim would have no time to stop by and see how the Southern California residents of his state are doing; the ones who threw their support and sent him an invitation for a state visit to Los Angeles. Not surprising to some and stunning to those who expected much from the governor, Ohakim would run Imo State for four years - good or bad - and the Southern California elites would not utter a word until Ohakim’s love-hate relationship with the state would be over.

When Ohakim was chased out of office by the peoples mandate, a sigh of euphoria beclouded Imo indigenes in the Soutland with a new strategy that began to unfold in another attempt at throwing in support to the new governor-elect, Rochas Okorocha. Thus begun the new movement and another round of “never again should we sit idly and allow another maladministration happen in our presence. We must not let this happen again,” which earnestly called for action to rescue Imo State from its nightmare and the long ordeal of bad leadership.

Upon Okorocha’s projected victory, the call was immediately announced on a series of outlets and related groups in cyberspace, and had been made public. The call was not about dissolution of Imo meeting in Los Angeles; it was not about the formation of a new one; it was about finding the ways and means to get involved in Okorocha’s administration and to help the state have a sense of belonging and purpose. It was also not about getting rid of the “old Guards,” but to determine if they’d like to continue or abandon what they started years ago in the quest for a properly, organized Imo State, home and abroad.

Nevertheless, the initiative was well worth it and the attempt a bold one. But here is the hiccup, which is troublesome: It’s been six months since Imo Diaspora of the Los Angeles, California-area residents came out with a new political agenda tailored to be significantly engaging in an upcoming Okorocha’s administration in the Igbo heartland. I was overwhelmed and filled with enthusiasm on the basis that Nd’Imo residing in Southern California had made up their minds to “pull the bull by the horn” and get Imo State moving again all around the globe with its new projected guidelines. With an obvious pumping fist in the air, I engaged some very few among my Imo colleagues here in the Southland, showing my interest by way of applications, recon-structuring journalism as part of the ideals to be drawn and required to effecting change in Imo, and especially to set the standard to improve relations between Diaspora and homeland.

From that perspective, many suggestions were made as to a framework that would help launch a new Southern California/Los Angeles Imo meeting which did begun, announcing its intentions to the Nigerian list serves. The idea was that all the blah, blah, blah, considering Imo’s magnitude and without question, the clear showing of its intellectual powerhouse with nothing to show for it, would be a thing of the past if not immediately arrested. The Imo Diaspora of Southern California meant business, and patently, no more baby talk. I had assumed, learning about the architects of change, it will go well and be smooth.

From my list of proposals suggesting a guideline which would help map out a spectacular blueprint, I listed the following I had thought was important for the creators who had gunned for a new, vitalized Imo, both home and Diaspora:

1). Start Imo Diaspora network by way of a discussion forum which must

be restricted with admissions by referral and verification. Table items to

be discussed and if needs be, moderated for out of character

commentaries.

2). Get our respective districts involved by attending town hall

meetings and voicing our opinions with regards to the ways and means of

the relevance of our stay here coupled with the 'push factor' which had

enabled us to be part of this great society.

3). Establish a thorough and efficient pressure group to monitor the

floors of our federal and state assemblies which would also include the

conduct of the state executive branch.

4). Open up a non-profit organization with a Imo Diaspora bearings to

start building institutions in all of Imo State, say, for instance,

University of Imo State, Amazano Campus, specializing in Agriculture;

University of Imo State, Umuowa Campus, specializing in engineering;

University of Imo State, Umuohiagu campus, specialing in medicine;

University of Imo State, Mbano campus, specializing in all areas of

liberal arts; University of Imo State, Nekede campus, specializing in

teaching credentials; University of Imo State, Arondizuogu campus known

for its business school, and the list goes on and on.

5). Being practical and committed to the cause applying effective

leadership.

6). Start working on the agitation for Imo Diaspora Liaison offices all

around the world and regional branches in the United States of America

for its larger concentration

7). Having direct contact with any sitting governor of the state, the

state assembly members, the federal representatives, local government

councilors for transparency and accountability.

8). Initiate learning institutes here in Diaspora for our kids to learn

a variety of who we are, for instance the kind of food that we eat

(botany) and things like that.

19). Initiate paying stipends to our reporters at home as they monitor

the goings on, on the floors of the state and national assembly,

including that of the executive branch.

What happened from around where this development fertilized was that the three most concerned Imo figures in the South-land involved with the new vision, was that most of us, if not all, had seen an unfolding, committed leadership that needed our moral support. Before the meeting held ground and supposedly no more time for baby talk, but absolutely and positively relative discourse to the well being of Nd’Imo. I, in several occasions, engaged my friend and pointblank, talking-head, radical teacher, Innocent Osunwa, who had been blunt over the years on an idling and do-nothing Imo Diaspora regarding its quest to make Imo a model for the Igbo-related states.

On the trio of intended creators of a new Imo Diaspora and a new Imo in homeland, nothing went through our minds as in suspecting lack of interest to get things done. We did not see the three as enemies of one another, nor seeing them as formidable political personalities who came to play politics with our heads and walk away with something else in their minds. We did not even see them as ambitious, having different visions for the state. We saw the three as having good intentions and same visions of a good society, adapting the American democratic fabric -- which they have since the ‘push factor,’ the conditions that compelled them to seek better lives elsewhere - and that the press lubricates democracy. We also did not see them as engaging in the personal endeavor to struggle for influence in Imo on the interest of their respective personal gains as indicative of previously mismanaged administrations of Achike Udenwa and Ohakim which was a shocking realization.

I had attended the first Imo meeting “call for action” in Los Angeles held at the All Saints Anglican Church conference room. Based on how the announcement circulated online, I had looked forward to a huge turnout from a Los Angeles-area population; and as it was, the turnout wasn’t disappointing. And I had also thought what the previous administrations had left behind - a state that is rich in cash and resources, but socially fragmented and intellectually impoverished - would rise like a phoenix getting the state back on track from what I earlier outlined in this framework. The long reign of past, corrupt regimes during the military juntas’ handling of the affairs of state; the excruciating pains of inept, corrupt administrations during the 2nd, 3rd, 4th Republics respectively, which held in suspense the ordinary struggles that forge historical progress. Imo rebirth expected to be created by the Los Angeles area “progressives” who had thought power should be earned by virtue of dedication, sacrifice and hard work; and what they saw as an opportunistic, financial oligarchic class which erupted a state of empire and anarchy should now be a thing of the past, bringing forth a new era and key figures to speak for the Imo people on accounts of thorough systems typical of organized societies.

The sad reality fact now is the real battle extending the state of empire and anarchy has just begun. Osunwa and I engaged on the subject matter, the probabilities of the “same old song,” old wine in a new bottle kind of stuff, that Okorocha’s backers are of the Old Guards, and if probably not, that Okorocha still have some payback time to his election campaign donors who helped catapult him to Government House, Owerri.

In one of my talking points, bedtime discourse with Osunwa, which took us into the night, and after the first meeting I had attended as path finder, I argued that the region’s modern state of insanity as seen over the years - kidnapping, human parts trafficking, rape (most unreported), police brutality, murder and things like that - that if we have been serious to face the challenges squarely, it must start from Diaspora to set up the pace condemning the all sorts of mayhem occurring in Imo and all the Igbo-related states through a powerful web of activists, writers, journalists to global links meant to influence Igbo leaderships on an array of problems requiring solutions that must be applied consistently.

Osunwa had relied on the creator’s sense of good judgement to shovel out the Los Angeles area Imo Diaspora from the deep mess it has been into over the years by lacking a sense of purpose. He had also endorsed the state of mind the creators had adopted in pursuing its course of getting Imo State out of the nonsense, square peg in a round hole drama that likely was taking the state to hell. It was in this atmosphere of Osunwa’s imagination that I chipped in to talk about journalism and why it should be taken as important as any aspect of the creator’s intent to be romantically involved directly with the goings on at Government House, Owerri, without laying more emphasis on the necessities that provides the tools for change - which by all accounts is the work of the journalist to shape how we think, inform the public and govern which comes along with a sound democratic fabric. And why do journalists think about what they do? The job is calling: the mission is to improve every corner of our enclaves. And how’s this done and achieved effectively? And why would it matter?

On the days approaching the first meeting of the “New Order” to a “New Dawn,” I was able to hold some conversations with many of the new dawns on how to get Imo Diaspora and the administrators of the home state to work in tandem for a better understanding and how working collectively would lead to utopia, coupled with a communication gap over the years that could be bridged by means of openness with journalism’s take. Osunwa, however, acknowledged the fact that journal work “is” more than required in a fledgling democracy like Nigeria to keep the government in check, and also said “independent journalists” must be made available to keep checks and balances orderly and not the kind of scandalous journalists who blackmail government and public figures when they have something on them and then negotiate a price within a range of some cash depending on the gravity which is how most newspapers survive in the country; and which at the same time destroys the reputation of worthy, news reporting.

And, remarkably, now that we have fallen into the age of Internet, everyone from individual citizens to political operatives can gather information, investigate the powerful, reach out to the powerless, mediate between government protocol and provide analysis in its investigative work. But as the case has been, not everyone engages in the need for news gathering. For instance, the Igbo-related discussion groups, staggering by the numbers of its subscribed members, and yet haven’t been established well enough to creating impact on how it could influence decisions to its respective administrations from the local governments, the municipalities, the legislature and its executive arm of government that is not however, done by these discussion, news-related groups. Or, are these discussion, news-related groups working on providing quality news items assuming it has established its own line of items that would have its own independent link to reach governmental institutions, as a stable organization which can facilitate regular reporting? And if so, why haven’t we seen a serious news break to their credit, linking directly with these organizations to governmental institutions including the local outlets other than wired news stories?

What has hindered these discussion groups from engaging itself directly with the governmental institutions - the executive, legislature and judiciary - directly for its Diaspora to be engaged fully and be part of a government their role is needed for a sound, thorough democratic dispensation? What was the purpose of creating these groups, for picnic, social gathering and ego-tripping, bragging on its members’ social economic status and the nouveau riche in its class? Why should these discussion groups still be standing in more than 12 years of its founding and are yet to establish any link connecting it directly with series of its governmental organizations in a strictly business way?

Maybe, not so clear to some. These discussion groups, whatever its foundation, cannot afford to be providing us information on picnic, ballroom dances, a new chief in town and its grand-style coronation, a breakthrough purchasing some new arrival of a ‘powerfully’ made machine by the Germans or the Japanese, negating and leaving aside its lifeline that should be benefiting generations to come by totally engaging in the political and socio-cultural issues affecting its land with a concrete, structurally established system for their off-springs and more, more generations to follow; and by discussing innovations, inventions, new techniques, formats for change, ideas and discoveries, and of course, the ways and means to compete in a challenging global market economy.

What are they leaving for the generations to come as legacy when they are sitting idly watching and applauding their land turned into a state of empire and anarchy? What would their generations to come, think of who they were, looking at how hopeless they left the situation? And why is it taken that these discussion groups of a Diaspora stock assume they have nothing to do with the affairs of state, of its native land? And if that be the case focusing on its adopted land, are they fully involved in the administrative process of its council members, senators and representatives at the state and federal level in its respective districts, where they should be presumably presenting their case for the turmoil in their home land like other communities did? How many town-hall meetings and series of activities that follows have they been to checking on how the folks they elected to office are doing by way of reaching out to its district? Or, would it be they played it off, caught up on a crossroad, not belonging to any side of the road?

There shouldn’t be any quiz here; and if only they had paid attention looking back to a failure , lacking the vision, as a result of their deliberately made mistakes and at a terrible cost, the generations to come, many would have to go through, probably would have done something that should have avoided such a terrible mistake of a lifetime - by using the same mechanisms of their upbringing that “it takes a village to raise a child,” putting the priorities into perspective.

And what would have amounted to such a terrible, costly mistake?

Again, one is weary of pointing out, especially on the logjam cases of a strong Diaspora foundations in building bridges by connecting as in all communities we all bear witness; how in similar, they overcame their predicaments of culture shock, struggled, worked hard as a community and thrived; becoming powerful, influencing decisions in their new found land and their native land. In that regard, they acquired all the accessories to become powerful in all aspects. They established their own banks for their commerce and industry; their own schools to teach their own; their own markets and farms for their own people; their subsidies and other related programs for the underprivileged and for their own elderly; their own learning center to teach their own language and culture; their own elected representatives to speak on their behalf and legislate for their concerns and needs; their own means of employment, employing their own; their own hospitals and women’s clinic to care for their own; their own medical staff and medical benefits for their own; their own vocational institutes teaching variety of trades and crafts for their own; their own mortgage companies attending to housing needs of their own; their own newspapers in their own languages; their own communities and villages where they can be identified; their own quest and determination to make life better for each and everyone of their own; their own socializing courts where the next line of projects are put into perspective; their own orthodox in religion where all their kind worship; their own landscaping company where gardening and things of that nature services the community; their own eateries where its dishes are now universal; their own playhouses where drama, musicals, movies, comedy, life band performances of its own musical genre and dance shows, and things like that, draws a diversified audience, and the list goes on and on and on.

So, too, as the creator’s had planned to use the above outlines beginning from establishing a newspaper due to, without news. “we cannot be in business facing the challenges of building community.” Folks need to know about new development in its community. Folks need to read on the latest update in a news worthy world. Folks need information from its own bulletin boards.

And how could this be arrived?

In terms of Imo State, as the creator’s had visioned, creating funds for local news with money made available from federated accounts or money collected from communication-bent projects, like tele-communication users, television and radio broadcast licensing fees, or internet service providers, and which would be administered in open competition through state local news councils. The same could be applied to Diaspora in the event it becomes too much of a burden for the home states to bear. Diaspora could channel a whole lot of ways in getting the news out: through multi-task revenues from related social events, funds from varieties of not for profit organizations, levies from non-governmental events like the churches, enterprises, and many other outlets where funding could be derived so journalists could focus on serious news at the local and state level; and could get it direct on one-on-one to reach the public, uncensored, unless where need be, like the classifieds.

And, as it goes, the bills of the journalist must be paid to get the quality and news-worthy stories across. Journalism has always been a direct/indirect, private/public backed projects. And from that background, journalists in this order, would then have a good relationship with those who pay their bills, whether advertisers targeting consumers and its business development, or private and public domains working on improving infrastructures, needing the services of citizens.

In one of my conversations with one of the creator’s regarding the infrastructural needs of the state and how the message could be sent across to a governmental awareness, journal work surfaced, citing outside newspapers’ credits that has been the mouthpiece of the people. The Sahara Reporters, an online news outlet, which has been doing well from noted public opinion polls, on its account of how it handles the news. While the creators applauded Sahara Reporters’ line of work in its reporting; analysis; dissected programmed blogs; essays relative to Nigeria’s problems grand and small; and documentaries of the same nature, I had wondered if the source of Sahara Reporters’ energy on news-gathering and analysis came from another planet. I had told them that the forces behind Sahara Reporters funding was not unearthly. That the forces, from its foundation of engineering social and democratic change during the Sani Abacha years remains one of its backbones of its existence. So, why wouldn’t Sahara Reporters be top notch agency news reporting outlet, from how it operated in the past and in disguise, masquerading with many handles to fight for democracy and social change?

The creators, from their point of view, weighing Sahara Reporters to have remarkably done a good job in its thought provoking reports and analysis over the years, applauding its efforts; one thing should be borne in mind: it’s time to get your own news outlet and be sure of what the general audience is getting from your reel. Face the challenges and fund your own newspaper. Organize, make it happen and leave it to the experts to handle.

For instance, it will not take all the heavenly places to piece together the finest Igbo writers, correspondents, investigative journalists, including reporters and researchers in homeland to dig deeply providing Diaspora with authentic and reliable, worthy news stories, which is where the creators should start putting their money where their mouth is; that is, if they honestly want to see change and be part of its outcome. The other question should be, are they willing to face the challenges of walking the talk?

Journalists. reporters, writers and researchers in the likes of Chidi Nkwopara-Uduma Kalu -Tony Edike (Vanguard), Leon Usigbe (Tribune), Ikechukwu Enyiagu (syndicated columnist), Chibuzo Ukaibe (Leadership Nigeria), Emma Mgbeahurike (The Nation), Chiawo Nwankwo (Punch), Nkechi Opurum (Daily Times), Petrus Obi-Chidi Nnadi-Ofole Okafor (Daily Sun), Andy Uneze (This Day), Ike Okonta (Daily Star), with a long list of Igbo journalists and scholars on a variety of discipline at the numerous Igbo-related institutions can be given the task; and by investing on good reporting and writing, a whole lot would gradually change especially in this new era of collaborative and “accountability journalism.”

Nkwopara, Kalu, Edike, et al., without doubt, have been doing some fine work of journalism; researching, reporting and writing to keep us informed on a variety of interesting subjects within our surroundings, in Ala-Igbo and its central government in Abuja, including the several other big cities in the nation where Nd’Igbo transact business on a daily basis providing goods and services that sustains the nation.

And why shouldn’t Diaspora be concerned about the affairs of its own people with the kind of work these folks in our journal world send to us, not even mentioning the scholars on their dissertation process and much, much more they will be having us know in terms of information and upfront knowledge. And how much are these folks paid by a controlling publishers and board directors who bankroll what these fine journalists transmits to us regularly?: On how we live and what’s going on in our communities; who is out there to attack us and who wants us dead or alive; how the government is playing games on a very gullible and vulnerable people; why we missed it all on our political, democratic endeavors; why Nigeria is failing all of us; what the urban hard-money banks, insurance companies and big corporations like Shell - are doing to us; the churches in every nook and cranny of the land and why it has become so; how anti-intellectualism and demonization of writers and critics is destroying free speech, and how we are becoming less and less a news reading media people; the angst of the Islamic Boko Haram terrorists, the series of kidnappings in Ala-Igbo and what should be done; the nasty romances in the governmental houses; and how easy going and down to earth men fell readily available as political tool for use by ugly politicians, hard and brutish men; so, the list goes on and on and on.

There are several reasons why other news outlets are performing much better than any independent, Igbo-related owned newspaper, that is, if there is a credible one. From the list of Igbo journalists I have cited, and taking a closer look at the news outlets they work for, about one or so could be said to be owned by a South-easterner; and taking a closer look, too, who indeed runs the paper? The creators cannot be trashy-talky, reproachy, sloppy and gossipy on inconsequential stuff while they have loads and loads of untouched literary and historical issues confronting them -- paying their journalists and writers to start researching on a wide range of their origin, where all the migration began, who they were, how they got trapped into a fabricated nation through a colonization mandate; their role in that fabrication and its aftermath; the pogrom, the civil war, the post-civil war and an alleged reconstruction that followed; and regarding the pogrom and civil war, the victims’ family, the participants who survived and what they know, leading-edge research and interviews in that perspective; and a whole lot connected to the facts and logic about what happened -- and not doing anything about it, which in its entirety a continuous tragedy.

Also, the creators should should come to realization that the people want an administration that is open to scrutiny, making its financial accounts public, one of the lapses former governor Ohakim was able to elude them.

The creators should be focusing and coming up with projects, since a lame duck government of deceit would not get anything done; on how to influence, shape, establishing their literary culture by building libraries in every of its enclaves where access to all that is important in its history and things like that can be located -- works of traditional and lyric poetry, comedy, cultural festivals, history, tragedy, medical writers, the pagans and all about the myth; Agwuisi na Amadioha; nd’amala and what they may have left behind; the churches and those church fathers who combined Omenala and the Biblical principles to their practice; the Dibies (native doctors), who combined mgborogwu and Western medicine to their profession; the nd’ na agba afa, soothsayers, who combine their craft with Western ideals of logic and philosophy, and the list goes on and on and on.

Remarking on these blows, I remember interviewing Dr. Julius Kpaduwa on August 11, 2002. I had scheduled this interview with Kpaduwa after reaching agreement with my colleagues at BNW Magazine on questions they would want asked. I had also notified my friend and colleague, Austen Oghuma, who promised he’d be there on the day of the said interview at Kpaduwa’s bedroom community, The Country Diamond Bar home.

What happened was, Kpaduwa had declared his candidacy to run for the governorship of Imo State. I was not there at his formal declaration party. I was investigating the Otokoto family criminal mafia, asking questions on who knows what on a trail of mayhem, rape, lynching, body parts trafficking and mob killings connected to the Otokoto family in Owerri and its environs. I would interview the son of the mob, Maxwell Otokoto Duru, here in Los Angeles on that trail of heinous crimes that spooked Owerri township.

While working on the Kpaduwa interview, first of its kind by any Nigerian, U.S.-based news magazine in that order, its content and capacity, which was during Achike Udenwa’s administration in Imo State, I bumped into Dr. Edmund Ugorji, then medical director, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, who had since relocated back to Nigeria and who had questioned if I was still writing my “thought provoking” stuff treading with caution that even though what I write is clearly the way it’s suppose to be, that Nigeria ‘is’ not America, that “my people are not matured yet for your kind of write-ups; we are still learning the process of democracy,” Ugorji would tell me. Ugorji also popped up the question of Kpaduwa, if I heard anything since he’d been shot by his political opponents in Nigeria.

“What actually happened and what are the details, do you know?” Ugorji asked.

“I have been scheduled to interview Kpaduwa at his Diamond Bar home and I have been talking to Kpaduwa since the attempt on his life in Nigeria, and I will be meeting with him soon for the interview,” I told Ugorji.

“Good, tell him that I said be well and be strong,” (emphasis mine) Ugorji said.

In late 2004, Ugorji, Kpaduwa, Jimmy Asiegbu and a host of Igbo Diaspora in Greater Los Angeles would summon its elite class to address the plight of the Igbo Nation and how to arrest the troubling situations in the Igbo-related states, which I will be writing in a different essay.

On August 08, 2002, my colleagues and I - Chinedu Ibe (Chicago, Illinois), Dr. Emeka J. Amanze (College Park, Maryland), Nick N. Nwuda (Inland Empire, California), Odo Akaji (Gloucestershire, England), Dr. Emeka S. Enwere (London, England) and Dr. Chidi Okorie (London, England) - had a teleconference on Kpaduwa’s interview to be published exclusively at BNW Magazine. The questions were all in order as agreed. Kpaduwa, fine with the date of interview, was prepared waiting for my arrival. Upon arrival, I met Oghuma, and some of Kpaduwa’s friends, colleagues and political allies who looked forward to the interview.

And for sure, investigative and compelling, I asked the questions and Kpaduwa answered all that had stuff to do with Igbo-related worthy causes and the people of Imo in general. Just like a country or state without appropriate measures operating a police force without bullets, Kpaduwa laid out his agenda for his ideas and visions if elected governor, when I popped the question on healthcare:

BNW: Let's talk about healthcare. The healthcare system in Imo state today is in shambles. I remember the story of a dying patient who could not be treated because he had no deposit. That, for sure, will not happen in the United States. Here, in America, in a situation like this, all one need to do is dial 911 and the response would be available immediately. If elected, how would your administration address the issue, improving the healthcare system?

Dr. Kpaduwa: You have asked the most important question of the night, though I don't know how many more questions you have. I can tell you that for the past four years, my wife and I (my wife is also a physician), we have been organizing and going on medical missions,, a free medical care to all parts of Imo State. As a matter of fact, we just finished one last Friday and we had a whole lot of cases. I was not able to go, even though I arranged it, and my wife could not go even though she was suppose to be part of the medical team. You just have to talk to people from Mbano, and they will tell can tell you what they experienced in our medical missions last week. Not only in Mbano, there were accounts of people who came from Orlu, Owerri and Mbaise trooping to Mbano Joint Hospital for free medical treatments and needs.

In fact, it was as a result of inadequate medical care I experienced during or very first medical mission that drove me to what I am doing now, running for the governor of Imo State, because I found out I could do very little with a stethoscope. I found out that if there was sound, good public policy as far as healthcare is concerned, the people of Imo State would be better off. That's really what motivated me to seek the office of the governor.

I have a plan that is very well laid out in our Manifesto, so to speak. And that plan, basically will guarantee any division of government owned Imo State hospital, standard of community hospital in the United States, if you know what I mean. That means that the operating room has to be fully equipped and functional. There has to be a functioning emergency department. There has to be adequate amount of drugs. And you will ask me how are we going to finance this. We have been doing this without even being in office, completely free of charge. We happen to be in a country--the United States of America--and God bless America that philanthropy is one of the bedrock of society. There is no where I can go to the hospitals that I practice, and ask them for equipments which are still functional and very good, or do a drive around the United States, I will equip every single hospital, functioning without spending a penny. All I need is the transportation. I will train a personnel, an adequate personnel. We will fully compensate the physicians that work there.

The hospitals, nobody goes to them because there is little or no care. We practiced in those hospitals, they are only hospitals in name and it is a shame. If you do not provide the people with minimum wages, decent jobs that will not guarantee them some form of health insurance or any form of health coverage, I believe that the government has the sole responsibility to take care of its own citizens. I don't care where you get the fund from,you go out there and get it until such a time when you have brought out the economic level of the state to a point whereby people can begin to get health insurances from their various jobs.

Under our own government structure, no single individual will be turned away from government hospital and emergency cases because of the inability to pay. It can be done because we will be able to get resources from outside of the country. For complex cases, no individual, for any operation that is needed will be turned away because he or she did not have money. And that is what's going on now. If you don't have money even on emergency basis, in fact, when I was shot and they took me to Federal Medical Center in Owerri, they refused to let me down until I have a police report. This is a gun shot wound, I was bleeding; I was in pain; nobody took the time to access my condition, I could have died. They told us that I cannot come down. So, we went to the police station to get a police report. Under our administration, such a nonsense will not happen.

When we got the police report and went back to the hospital, they refused to attend to me until we are able to pay certain basic fees. I just was lucky my wife's friend who's a physician works at that hospital and she happened to be there when we walked in. She paid all the fees. It's not that I don't have the money, but we just didn't have it on us. You will need a card, you will need this, you will need that in order to be attended, or they won't attend to you. Under our administration, that comes to a full stop. I don't care whether it's a federal medical center or a state hospital.

So the Imo people are in for a treat, as far as healthcare is concerned. That's where they will have the immediate benefits of our administration, because this is not depending on anybody else effort. It is going to be solely our effort. I belong to the Association of Nigeria Physicians in America; they help me run the medical mission in Mbano. The Imo people really are out for a treat; they want decent health-care and we are going to put a whole lot of money for it.”

Which, as the interview entails years we have been living in different times, if at all, we ever had normal lives, with no sense of an ending, as our daily life and movements have been altered, not knowing where the kidnappers are planning for their next victim; not knowing the next politician to be murdered in the most brutal of circumstances; not knowing when a village encounters police on a shootout on the vagaries of a kidnapped local government chairman; not knowing the next victim to be hanged on a tree; not knowing when a Diaspora is waylaid by hired assassins while visiting his native land; not knowing when a young girl would be raped by a gang of college students; not knowing when police would fatally shoot a U.S.-based resident visiting his homeland, and the list goes on and on and on..

We have not in many instances cared about these practices except when it’s shown in the news or we heard it while socializing in beer parlors, and as it’s not happening directly to us, but others - until, one day, and unfortunately like a man going about his business knowing nothing at all and suddenly hears the story of his or her relative being a victim, of the chaotic nature of the land, and that’s when we’ll be up awake, in shock, moping, “is this happening in our land? Jesus

Christ!”

What is actually disturbing is the recent incident of the rapists Jonah Uche, Zaki, Ifeanyi Justin Ogu and Winston Okoye Chinonso who collaboratively raped a young college student brutally to a point the victim asked to be killed. The irony: the follow-up to the case seems to have quieted down, fizzled out and we are erasing it from our memory with nothing done as time passes by. Has anyone thought of the rape victim being a sister, a sister’s friend, a mother, a family friend’s wife and or a very close relative?

These and a whole lot of problems is what should be expected from Diaspora to address with their influence and a positive result forth coming. And with this framework, and a Diaspora comparing its ideals to other communities, in analogy, as they lay claim on their cumulative life experiences in building community from turmoil to triumph in what did pay off telling of their American story as a community; and telling of American prosperity from their building community; and telling of American triumphalism, who else would doubt and argue when they say: The United States Of America is the greatest nation in the world!

Ede chaa nam!

References: See;

BNW Face 2 Face: Dr. Julius Kpaduwa

http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/aehirim/2002aug16.html

The Otokoto Family Criminal Mafia

A BNW Magazine/The Ambrose Ehirim Files Exclusive With Maxwell Vincent Duru Otokoto

http://tinyurl.com/3lavqrk

http://tinyurl.com/3suq9ph

Rochas Okorocha and the New Dawm

http://ambroseehirim.blogspot.com/2011/06/rochas-okorocha-and-new-dawn.html

That Southland Imo Diaspora Meeting

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/info_group/message/18639

Zik Ewuo Aru Upside Down Readers

2011-10-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

Onye na ekwu...Onye ka iwu
Ebee ka iguru akwukwo
Imakwa onye mmwu
mmee gi ihe; iga amata onye mwu
Ana enwe obodo enwe;
kama-kwa-kama; mmee gi ihe
mgbeahu ka iga amata
na uguru tu oyi
Awum Udumotali Ugwumagala
Duru akwukwo bekee na atu ujo
okeze ji obodo; oshimiri ego agwu agwu
ebe oku na enwu n'elu
ga kwaa juo

Starring:Omemgboji 1, Oloutuna Ukashi, Kpakporo Okoroigwe, Okwamkpuru Nwaimo, Eziokwu bu-Ndu, Oguzie nwa-Emena, Omajiji Ogbokiri, Igbo Nd'Iro

NOW PLAYING AT ALL IGBO-RELATED THEATERS NEAR YOU!

Disintegration of Nigeria Is The Cheapest Means To Containing Islamic Extremism In Africa

2011-10-06T15:49:00.000-07:00

By Ikechukwu Enyiagu, Modern Ghana

No one ever solves a mathematical equation without a formula; no one finds the solution to a problem without first finding the root of the problem. Terrorism didn't just happen; it is the result of decades, and perhaps, centuries of subdued disagreements and misunderstanding. Wisdom demands that prevention often be preferred to a cure. These truths inform this timely advice to the United States of America, Britain, France, and all other affected countries of the world to accept without delay that, in order to contain this virus called terrorism which is speedily spreading all over Africa, Nigeria must be disintegrated without further delay.

Like a mustard seed, terrorism only has to have a point of contact-no matter how small. Whilst the Nigerian genocide against Igbos from 1967-1970 have remained no business of the world ruling interests (those who champion human rights) to this date, terrorism in Nigeria shall force everyone to ask this very vital and inevitable question which has until now been mumbled in different quarters: “Does Nigeria has to remain one?' Of course, the obvious answer to this is a resounding NO! Setting aside the unthinkable amounts of money which the US and other nations have wasted so far in the fight against terrorism, lives threatened, with no one sure where and who it may be next, pose greater worries for the world at large.

Nigeria, a country with over one hundred and sixty million (160,000,000) people, have proven itself ungovernable as one federal state. A foolish leader is not one who makes a mistake but one who refuses to accept his mistake and learn from it; the amalgamation of Nigeria by her majesty's authority was the worst mistake ever made by the British government. Even with the many lives of Igbos wasted, with the backing of Britain, for no justifiable cause, and the corruption which has corrupted everything in Nigeria, until now, the British authorities have not accepted that their “Project Nigeria” was a fatally destructible and failed one. Nevertheless, Islamic terrorism is about to change all that arrogant denial.

Until now the pursuit of a Biafran state out of this failed project called Nigeria has not won all the duly needed attentions and interventions from the United Nations, America, and the rest of the world. However, it will be noted here that Biafra is not the only nation in Nigeria that wants to secede; the entire Northern states of Nigeria have obtrusively been agitating for their separate state, even before the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, where Sharia law shall be the constitution of the day; and at the other end stands the Niger Delta movement. While MASSOB represents the Biafran movement, MEND fights for the Niger Delta and Boko Haram, the Muslim North. And while MASSOB resorted to a non-violent approach to assert and obtain the rights of Igbo nationhood, MEND uses violence to claim their rights, while Boko Haram diversifies terrorism in Nigeria.

According to Gen. Andrew Owoye Azazi, the Security Adviser to the Federal Government of Nigeria, “Terrorism has come to stay in Nigeria. This was in confirmation of the British secret service's report that Al-Qaeda has planned to use Nigeria as their African headquarters to attack the west. And true to it credentials, Boko Haram, the extension of Al-Qaeda in Nigeria, has now sworn that “the country would not have peace until there is 100 per cent implementation of Sharia law in the country as enshrined in the holy Quran.” This therefore leaves no question as to whether Nigeria will metamorphose into a Pakistan, an Afghanistan, or even another African Somalia; the question the west and indeed the rest of the concerned member states should be asking now ought to be: “Should we let Nigeria evolve into a Somalia, or an Afghanistan, or even a Pakistan in Africa?” Considering the effects of fighting terrorism and mostly the damages it has inflicted so far, the obvious answer to this, again, should and must be a resounding NO!

Having considered the conditions of Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, South-Sudan, and Somalia, I have come to the only wise and workable conclusion and solution to a terrorism-free Africa: A disintegrated Nigeria. If British intelligence claims Nigeria to be the proposed African headquarters of Al-Qaeda, then it could be since the sings are on the increase. One of the many reason large sums of money are wasted and lives lost in combating this international crime is the precautions and cautions taken by America and its allies to avoid killing innocent citizens, and the sole reason terrorism has lasted this long is because those involved take advantage of civilian-populated zones , both to hide and to attack. In the case of Nigeria and, by extension Africa, knowing the source of the problem would lesson the degree of wastes always envisioned and encountered. The economic instability in all of the western countries today is the effect of fighting terrorism-the effect of refusing to prevent from occurring and, instead, preferring to cure when the whole system has been effectively affected. Not everything has immediate cure if and when not initially prevented from occurring. Lastly, I'd like to advice the US and all concerned that, before the decision to send drones or to come in to fight terrorism (which has actually gained legal residence in Nigeria) is made, please help Nigerians to help you. Nigeria has truly shown the final sign of a failed state when it lost the capability to provide security to protect its president; how much vulnerable can an ordinary Nigerian be? But before the west comes in to increase our pains as a means of reducing yours, give us the help we need to reduce yours without having to increase ours; help us to dissolve this lethal mistake of an experiment called the Federal Republic of Nigeria. A stitch in time saves nine.

How Shell funded militants -Report •It’s not true -Shell

2011-10-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

By Olawale Rasheed, Nigerian Tribune

OIL giant, Shell, has been accused of fueling human rights abuses in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria by paying money and awarding contracts to armed militants, according to a new report published on Monday in London by a coalition of local and international non-governmental organizations, led by a London based NGO, the Platform.

Entitled “Counting the Cost,” the report implicated Shell in cases of serious violence in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region from 2000 to 2010, detailing how Shell’s routine payments to armed militants exacerbated conflicts and led to the destruction of Rumuekpe town.

Shell was also accused of collaborating with the state in the execution in 1995 of writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa and other leaders of the Ogoni tribe.

Shell was said to have paid $15.5 million to the eight families in settlement, and key documents implicating it never saw the light of day during the trial.

Shell has, however, disputed the report, defending its human rights record and questioning the accuracy of the evidence, even while it has pledged to study the recommendations, according to its London office.

The coalition backing the report includes Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), Friends of the Earth Netherlands/Milieudefensie, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, Social Action, Spin-watch and Stakeholder Democracy Network.

According to Platform’s report, Shell continues to rely on Nigerian government forces, which have perpetrated systematic human rights abuses against local residents, including unlawful killings, torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

Key findings of the report include testimonies of contracts that implicated Shell in regularly assisting armed militants with lucrative payments, such as an alleged transfer of over $159,000 to a group credibly linked to militia violence in late 2010.

Shell was also alleged to have, from 2006 onwards, paid thousands of dollars every month to armed militants in the town of Rumuekpe, in the full knowledge that the money was used to sustain three years of conflict.

Platform’s investigation alleged that government forces, hired by Shell, perpetrated atrocities against local civilians. (Shell disputes the report, but has pledged to study the recommendations).

Last year, Shell was said to have transferred more than $159,000 to a group credibly linked to militia violence.

One gang member, Chukwu Azikwe, told Platform that “we were given money and that is the money we were using to buy ammunition, to buy this bullet, and every other thing to eat and to sustain the war,” adding that his gang and its leader, S. K. Agala, had vandalized Shell pipelines.

“They will pay ransom. Some of them in the management will bring out money, dole out money into this place, in cash,” he said.

Platform alleged that in Rumuekpe, ”the main artery of Shell’s eastern operations in Rivers State,” Shell distributed “community development” funds and contracts via Friday Edu, a youth leader and Shell community liaison officer.

By 2005, Mr Edu’s monopoly over the resources of the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) was reported to have sparked a leadership tussle with Agala’s group, with the latter reportedly forced out of the community and a number of people killed.

The allegations, according to Platform, were largely substantiated by a Shell official, adding that a manager with Shell confirmed that in 2006, one of the most violent years, Shell awarded six types of contract in Rumuekpe.

Rumuekpe is just one of several case studies examined by the report, which alleged that in 2009 and 2010, security personnel guarding Shell facilities were responsible for extra-judicial killings and torture in Ogoniland.

Meanwhile, a Nigerian environmental activist, Sunny Ofehe, standing trial in The Netherlands for alleged plot to bomb pipelines in the Niger Delta, has cried out, saying “I am not a terrorist or suicide bomber.”

In an e-mail made available to the Nigerian Tribune, Ofehe, who is also the founder of Hope for Niger Delta Campaign, said his travail was traceable to the parliamentary testimonies he gave at the Dutch parliament about degradation of Niger Delta environment by Shell Oil and other oil majors.

“I have been campaigning against environmental devastation of our people’s environment for many years and testified at the Dutch Parliament against Shell in a parliamentary hearing, where Shell was summoned to defend its practice in the region,” he said.

He said less than a month after the hearing, “a team of about 30 policemen came to my house and arrested me on trumped-up charges and I was detained for 14 days before being released, but remained a suspect, adding that “when they could not establish a case against me, they came up with a new charge of conspiracy to commit terror act by blowing oil pipelines belonging to Shell in the Niger Delta.

“I became the first person to be charged under this law since it came into effect in 2004. I appeared in court for the first time on September 5 and we now have a new hearing date of December 5, 2011.”

No parole for drug traffickers in Malaysia -Malaysia’s High Commissioner to Nigeria

2011-10-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

Nigerian Tribune Interview

When you see a man who is brilliantly excelling in any duty post, that person’s success may not be because of his intellectual capacity or capability to harness logistic alone. There must also be a judicious admixture of passion.

Passion was what the Tribune Tourism Magazine ‘s crew of Wale Ojo-Lanre and Wale Olapade found written all over The High Commissioner of Malaysia in Nigeria, His Excellency, Nik Mustafa Kamal Nik Ahmad, when he granted an interview at the moderately furnished Malaysian House, located on Rio Negros Close, off Yedseram Street, Maitama Abuja.

Nik Ahmad is a journalist’s delight any day. Cool, calm and collected. He logically and sequentially responded to our questions without any ill feelings, no matter how sensitive and provocative the question might be.

“Your country seems to be ruled by wicked people who enact wicked laws, one of which stipulates hanging as a sentence for drug traffickers.”

Instead of him raking on you, the amiable Ambassador would take you on an expository journey of the consequences of the activities of drug traffickers.

The soft-spoken diplomat has a robust understanding of Nigerian and its people “You see, Malaysia and Nigeria are Siamese twins, but the difference is that, one is in West Africa and the other in East Asia.”

And throughout the interview, we could see in him the passion and emotional attachment to the values, culture and norms of his country with equal respect and regard for Nigeria.

He patiently, with the candor and mannerism of a debonair diplomat, discussed how tourism became the number two revenue generator in Malaysia. The issue of Islamic banking, expected behavior of travelers to Malaysia, the drug issue and its attendant consequences, why Malaysia has over 118 airports and their vision of making Malaysia the 20th economy in the world.

By the time you finish reading this interview, you will agree that Nigeria needs to learn and do thorough peer review with Malaysia. Excerpts:

YOU have spent almost two and half years here in Nigeria. You must by now have an impression about your host country?

Yes. I do. Nigeria is a great and wonderful country blessed with innumerable resources and stocked with a mass of pristinely intelligent people. We have a lot also to learn from each other. The reality is that Nigeria and Malaysia share a lot in common. In fact, I used to say they are Siamese twins but unfortunately, however, one is surviving in East Asia and the other is coping in West Africa. Both have the same colonial experience. They both belong to many international associations .Their history of formation is the same. They are countries of mega-diverse cultural and multi-linguistic entities. So we have a lot to learn from each other.

But despite all these diversities, Malaysia seems to be more united than ever?

It is a function of governmental structure and determination to survive together. As I told you, Malaysia is a country of 27 million population, made up of 13 states and three federal territories. We have on ground a federal constitutional monarch. The monarch takes care of the ceremonial aspects of country while the Prime Minister takes care of the running of the government business. In Malaysia, despite the fact that we have different languages, different culture, different ethnic groups, different nationalities, different religions, we never allow these to becloud our sense of reasoning as one indivisible people with a common destiny, hope and vision, while our government functionaries harp on those factors that harmonize us rather than fanning embers of disunity. We realized that in unity we stand. We never allow mutual suspicion or ethnic jingoism to rule our national psyche and/or as determinant factor in appropriation of issues, assets or consideration. It is also in our sub-consciousness that many nations that were hitherto strong and enviable some decades ago are now broken down to smaller territories now.

We don’t want Malaysia to be so. Hence, we daily see those things that unite us, and what we have to gain being united. Malaysia will like to be like Switzerland, not like the former USSR, Ceylon, or like the defunct Yugoslavia or the latest, Sudan. You can see the terrible consequences of fragmentation. We don’t want that in Malaysia and I don’t think it is expedient for any country. Our mega diversity is our pot of unity. And we will defend it till eternity.

Malaysia is one of the first; if not the first, Islamic countries to be called a developed economy. What is the miracle?

It is true. Malaysia achieved this through proper planning, vision-driven strategy and prompt response to diversification. Our vision is to become one of the first 20 economies in the world. Hence, anything we set our minds on, we implement to the letter. This is why we launched our own vision 2020 in 1990. We have not derailed. Also, our ability to read the global economy in the early 80 which forced us to diversify our revenue generation factors, helped us a lot.

You know that in the pre and early post independence, Malaysia was world’s No 1 producer of rubber and tin, but we realized that to lead the world as intended, we must do some extra work. We then diversified into the manufacturing of electronics, and tourism.

As of today, manufacturing is the highest revenue earner for the country, followed by tourism, then petrol, palm oil and timber.

Then what happened to tin and rubber?

You know in the early 80s, there was this economic recession which affected the prices of tin, rubber and oil. As we set ourselves a goal of becoming no 20 of the world economy, we decided to diversify. So we embarked on massive development of the manufacturing sector with specialization in electronics and electrical. We also realized the enormous potentialities in the tourism sector. We quickly commenced the development of the infrastructure necessary for the enhancement of the tourism sector. Nigeria too is heavily blessed with a lot of tourism potentialities. Now, because of the insight and strict adherence to policy implementation, tourism is the second revenue generator for Malaysia, second to manufacturing, while oil takes a distant third followed by palm oil, timber and others. And I want to tell you that 20 million tourist visited Malaysia in 2010.

So what happened to tin and the mining gorges?

This was where creativity and seriousness came into play. In other countries where heavy mining activities were carried out, the gorges and lakes created environmental problems, but do you know what? We turned all of them into resort sites and tourist attractions. The large mining lakes that have continued to attract massive inflow of tourists all over the world are in Malaysia. That is through tourism. We turned sites that should been liabilities and environmental hazards into money making, wealth creation, employment generator sites.

Also, these former mining sites are now locations for Bollywood film makers. In fact, James Bond, Ian Flemings, shot one of his films in our country.

I am using this opportunity to call our Nollywood giants to visit Malaysia and use the resorts as locations to shoot films. It will be interesting also to let you know that some of the medical tourism sites which Malaysia is famous for are also planted within the mining sites!

So how did other resources fare?

We did not relegate any into the background. We also tuned them inward; to keep the industries working, That is why we have been able to reduce the poverty level and unemployment drastically. Let it be known that any country that exports its minerals and material resources in the crude and raw form may never grow and developed rapidly. In Malaysia, we processed all our mineral and materials resources. No timber leaves our shores without being processed. The tin is not only processed but used to produce our ancestral sword, which some Malays hold so dear to their hearts. Imagine what the scenario will be, if Nigeria processes all its exports commodities? This would drastically reduce the poverty level, inflation, unemployment, dearth of fund, and increase the GDP.

Let’s go back to tourism. What is the miracle?

We had a clear vision of what type of tourism we wanted. We realized that we are in the middle of great countries; Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, Vietnam, Brunei. These countries attract a deluge of tourists and travelers. These tourists used Malaysia as a transit post. We decided to tap into this, if only to just attract and lure five per cent of these tourists.

So, our government embarked on tourism promotion taking cognizance of the 3S of tourism, Sun, Sand and Sex. These we don’t desire. We now focus on the rain forests, some of which are over 130 million years old, national parks, where we have the largest numbers of ancient elephants, tigers and orangutan, which is only found in Malaysia. Also since we don’t have the pyramids like Egypt, nor the Taj Mahal like India, we have the people, the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Indians and others whose mode of living are unique and interesting. We packaged and promoted our Home Stay Program, whereby an international tourist, even city dwellers, would visit and stay with the rural dweller in their homes and do things the way they do.

What are the tourism incentives?

Tourism is about infrastructure. It is about promotion. It is about packaging. With our 27 million population, we have 118 Airports, six are international. We have 22 seaports and harbors and road network that covers 98,721 kilometers (61,342 mi) and includes 1,821 kilometers (1,132 mi) of expressways. (The longest highway of the country, the North-South Expressway, extends over 800 kilometers. We generate 24,00 megawatts whereas we need only 20.We also keep our road sane. Road repairs are carried out in the night, not during the day time. And during the peak hours, long vehicles and articulated trucks are barred from entering the city which is from 6- 10 am and 4-6pm.

Let’s talk about Nigerians in Malaysia. How many are in jail?

I do not know how many Nigerians are in jail in Malaysia. There are many Nigerians in Malaysia. Last year alone, we issued over 12,000 visas. Right now, over 7000 are studying in various institutions. Sometimes, there is a problem of identity assumption. For instance, last year, there was a report that a Nigerian committed suicide in a hostel. When I read the news, I quickly made an investigation into the case. I was surprised to find out that the deceased was not a Nigerian but a Guinean! However, I was also embarrassed last year when another report came out that a Nigerian had been kidnapped by another Nigerian, both of them students. When I looked into the issue, I found out that it was a fact! It was like a set up by one of them to farm more money from his rich parents. The majority of the few Nigerian bad eggs in Malaysia are from well to do families who resorted to misbehavior out of indulgence. For I don’t see the justification; why some parents will be paying their children over a thousand dollars every month in a country like Malaysia It is too much. There is no way such a student will not misbehave.

There is this issue of Islamic banking which is a little controversial. What is your view on this?

There should be nothing controversial in this issue of Islamic banking, which I will say is good for Nigeria. I understand the fact that people might be uninformed or have too little knowledge of its operation. What we should try to do is for everybody to have an open mind on the issue and then look at the inherent advantage and opportunities in the system before we say 1234. Islamic banking should not be confused with religion. It is a process of banking being conducted in line with the way of Allah. Allah, the most compassionate, the beneficent, the merciful, who abhors exploitation. If we are sincere with ourselves, the formal banking system is heavily exploitative, pro–rich, and breeds poverty when it comes to lending and granting credit facilities.

How ?

This is because, one, the banks charge interest; two, the interest rate is often too high. Three, there must be collateral, which you have to forfeit in case you did not make profit; four, profit or not, the bank will collect the agreed interest. But in Islamic banking, the bank will lend you money to execute a project or finance a business without any interest. The business must not be those against Islamic injunctions. The bank will not leave you to your fate as it will be a participant in the business. The profit will be shared at the end of the day. And if there is no profit you will not forfeit your property or anything personal effect or loss, which you did not plead in the first instant because there is no collateral needed in this form of credit facility. Allah is against exploitation not dividends.

But you said ‘the business must not be against Islamic injunction is that not infusing religion into it?

Well. It is simple. I am a Muslim and you want me to participate in a concern that it is against my faith, I will not. For instance, asking me to finance or participate is such enterprises that promote prostitution alcoholism, piggery and others. This is not a new concept.

Your country is having one of the crudest penalties for drug trafficking, that is death by hanging. Don’t you think it is high time for change?

To the ordinary fellow on the street who does not appreciate the consequences of drug trafficking. It will look so. But to us who know the import of these acts, we cannot treat the offender with kid gloves. A drug trafficker is a mass murderer. He does not care a hoot for the consequences of his actions. He only cares for his dirty money. Such a kind of a fellow does not deserves mercy. He does not deserve to live. He is worse than an animal. That is why we always urge applicants for Malaysia visa to read and assimilate our rules, laws and policy very well before they set their foot on Malaysia’s soil.

Don’t you think there should be parole for some people on compassionate ground?

If the offense is drug trafficking, the law is clear on that, there is no parole .It is death by hanging. This penalty is not discriminatory. It applies to anyone found guilty of drug trafficking. If a Malay is caught today, Insha Allah, he must face the consequence. So, it will be difficult for any government to plead clemency for its citizens if they are caught in the web. This is equity. This is fairness. This is justice. And as for us in Malaysia, we cannot tolerate drug trafficking, prostitution and terrorism because we want to remain truly Asia, the best of the East.

New Report Expose Shell Complicity In Nigerian Human Rights Abuses

2011-10-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

Graphic: Guardian
By John Donovan, Royal Dutch Shell PLC

Shell fueled human rights abuses in Nigeria by paying huge contracts to armed militants, according to a new report published today by Platform and a coalition of NGOs and featured in The Guardian.

This evening we received an email of thanks from Ben Amunwa of platformlondon.org. Ben is the author of the 41 page report called Counting the Cost, which uncovers how Shell’s routine payments to armed militants exacerbated conflicts, in one case leading to the destruction of Rumuekpe town where it is estimated that at least 60 people were killed.

Shell also continues to rely on Nigerian government forces who have perpetrated systematic human rights abuses against local residents, including unlawful killings, torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

What writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa dubbed the “slick alliance” between oil multinationals and the Nigerian military is alive and harmful as ever. Shell’s operations remain inextricably linked to human rights violations committed by government forces. The Nigerian government, driven to keep oil revenues flowing and working in close partnership with oil multinationals, has heavily militarised the Delta. Shell alone has hired over 1,300 government forces as armed guards. For communities, the impacts have been devastating and are in addition to ongoing environmental damage from oil spills and gas flaring.

Commenting on the report, Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth International said: “Shell’s obligations are clear: it must clean up after decades of devastating oil spills, end the illegal practice of gas flaring and compensate the victims of human rights abuses in Nigeria. It is unacceptable that Shell continues to deny responsibility, while pushing communities deeper into poverty and fuelling destructive conflicts.”

“Shell’s divisive practices have led to daily human rights violations in the Niger Delta,” added Geert Ritsema from Friends of the Earth Netherlands. “Many of the victims have no access to justice and cannot afford to take the oil giant to court. Lawsuits in Nigeria can take decades to resolve and the remedies are often inadequate. Yet Shell must be held accountable for its environmental destruction and complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria, and home governments like the UK and Netherlands must ensure that remedies are available and accessible to the victims.”

Interviews with Ben Amunwa and the former Royal Dutch Shell Group Chairman, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, will be aired during a related feature on the BBC World Service “Business Daily” at 8.30am tomorrow, Tuesday 4 October.

I have been reporting on these disturbing matters since 2007 e.g. Is Shell skulduggery in Nigeria pumping up global oil prices?: 18 July 2007. The astonishing revelations in my article came from a high level manager inside Shell Nigeria.