By Peter Okutu

ABAKALIKI—THE Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, weekend, said it has commenced the sensitization and mobilization of people on the need and pattern for Biafran referendum which will soon commence in the country.

In a statement issued in Abakaliki, MASSOB leader, Mr Uchenna Madu, said the referendum was not only the need of the hour but also the methodology for the actualization of the sovereign state of Biafra in no distant time.

According to him, “the referendum will determine our future existence as an indigenous people’ and undo the British enslavement policies of the Ndigbo.”

The statement read in part: “The Movement for Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, has started mobilizing and sensitizing the people of Biafra on the need and pattern of the Biafran Referendum that will commence soon.

“We see it as the need of the hour, as every self determination struggle had its methodology. The non violent Biafra struggle and restoration urgently and earnestly demands the long awaited referendum.

“MASSOB, Biafra Peoples National Council, BPNC, and other pro-Biafran groups have resolved to thwart and undo this British enslavement called marital union that will never work again.

“We have also resolved to work in unity of strength, cohesion and one accord pursuant to achieving a resounding referendum exercise that will determine our future existence as an indigenous people.

“The current escalation of the quest for an exit from the failed Nigerian union must, therefore, be seen by the global community in its true context as the continuation of an almost 50 years old fight for self-determination, driven by a clash of irreconcilable civilizations and cultures, erected by colonial fiat.


Members of the Movement for the Survival of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) during their rally to mark the 17th anniversary of the movement, yesterday, in Awka, Anambra State.
“Providentially, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, offers a fresh window of engagement with these volatile issues in a manner that steers everybody away from the specter of violence, since a simple Referendum can resolve the matter instead of war and violence.”

“It was in pursuit of this non violence option that MASSOB support the Lower Niger Congress Solemn Assembly of The Peoples of The Lower Niger in Port Harcourt on 27th April 2015 at which it was unanimously resolved that the Peoples of the Biafran Territory shall go to a Referendum to determine their political future in exercise of their Right to Self determination.

“Nigeria was a colonial-era creation of the British. The country was on January 1st 1914 artificially cobbled together by the annexation of the then Protectorate of Southern Nigeria to the then Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in an exercise officially tagged “Amalgamation”.

“The mind-boggling failures of this otherwise giant promise on the African Continent has been the subject of many researches and academic inquisition.

“Decades of routine, massive bloodletting which punctuate these monumental failures came to global reckoning in 1967-1970, Eastern Nigeria, one of the four Federating Regions that constituted Nigeria, found itself in a genocidal war.

“The war was levied on it by the rest of Nigeria, having proclaimed itself the Republic of Biafra in a desperate bid to preserve the remnants of its population who were being decimated in mass xenophobic killings by rampaging Northern elements who clung unto a false interpretation of a botched military putsch in January 1966 in which leading Northern politicians lost their lives.

“These pograms collapsed the Union of Nigeria and the attempt to revive the Union failed in January 1967 after an Accord reached in Aburi, Ghana was jettisoned by the Federal Side.

“In the war that erupted, over 3 million Biafrans perished as a result of coalition of Arabs countries with Nigeria and British sponsored Western back up amidst the search for self-determination, in circumstances that cast a shadow of doubt on the humanity of mankind of that era.

“The gory pictures from the killing fields of Eastern Nigeria, particularly defined by the bony frames of thoroughly malnourished infants, with protruding stomachs signaling the terminal stages of hunger-induced kwashiorkor.

“At the cessation of bomb and bullet hostilities against the people of Biafra in 1970, the acclaimed victorious Federal side isolated the Igbos of Eastern Nigeria and continued the War by other means, particularly on the economic, political and other fronts.

“MASSOB draws more insight In the words of Lamido Sanusi Lamido, the immediate past Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and now the Emir of Kano:

“The Northern Bourgeoisie and the Yoruba Bourgeoisie have conspired to keep the Igbo out of the scheme of things.

“They have been defeated in war, rendered paupers by monetary policy fiat, their properties declared abandoned and confiscated, kept out of strategic public sector appointments, and deprived of public services.

“The rest of the country forced them to remain in Nigeria and has continued to deny them equity. Our present political leaders have no sense of history.

“There is a new Igbo man who was not born in a 1966 and neither knows nor cares about Nzeogwu and Ojukwu. There are Igbo men on the streets who were never Biafrans. They were born Nigerians and are Nigerians, but suffer because of the actions of earlier generations.

“They would soon decide that it is better to fight their own war and maybe find an honourable peace than to remain in this contemptible state in perpetuity. The Northern Bourgeoisie and the Yoruba Bourgeoisie have exacted their pound of flesh from the Igbo.

“For one Sardauna, one Tafawa Balewa, one Akintola and one Okotie-Eboh, hundreds of thousands have died and suffered. If this issue is not addressed immediately, no Conference will solve Nigeria’s problems.” (Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, at a Public Lecture titled, “Issues in Restructuring Corporate Nigeria” 11th September, 1999, at Arewa House Kaduna).

“For the sake of brevity, MASSOB in consonant with the Lower Niger Congress adopts this succinct 1999 encapsulation of the Igbo misery in Nigeria, though as to be expected, the situation has gone much worse for the Igbo, with the introduction of violent sharia by 12 States of Far North since year 2000.

“There is no doubt that the 1999 prophesy of Lamido Sanusi Lamido is simply fulfilling itself now, simply because nobody heeded that sober call for equity.

“Needless to recount here the several debilitating Constitutional shackles, consciously emplaced by the same victorious Alliance of the rest of Nigeria against the people of Biafra, in what now translates to a master-servant Constitutional Order, comparable only to the apartheid era of South Africa, presently anchoring Nigeria’s “Democracy.”

“It is against this backdrop that one can meaningfully examine the dynamics driving both the relentless, ubiquitous demand for ‘Biafra,” and the world-wide outrage of the people of Biafra against the incarceration and molestation of “Biafra” agitators.

“It is also against this backdrop that one can appreciate the urgency of Richard Branson’s recent reminder to the whole world of this dark, shameful chapter of human history when he republished those horrifying pictures and war-time editorial comments on his Twitter page, indicting his home country, Britain, for leading other Allies, including the United States and Russia, to visit such genocide upon a people for no reason beyond oil.

“Probably prompted by the resurgence of the agitations for the resuscitation of Biafra, Richard Branson had queried aloud, why 48 years after the Biafra Genocide, the World pretends that nothing happened.

“For purely commercial reasons, the more endowed Southern Nigeria was politically subjugated to the North in what the British creators of Nigeria explicitly envisaged as a permanent marriage between a poor Northern husband and a Southern Lady of means that gives Britain an indirect control of the Country.

“By a cablegram message of December 1913, the then British Secretary for the Colonies, Lord Harcourt, boss to Lord Frederick Lugard, had captured the purport and import of the impending Annexation of the then Protectorate of Southern Nigeria to the then Protectorate of Northern in the following words:

“We have released Northern Nigeria from the leading strings of the Treasury. The promising and well conducted youth is now on an allowance of his own and is about to effect an alliance with a Southern Lady of Means. I have issued the special license and Sir Frederick Lugard will perform the ceremony. May the Union be fruitful and the couple constant.”

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/03/massob-begins-sensitization-mobilization-biafran-referendum/
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if reading this epistle is all takes to be in soliderity i procastinate it.

Yoruba Muslims will soon arrive here to tell you that MASSOB is behind the arrest of their sons and daughters including their Oba after Hausa mafia killed and burnt their houses in Ile Ife.

OK

Garbage

I support referendum as a peaceful way to answer the Nigerian question.