You gave them amnesty, freed the ones serving prison terms for their atrocities, disbanded and disarmed those checking their menace, rolled out Ruga settlements at the expense of those they've been terrorising, gave them paid employment and now you throw a party for them.


Anybody that tells you that crime doesn't pay tell them to come to Buhari's Nigeria where terrorists are rewarded with everything the govt can muster to throw at them including the damn kitchen sink.

BoboNkiti19:
Zik(Mr one Nigeria, fought against self government even when the golden opportunity was presented to him... the fool opted for alliance with the North) and Aguiyi Ironsi(this idiot was warned by his people against pandering to the North just to be on their good side... the signs of a revenge coup were clear, yet he failed to impose his authority and stop it... at the end the same Northerners whose aSS he was ignominiously kissing... ended up wasting him) those two men were the biggest mistakes to Igbos, infact we can argue that those two characters, are the reason why we are stuck in these predicament and mess of a country today. Honestly in hindsight, I wonder why Nzeogwu and his boys didn't kill Ironsi and Zik... only if...

Ironsi was at a dinner party on board a vessel anchored in the Lagos Marina.

They waited for him to disembark but he never did and other events diverted the coup plotters.

Azikiwe was not in the country on the day of the coup.

You must know that the Nigerian Army back then did not have any intelligence unit that could supply them up to date information on their targets and so the coupists just went and barged on the doors of their targets hoping to meet them in bed with their pyjamas.

In hindsight, it was the worst coup ever staged!

The Nigerian Police E-Branch (Espionage) already knew months back that a coup was about to take place.

The coup leaders had been brazenly recruiting officers and men into their folly by interacting with them in mess halls trying to gauge their political leanings and perceptions of the govt.

Kaduna Nzeagwu had been doing military drills in the dead of the night around Ahmadu Bello's residence for weeks prior that the Sarduna had to raise an alarm and report the troop movements to the Police.

There was no way such an amateur coup plot would have succeeded anywhere on earth today!

Unless it was meant to happen.

I am damn sure Nzeagwy's coup just like Dimka's was backed by MI6.

They knew that the coup will definitely result in outright war.

They knew the Coup plotters were die hard Marxists who wanted to usher in a powerful central govt which will inevitably end with northern control from where the recently discovered oil Wells can be exploited at the expense of the relatively more intelligent southerners.

Just like Dimka's coup which was meant to usher in another round of war beteen middle belt and Muslim north, they knew very well that war will break out from where they would supply obsolete WW2 surplus weapons to sell to the Nigerian govt in return of control of the oil Wells.

Nzeagwu was a fool.

MoIbrahim:
Thanks.
This is on part that is usually missing in the genesis of the Nigerian civil war.

No. This was just a brash reaction to the northern Fulani supremacist agenda.

Ahmadu Bello and his stooge Tafa Balewa were bent on fulanization agenda.

This is what led to the coup.

Funny how the same Fulanis then switched the tables round to accuse the Igbos of trying to dominate Nigeria while they had been doing the same exact thing since 1960!

The agricultural revolution heralded by the GEJ govt which saw more and more southerners going back to the farms have been eroded by this govt.

The farms are no longer safe and what little support southern farms use to get from the CBN are no longer accessible to southern farmers but are restricted to northerners.

Now they want to force us to give up our lands for RUGA and if we refuse, they will starve us to death by placing a financial embargo on imports from where we will be at the total mercy of the north for our feeding.

pazienza, you have developed a supremacist ideology based out of thin air to think that you are better than us in the ND based on the false assumption that you are some how related to those judases and for some daft reason you assume you can achieve glory on your own.


Let me tell you now, that Kanu is deceiving you with Jewish religion today just as the same Jews deceived Zik, Ojukwu, Nzeagwu and Ifenjua with Marxism.

Marxism is and always be a Jewish invention meant for your subjugation.

You are displaying the same mindset as the Fulani.

It's not the Americans but their Jewish rodent overlords.

Classyuniquebae:


Obviously you ain't talking about the Nigerian Army we know except ignorance is playing a huge joke on you .

Your fcking COAS has issued a command order that all personal on pass must go without uniform and be "circumvent" i.e. coded when interacting with the police.

The curse of the Midonites

Mbeki:

Just imagine the high-tech weapons then. By now, North Korea, Russia and the US, will be learning from Biafra. The Nigerian Army we have now are cow ranching and estate development military.

Too much niggery will not make them develop.

Chiwude:
My brother, the deed has been done. If and if led us to entrusting leadership on a marxist and young Ojukwu. The federal forces, had we acted tactically had no business defeating us in that war. All our father's needed do was allow the elders taken seat by guiding Ojukwu, failure to accept that would have pushed him to the back seat while someone else takes the realm. The federal forces would have been decimated with the elders agreeing a deal with the Soviets.
The same thing that panned out then, is still happening now with Nnamdi Kanu. When anybody questioning his pattern is castigated in similar way our father's cheered Ojukwu while chastising the elders.
We seem not to have learnt our lesson and rather following similar path with Kanu.

Great post!

Chiwude, you will learn a two from this article.

In Africa, gallantry does not win wars only brutality.

Chiwude:
I cringe anything I remember the unity of the eastern region post Zik premiership. It was the political disagreement of Zik and Eyo Ita that led to the southern Cameroons voting out their pro Nigeria delegates and electing the pro secession party that gingered their people to vote for union with French cameroons. It was the same disagreement that led to the founding of COR movement.
Zik even though nationalistic was a bad option for our people. He didn't understood the eastern region. Imagine a man born in the north and spent his political career in Ghana and the west, now coming to draw the identity of the eastern region. It was a disaster in the making, that even those who bask in the europhia of his arrival finally regretted it.

He was never a nationalist for if he was he would have put the Eastern region first above Nigeria.

Nigeria is not a nation but a collection of nations and thus a multicultural entity.

Zik was a neo-liberal with twisted Marxist leanings and had always craved for a more powerful central govt.

I don't really blame him because communism was spreading like wild fire across the globe especially in Africa and S.America. He was an ardent and staunch believer of the mythical African unity as espoused by Nyere and Nkrumah.

He was part of the AU representatives that drew a resolution promoting the invoilibility of colonial borders thereby opposing secession in any means.

His mishandling of the Western Cameroun seccesion led him to adopt the stance of not including a referendum for plebiscite in the constitution.

He never knew the potentials of the then old Eastern region as he was never in anyway an Eastern but only by birth.

Chiwude:
Zik was a big mistake that should have been sent back to the west. The damage he did in the eastern region was far greater than the good.

You are damn right.

He was too comfortable in Lagos like most SE and SS politicians of today to have the interest of the people.

https://www.nairaland.com/4671575/azikiwes-foolishness-making-enugu-capital

Chiwude, here's the link I told you about Azikiwe's foolishness

Chiwude:
Well I think so to. Calabar as capital would have done a lot of good to the unity of the eastern region. Minorities would have really felt a sense of brotherhood and even the southern Cameroon's would have voted to remain with us. Everything just happened so fast and before you could say Jack the spanner had found itself in the wheel.
I feel the eastern region was getting there before the arrival of Zik from the west. People now understood that Zik return to the Eastern region destroyed the fabrics that held us as a people. Eyo Ita's premiership would have taken us to greater heights. Zik should have remained in the federal and slug it out with Awolowo and Balewa and not coming home as a crybaby to seek for relevance. Even if he had return, it shouldn't be at the mercy of the leadership of the Eastern region. It's just a pity we lost the plot.

I did an article about how Zik was the major hindrance not only to Biafra but to the development of the eastern region.

That man was a Joe Igbokwe.

Let me search for it

pazienza:


There is no evidence to prove that Igbos looked down or oppressed the Eastern minorities.

Igbos naturally are competitive and even amongst Igbo tribes, it would appear we look down on Igbo clans perceived as lacking behind others. This competition transents even to family settings.
That's how the Igbo society works.

Ndiigbo was fair in our dealings with the Eastern minorities. The Willink report confirmed this.
I currently have a book on the sittings of major projects across Eastern region by the Eastern region government, and it could be seen clearly that the distribution of projects and their completion were done on equity and fairness for all parts of the region.
The same was applicable in employment and scholarship programs.

Eastern region was created in 1939, where was the capital in 1939?

Well it could have been a case of mistaken Igbo confidence for Igbo Arrogance. I am accused of such attitude as well.

But the Biafran declaration was not based on wide consultation and the minority groups did not see why they should fight a war ove Igbo grievances.

There was also the prospect of gaining full autonomy which Gowon promised the minority people by granting them states - although these states were to be fully under the yoke of centralized military dictatorship for decades.

Don't blame us for not siding with you but also remember we also never fought you as well.

pazienza:


Stop spreading lies.
Enugu never replaced Calabar. Calabar was at no point the capital of Eastern region.
Rather it was Lagos that replaced Calabar in 1906 as the capital of Southern Nigeria, when Lagos colony (modern day SW) was joined to Southern Nigeria (Modern Day SS and SE) by Sir Eggerton.

It was not until 1939, 33yrs later since Calabar lost it's capital status to Lagos, that Eastern region was created by Bernard Bourdlion, with Enugu as the capital of the region.
Moreover, Enugu produced coal that was the economic mainstay of the Eastern region, it was like the crude oil of today. In fact, Port Harcourt only exists today because of the coal that was discovered in Enugu and need to transport it to the nearest point of exit to the Atlantic.
So how can you say that Calabar was at that point in time, more economically relevant than Enugu? Were you sleeping when you typed this?

How exactly did the Biafran declaration not consider the views of minorities in the East, when the very name Biafra itself was suggested at an assembly of all Eastern ethnic groups by an Ijaw man from modern day Bayelsa, named Frank Opigo?
An Ebonyi man can as well come and claim that Biafra declaration didn't carry them along, since no person from Ebonyi played a leading role in Biafra hierarchy.

I am the OP and from ND and I truly do sympathise with the past and present Biafran cause but we must be honest, the Igbos back then had a very condescending and paternalistic view on minority peoples of the then eastern region.

Enugu did not in any way help the Igbo cause.

If Calabar had been maintained as capital, the then Eastern region would have been more integrated and economically viable.

Enugu was declared capital in 1959 by an act of the eastern parliament which the Igbos were a super majority.

These subtle event and so many to mention here caused anti Igbo sentiments that were fueled by Nigerian propaganda.

A year into the war, the Ibo had nothing left. No food, no ammo, not even fuel, which is ironic when they were sitting on the big Niger delta oilfiends.

Even the bravest troops can't fight when they're dying of starvation. So in 1969 the Nigerian Army sent 120,000 men pushing through the center of Biafra, dividing the Ibo zone in half. It was like Sherman"s march to the sea -- it broke the Biafrans' backs. Early in 1970 Biafra surrendered. Nobody knows how many people died. The low guess is a million, the high ones maybe three millions. Almost all were Ibo civilians.

The Nigerians punished the Ibo for their uppity behavior by freezing them out of the loot they got from oil revenues and other graft, the one industry in Nigeria. For 30 years the Ibo have been watching the oil pumped out of their land to buy more Mercedes for a bunch of sleazy generals and politicians. They've got a right to be pissed off -- but the Biafra war showed them that in Africa, right ain't got much to do with it. Like the greatest Swede of 'em all used to say, "God is on the side of the big battalions."

Biafra: Killer Cessnas and Crazy Swedes
By Gary Brecher Browse author Email



The eXile asked me to do a special 200th column, something about old wars and new wars, so I thought I'd talk about the bush war building up right now in the Niger River delta in Nigeria. The TV's talking about how the locals are forming an army to make the Nigerian government give them a share of the income from all the oil they've found in the delta, but nobody mentions that this miserable maze of fever swamp was the focus of the biggest war in modern Africa -- the Biafra war.

Nigeria's a typical West African mess of a country, only bigger and meaner. It's divided up the usual way: the coastal tribes are Christianized from sucking up to the European colonists. The further inland you go, the drier, hungrier and more Islamic it gets. The Brits grabbed the Nigerian coastline from the Portuguese when they realized there was money to be made, and turned the two big coastal tribes, the Ibo and the Yoruba, into their overseers on the Nigerian plantations. That left a lot of the inland Muslim tribes, the Hausa-Fulani people of the Sahel, permanently pissed off, sharpening their knives and biding their time.

The Hausa-Faluni got their chance in 1963, when the last Brit in Nigeria hopped on a plane, yelling back to the Natives "Congratulations, chaps! You're independent!" As soon as the Brits bugged out, the tribal massacres got going. Muslims in the north hacked to death every Ibo they could find. They hated these smartasses from the coast -- and now the Redcoats weren't there to stop them from taking revenge. 30,000 Ibos were killed in a few days.

The massacres kind of soured the Ibo on the idea of Nigeria as one big happy intertribal family. In 1967 an Ibo General in the Nigerian Army declared that the Ibo region was now an independent country, "Biafra." The Nigerian Army, a big, sleazy outfit, begged to differ and invaded the Ibo region in SE Nigeria. The Army had 250,000 men. The Biafra/Ibo army had maybe a tenth that many, but they were brave and smart -- the Ibo had always been the brains of Nigeria.

Every time it was a question of real battle on anything like equal terms, the Biafran rebels won. They stopped the government troops cold, then grabbed tactical surprise by staging a long-range raid into Western Nigeria.

A risky advance like that by untrained civilian recruits (which is what most of the Ibo fighters were) is really impressive. But sad to say, courage doesn't count for much in West African warfare. It's ruthlessness that wins these wars, and the Nigerian junta had it.

Instead of facing the Ibo army man to man, the Nigerian troops grabbed the coastline around the Niger River delta, the supply route the Ibo needed. They stopped all food shipments heading for Ibo territory and sat back to let the Ibo starve.

The Biafrans were still winning every battle and losing the war like Lee in 1865 -- starved out, strangled from behind. They realized they needed to open the supply route and decided to take back the Niger delta. And they got some help from outside.

The best example, one of the few real heroes you'll get in this sleazy world, was a Swede, believe it or not. A Swedish aristocrat, no less. Count Carl Gustav von Rosen volunteered to do close air support for the Biafran army, hosing down government troops and raiding their bases, flying tiny civilian prop planes like little Swedish Cessnas.

Is that glorious or what?

The mismatch in the air war was total. The Nigerian AF had MiG-17 fighters and Il-28 bombers, DC 3 transports converted to bombers and a few choppers. Those Ilyushin and MiG designs were the high point of Soviet military aviation. Don't kid yourself -- the Soviets built some great planes. The Il-28 was a big, fast bomber with a bombload of 16,000 pounds and a three-man crew, including a tail gunner manning twin 23mm cannon. You wouldn't want to tailgate one of these.

The MiG-17 was even better. It might have been the best fighter in the world when it went into service in 1953, and even in the mid-sixties it was good enough to win against our Phantom F-4s in dogfights over North Vietnam. US pilots were way more scared of the MiG-17 than the follow-on model, the MiG-21. The slick moves and big cannon of the MiG-17 were one big reason the USAF stopped thinking of fighters as manned SAMs -- all speed and no finesse -- and went back to planes with nose cannon, maneuverability and started teaching air combat at Top Gun schools.

Up against all this big international hardware, the Biafrans had...nothing.

Then this crazy Swede von Rosen came up with the kind of idea that would only work in Africa. Since he couldn't get the Biafrans any jet aircraft, he'd just buy some prop-driven trainers and refit them for combat. Von Rosen is such a great character he almost makes me reconsider hating Swedes. He was a throwback to when the Swedish pikemen turned the tide of the Thirty Years War.

Von Rosen specialized in noble lost causes. Way back in 1938, when he was just a kid, he volunteered to fly for the Finns in their ultra-cool, hopeless fight against the Red Army. The Finns had no bombers so von Rosen just grabbed a civilian airliner, loaded it up with bombs and dropped them on the Reds from the passenger doors.

"Welcome, Comrade passengers! Coffee, tea or 500 pounds of HE?"

Thirty years later, in August 1968, von Rosen was working as a civilian pilot delivering aircraft to Africa. He ran into some priests who were trying to find somebody brave enough to fly medical supplies past the blockade into Biafra. The mercs they'd hired called it off as too dangerous.

Von Rosen volunteered to fly a DC 7 into Biafra with the supplies. The Biafrans were so grateful, and were fighting so bravely against all the odds, that von Rosen warmed to them like he had to the Finns. The Biafrans needed help to deal with the Nigerian AF, which was fighting a nasty war even by African standards. In the whole war, there"s not one case of the Nigerian AF attacking a military target.

That would've been dangerous -- and not nearly as much fun as bombing refugee camps, strafing hospitals, and napalming fleeing civilians.

Von Rosen tried to find the Ibo some modern military jets, but nobody wanted to sell to the Biafrans for fear of upsetting the Nigerian government, a much bigger customer. So von Rosen started thinking about small prop-driven aircraft. There's a long history of using slow prop planes in bush warfare. Even the USAF, which has a major hard-on for afterburners and chrome, was forced to adopt a slow, armored CAS plane, the A-10. They hated it at first but it proved itself in both Gulf Wars, when fancy toys like the Army's dog of an AH, the Apache, left the field with its tail between its legs. In Nam, the classic jungle air war, we used two planes that were slow as molasses but did the job. One of the best and ugliest was the A-1 Skyraider, a chunky WW II style plugger. The USAF hated it and was always trying to twist combat reports to make the F-4 look good and the Skyraider look bad, but pilots agreed: you were better off going in low and slow in a Skyraider than zooming by in an F-4.

Even the Skyraider was like an SR-71 compared to the little putt-putt plane von Rosen built his force around: the MFI-9, a tiny prop-driven Swedish trainer that looks like those ultralights people build in their garages. This plane could park in subcompact spaces at the Stockholm mall. It had a maximum payload of 500 pounds -- me plus a couple of medium sized dogs. Lucky those Swedes are so skinny.

Von Rosen bought five of these little "Fleas" down the coast in Gabon, slapped on a coat of green VW paint to make them look military, and installed wing pods for unguided 68mm unguided anti-armor rockets. Then he and his pilots -- three Swedes and three Ibo -- flew them back to Biafra and into combat.

They blew the Hell out of the Nigerian AF and army. These little Fleas were impossible to bring down. Not a single one was knocked out of the sky, although they"d buzz home riddled with holes. They flew three missions a day and their list of targets destroyed included Nigerian airfields, power plants, and troop concentrations.

The Fleas turned their weaknesses into advantages in true guerrilla style. They were so slow that they had to fly real low -- which made them almost impossible to hit in the jungle, since you never saw them till they were on top of you. The low speed made for better aim: almost half the 400 68mm rockets they fired hit their targets, which is an amazing score for unguided AS munitions. (There used to be a joke in the USAF that if it wasn't for the law of gravity, unguided AS rockets couldn"t even hit the ground.)

The Biafran AF managed to destroy three MiG-17s and an Il-28 on the ground. Killing enemy planes on the ground may not be as glorious as shooting them down in a dogfight, but they're just as destroyed. The Fleas also took out a couple of helicopters, an airport tower, a Canberra bomber and a half-dozen supply trucks. And they blew away at least 500 Nigerian troops. It was one of the few really glorious exploits you get in war these days. Why they haven"t made a movie of it, I don't know. Guess they think we"d rather see tennis pros fall in love or some shit like that.

Von Rosen's Fleas weren't enough to turn the tide of the war. The rest of the world turned their backs on the Ibo, let the Nigerians starve them into submission. The USSR sold the Nigerians every plane, tank and gun they could cram into their shopping cart, and the British loaned their pilots to fly as Nigerian AF mercs, bombing Biafran civvies and blowing up convoys bringing food and meds to the Ibo villages.

The famine in Biafra was the first time we saw pictures of African kids with skeleton arms and legs and big balloon bellies looking up at the camera. It was easy to get shots like that in Biafra, because the whole country was starving.

Printerscanner:


I think you did not wake up with your brain today

And you with your 2kb processing brain could not discern whom El Rufai was attacking but rushed to defend your chewing stick god.

Armed with just bayonet, Corporal Nwafor fought his way through heavy gun fire, in-close hand to hand combat, seized a manned armored vehicle and turned it's guns on the overwhelming enemy troops and led an advance that saw the enemy retreat beyond their defense lines.

This is Hollywood stuff

MelesZenawi:
So what's the essence of this thread.

To school you Yorubas on what it takes to be brave and courageous

Printerscanner:


If Buhari should look at El-Rufai side once, even El-Rufai's enemies will cry for him. El-Zakzaky that has militants as followers crawled on his belly for Buhari's mercy. Col. Sambo Dasuki who is a Sokoto Prince has been in jail for about four years now. I hope village people are not pushing El-Rufai to replace El-Zakzaky in prison.

Zombie, el Rufai was referring to Jonathan's presidency.

Check the date and read before you rush and drop your kegs of ignorance here.

FarahAideed:
Just imagine

Will you blame him?

When their zombie supporters swallow every lie they spew why won't he continue running his midget lips

But they will dump their weapons and run when confronted by real killers

How will he not know

Boko king

100% accurate

This body bag midget and Boko cheer leader, butcher of Zaria and Khalifar of southern Kaduna Ruga?

Today he is arresting people for "hate speech".

Coming from the body bag governor