bedfordng:
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Hi bedfordng I need to discuss an idea with you asap. You can hit me up on this email> nazubike@live.com

1MCN: Ol' boy, see CV!
See achievements!
This Soludo guy don make me feel say my CV dey learn. Omo, this na intimidation!
Next time el-rufai wont dare those ahead of him in facts and figures.
But, chai, if this rejoinder enter public circle wela all the osusu wey suppose enter our bros el rufai pocket from that im book don do vuum.
But e just be like say that el rufai guy like to open im own n.y*sh by imsef.
God bless 9ja and im people.

As in ehn... wicked credentials o! my guy...

"...For your information el-Rufai, before I met anyone of you at the original Economic Management Team, I had (for a decade) lived in Ethiopia, United Kingdom, and United States of America (USA) and traveled to 45 other countries as an itinerant scholar and consultant; worked at the United Nations; been to Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick Universities; was a visiting professor at Swarthmore, USA; and consultant to 18 international organisations including the World Bank, IMF, OECD, EU, ADB, various UN agencies, etc. I have been consultant to different departments of the World Bank at different times, including being on the Chief Economist Advisory Council (CEAC) for the period 2005 - 2012 and no Nigerian had anything to do with any of them. I spent 19 months at the Brookings Institution, USA (January 1991 – July 1992; and three months in 1998) but according to el-Rufai, I went to Brookings after a consulting job at the World Bank (which would then mean ‘after 2000’?). According to el-Rufai, I became Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in “mid 2005” instead of May 2004. He manufactures both the facts as well as the comments."

autowiz: where u located? call this no for diagnosis and repair assistance

where's d no.?

luvinhubby: ECU(brainbox) is the primary suspect.

I've scanned the car again. When the key's turned to ignition, the check engine light comes on for 2 seconds like it's supposed to and then goes off, with the clicks from the main relay sounding.
My confusion now is, ALL the codes have suddenly disappeared! But the car just won't start!!! Someone please help with possibility advice.

nissparts: Turn on the ignition switch, if the check engine light does not come on with the other instrument cluster lights, the ecm has been damaged

The other lights come one but the check engine light doesn't. But the injector still supplies fuel when trying to start and other necessary conditions such as spark into the plugs and co still work. Does that count?

Please I need advice on my car. It’s a 97 Honda CRV that stalled while I was driving about 3 weeks ago.
Prior to that, the car had been having hot-start problems. I scanned for errors (I’ve got a pc scanner) and got a few codes that I planned to sort out at my convenience (since I usually just drove to the office in the morning and by evening, the car was cool enough to start). The codes were:
P0122- Throttle position sensor,
P1337- Crankshaft speed fluctuation sensor,
P0141- Oxygen sensor,
P0700- Transmission control system,
P0715- Input/turbine speed sensor.

The day it stalled, (it had never stalled while driving) I tried waiting for it to cool down before starting again, kicked severally, but it never started and I had to park it there. I did a scan and got the ff codes:
P0118- Engine coolant temperature circuit high input
P0122- Throttle position sensor,
P1359- Crankshaft Position/TDC sensor/Cylinder Position Connector disconnection
P0141- Oxygen sensor,
P0700- Transmission control system,
P0715- Input/turbine speed sensor.

I got a mechanic the following day who checked it and found the timing belt had cut. He changed the timing belt and at first it didn’t start, but after fiddling with the ignition distributor, eventually it started. Only this time, the hot start issue seemed to have become worse. The mechanic drove it down to his workshop to fix other minor pending issues. I was told the hot start was caused by the distributor coil, which I changed. Before it was changed, i tired to drive it, but the gear was giving issues and flashing the D4 light. The mainshaft sensor was serviced and the gear oil changed.
The problem now is the car has simply refused to start since then. Everything has been checked from fuel pump to injectors, to the ignition coil, igniter, spark cables, Main relay, to the timing settings. Everything seems to be working fine but the car would just not start.
Now the mechanics are saying it’s a bent valve issue caused by the timing belt that cut. I don’t believe this coz the car had started after that and it was running fine except for the hot-start issue and the gear.
Now, I’ve tried to scan the car, but it doesn’t give any codes whatsoever. The MIL is now off, so I’m suspecting it’s probly the ECM.
Please what’s your take and how would you advise that I proceed the smartest possible way?

Siena: In my opinion, the more automation in an automobile, the less fun it is.

I don't like it.

Hi OP, sorry to barge into ur post but Siena, please i need ur help. Can i get ur mail pls... I need to send you a msg asap

o'boy:
Damola,leave Achebe alone and stop seeking cheap popularity,this is the Sixth essay of him on Achebe i have read so Far
kinda reminds me of one Nichole gravity that sang "i want finish timaya" to become Famous

Why should he leave him alone? If a well respected and influential prof can descend into peddling lies as facts, then by all means, anyone with enough ammo to fish him out deserves all the "cheap popularity"!

GARRI (x7):

No matter how highly rated you are, the moment you start spreading poisonous lies and deceit, you lose your respect. It's sad, but that's where Achebe has put himself. He will be remembered for his bitterness, deceit and bigotry..

Well said Garri. Truth as it's often said is this, everyone (no matter how world acclaimed or intelligent) has a right to their opinions, but no one has a right to their own facts. What the hitherto respectable prof did was cunningly try to portray is heavily biased and skewed views as true representations, in other words, facts.
The onus is therefore on anybody (whether renowned or not) with counter facts to rubbish his rather horrendous claims, as it turned out to be.

This is quite a long read but the author does a painstaking job of driving home his points in the best rebuttal of Professor Achebe's controversial book so far.

Achebe and the Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent:

A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It is not the business of a writer to side with the powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be thoughtless and wrong. (The Nazi party was once a powerless group). A writer should not prefer falsehoods to reality just because they serve patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should get out and warn the society that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when they are not properly moderated by other higher considerations, they can prove more destructive than nuclear weapons.

I was in Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife when another round of the war of self-determination and secession broke out between Modakeke and Ife. As the war escalated, a single bullet wasn’t enough to kill the “enemy,” he had to be butchered into little pieces and the severed heads displayed at each other’s market squares to huge approval and celebration. Such was the power of the mutual hatred unleashed from their pride in their respective ethnic identities that these two communities were not rebuked by the fact that were both Yoruba, both Nigerians, or that the massacres were being conducted around the famed cradle of Yoruba civilization.

Patriotism when deployed must always be simultaneously governed by something higher and lower than itself like the arms of a democratic government. These provide checks and balances so that patriotism doesn’t become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Achebe’s patriotic autobiography, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra in the light of something higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret, Top Secret US State Department Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967- 1969 and something lower: The Education of a British Protected Child by Chinua Achebe himself.

…A Country is written for modern day Igbos to know from where the injustice of their existence originated. Achebe’s logic is neat but too simple: Africa began to suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is, there was no suffering or intertribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And Igbos began to suffer because of the event surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together called Nigeria. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion which makes every region counterproductively seeks a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 tribes in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive tribes in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of tribes and there are only 206 countries. What the tribes that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratization of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalization of consciousness which makes it possible to treat a person as an individual and not basically a member of another tribe. That is the first error of Achebe.

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer hence working himself into a Zugzwang bind. In chess once you are in this bind, every step you make weakens your position further and further. All the places that should alarm the moral consciousness of any writer, Achebe is either indifferent to or dismisses them outright because the victims are not his people. However, in every encounter that shows Igbos being killed or resented by Nigerians, or by the Yoruba in particular, Achebe intensifies the spotlight, deploying stratospheric rhetoric, including quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in endnotes to show he is not partial. Achebe calls upon powerfully coercive emotive words and phrasings to dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore, not only does he take pride in ignoring the findings of common sense, he allocates primetime attention to facts-free rants just because they say his people are the most superior tribe in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is a masterpiece of propaganda and sycophancy. And yet it is not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to lies.

First let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo. Throughout the book, Achebe presents Okigbo in loving moments complete with tender details: Okigbo attending to Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering opulent room service dishes for Achebe wife in a swank hotel while millions were allegedly dying of starvation and Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo being a dearly beloved uncle to Achebe’s children, Okigbo opening a publishing house in the middle of the war. Out of the blue he writes that he hears on Radio Nigeria the death of Major Christopher Okigbo. Major? The reader is completely shocked and feels revulsion for the side that killed him and sympathy for the side that lost him. Unlike other accounts like Obi Nwakanma’s definitive biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips details of Okigbo running arms and ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and also from place to place in Biafra; he omits the fact that Okigbo was an active-duty guerrilla fighter killing the other side before he himself got killed. Like many other episodes recounted in the book, Achebe photoshops the true picture so that readers would allocate early enough which side should merit their sympathy, which side should be for slated for revulsion. Pities, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what are on sale throughout the book. Achebe of course is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.

To Achebe, the final straw that led to secession was the alleged 30,000 Igbos killed in the North. He carefully structures the narrative to locate the reason for this systematic killing/pogrom/ethnic-cleansing in the so-called usual resentment of Igbos and not from the fallout of the first coup in the history of Nigeria. Achebe dismisses the targeted assassinations as not an Igbo coup. The two reasons Achebe gives are because there was a Yoruba officer among the coup plotters and that the alleged leader of the coup, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu was Igbo in name only. “Not only was he born in Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the Northern traditional dress when not in uniform(pg 79).” Really? First, it was not mysterious that Azikiwe left the country in October 1965 on an endless medical cruise to Britain and the Caribbean. Dr. Idemudia Idehen his personal doctor, abandoned him when he got tired of the endless medical trip. Not even the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference never held outside London but hosted in Lagos for the first time in early January was incentive enough for Azikiwe to return and yet he was the president of the nation. In a revelation contained in the American secret documents, it was Azikiwe’s presidential bodyguards that Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, the coup’s mastermind, used to capture the Prime Minister, Abubakar Balewa. Once Ifeajuna and Major Donatus Okafor, the Commanding officer of the Federal Guards tipped off Azikiwe about the planned bloodshed, Okafor, Godfrey Ezedigbo and others Guards became freer to meet 12km away in Ifeajuna’s house in Apapa to take the plan to the next level. The recruitment for the ringleaders was done between August and October 1965. Immediately Azikiwe left, planning and training for the execution began.

Second, the eastern leadership was spared when others were brutally wasted. Third, the head of state Major-General Aguyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, didn’t try and execute the coup plotters as was the practice if it were a pure military affair. (Ojukwu told Suzanne Cronje, the British-South African author that he asked Aguyi-Ironsi to take over and told him how to unite the army behind him. That was the reason he made him the governor of Eastern Region.) Four, when Awolowo, Bola Ige, Anthony Enahoro, Lateef Jakande, etc were imprisoned for sedition, they served their terms in Calabar away from their regions as was the normal practice. When Wole Soyinka was imprisoned for activities at the beginning of the civil war, he was sent to faraway Kaduna and Jos prisons but the ring leaders of coup plotters were moved from Lagos back to the Eastern Region, among their people on the advice of Ojukwu. Five, during the Aburi negotiations, why was full reprieve for the coup plotters put on the table? Six, a freed Nzeogwu by April 1967 before the secession joined in training recruits in Abakaliki for the inevitable war with Nigeria. He later died on the Nsukka front fighting for Biafra. Yet that was Achebe’s Hausa-speaking, kaftan-wearing Kaduna man, who is Igbo in name only. It was an Igbo coup. (The same repackaging was attempted for the invasion and occupation of the Midwest. It was called liberation of the Midwest from Hausa-Fulani domination when it was simply another Igbo coup for Igbo ends planned in Enugu albeit headed by a Yoruba, Colonel Victor Banjo)

The January coup didn’t foment a much more viscera response in Western Region since their assassinated political leader was part of the corrupt, troublesome, election-rigging class. To Westerners, the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish. However to the Northerners who were feudal in their social organization and Hobbesian in their consciousness, it was different matter. Sir Ahmadu Bello, the slain Sardauna of Sokoto was their all in all; he was the heir to the powerful Sokoto Caliphate and descendant of Usman dan Fodio. More than Azikiwe and Awolowo, Sardauna was the most powerful politician in Nigeria (pg 46). Murdering him was murdering the pride of a people. Achebe chooses to ignore this perspective and more importantly was the fact that Igbos in the North were widely taunting their hosts on the loss of their leaders with Rex Lawson’s song “Ewu Ne Ba Akwa” (Goats are crying) and others celebrating “Igbo power”, the “January Victory.” Posters, stickers, postcards, cartoons displaying the murdered Sardauna begging Nzeogwu at the gates of heaven or Balewa burning outright in pits of hell, or Nzeogwu standing St George-like on Sardauna the defeated dragon began to show up across Northern towns and cities. These provocations were so pervasive that they warranted the promulgation of Decree 40 of 1966 banning them. The Igbos didn’t stop. Azikiwe is more honest than Achebe. In his pamphlet, The Origins of the Civil War, he writes: “…some Ibo elements who were domiciled in Northern Nigeria taunted Northerners by defaming their leaders through means of records or songs or pictures. They also published pamphlets and postcards which displayed a peculiar representation of certain Northerners, living or dead, in a manner likely to provoke disaffection.” It was these images and songs that eventually led to the so-called pogroms/ethnic-cleansing/genocide not the coup. The coup was in January, the pogroms started late in May, and the provocations were in between.

However Igbos in the East did not sit idly by. They started the massacre of innocent Northerners in their midst. Achebe chose to ignore this account since it doesn’t serve his agenda so we return to Azikiwe: “Between August and September 1966, either by chance or by design, hundreds of Hausa, Fulani, Nupe and Igalla-speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria origin residing in the Eastern Nigeria were abducted and massacred in Aba, Abakaliki, Enugu, Onitsha and Port Harcourt.” It is important to note that these Northerners never published nor circulated irreverent or taunting pictures of Eastern leaders unlike the Igbos of the North, they were just massacred for being Northerners. The government of Eastern Region did not stop these massacres. Neither did the Igbo intellectuals. Ojukwu, the military administrator even made a radio broadcast saying that he can no longer guarantee the security of non-Eastern Nigerians in the East, Easterners who did not return to Igboland would be looked on as traitors. This was when Professor Sam Aluko who was the head of Economics department at University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a personal friend of Ojukwu fled back to the West. Azikiwe continues in his book: “Eyewitnesses gave on-the-spot accounts of corpses floating in the Imo River and River Niger. [Faraway]Radio Cotonou broadcast this macabre news, which was suppressed by Enugu Radio. Then Radio Kaduna relayed it and this sparked off the massacres of September – October 1966 [in the North]”.

Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and goes on to pivot the ‘pogrom’ on the fact that Igbos were resented because they were the most superior, most successful tribe in the country. He claims they were “the dominant tribe(pg 233)” “led the nation in virtually every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the arts(pg 66),” which included having two vice chancellors in Yoruba land; they the Igbos are the folkloric “leopard, the wise and peaceful king of the animals (pg177),” they “spearheaded”(pg 97) the struggle to free Nigeria from colonial rule: “This group, the Igbo, that gave the colonizing British so many headaches and then literarily drove them out of Nigeria was now an open target, scapegoats for the failings and grievances of colonial and post-independent Nigeria(pg 67).” An Igboman, Achebe writes, has “an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots…Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies…Although the Yoruba had a huge historical head start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between1930 to1950 (pg 74).” Beside the fact that this has a language consistent with white supremacist literature, Achebe, to demonstrate he is not partial or a chauvinist, based himself on a 17 page report by Paul Anber in Journal of Modern African Studies titled Modernization and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Ibos.

I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this ‘scholar’ was designated as “a member of staff of one the Nigerian Universities.” Why would a scholar hide his place of work in a journal? I checked the essays and book reviews in all the 196 issues of Journal of Modern African Studies from Volume 1 issue 1 of January 1963 to the last issue Volume 49 November 2011, there was nowhere a piece was published and the designation of the scholar vague or hidden. Also this Paul Anber never published any piece before and after this article in this or any other journal. I wanted to start checking the academic staff list of the five universities in Nigeria then until I realized again that it says “he is a staff of Nigerian university;” I would have to check the names of janitors and cleaners, and other non-academic staff too. The truth is Paul Anber is a fake name under which someone else or a group of people possibly Igbo is masquerading. And he/they never used this name again for any other piece or books. So that this ruse would not be found out was the reason he/they hid his/their university. And this piece like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been the cornerstone of books and widely quoted by other journals over a period 45 years. It is the cornerstone of the chapter A History Of Ethnic Tension And Resentment which Achebe used to skew the motive for Igbo people’s maltreatment from the fallout of January 1966 coup and the inflammatory provocations they published to resentment for being allegedly the most successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.

Had Achebe not been overdosing on rabid Igbo nationalism, he would have had his chest-beating ethnic bombasts inflected by a deeper and more sobering analysis of the Nigerian situation in the next essay in the Journal: The Inevitability of Instability by a real and existing Professor James O’Connell, an Irish priest and professor of government in a real and existing institution: Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. O’ Connell argues that the lack of constitutionalism and disregard for rule of law fuel psychology of insecurities in all ethnic groups. He fingers as an inevitable cause of our national instability, Nigerians’ “failure to find an identity and loyalty beyond their primordial communities that lead them constantly to choose their fellow workers, political and administrative, from the same community, ignoring considerations of merit.”

The symbolism of Igbos heading the University of Ibadan and University of Lagos both in Yoruba land was a positive image to assist Tiv, Hausa, Ijaw, Urhobo, Yoruba, Ibibio, Igbo, Efik, etc students shed their over-loyalty to their respective primordial communities and to fashion a higher sense of identity that is national in character and federal in outlook. To Achebe, the symbolism was an example of the dominance and superiority of Igbos. “It would appear that the God of Africa has created the Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of ages,” Paul Anber quotes Azikiwe saying in his West African Pilot, “History has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt themselves to the role of preserver… The Ibo nation cannot shirk its responsibility.” Anber says in his/their essay: “The Ibo reaction to the British was not typically one of complete rejection and resistance, though Ibos were militantly anti-colonial. Since modernisation is in many respects basically a process of imitation, the Ibos modelled themselves after their masters, seeing, as Simon Ottenberg put it, that ‘The task was not merely to control the British influence but to capture it.’ To some degree, it may be said that this is precisely what they proceeded to do. Faced with internal problems of land hunger, impoverished soil, and population pressure, the Ibos migrated in large numbers to urban areas both in their own region and in the North and West…”

The spirit of inclusive humanism, the Martin Luther King Ideal, the Mandela Example, the conscience of a writer should necessitate that if a child in Sokoto goes to bed hungry someone in Umuahia should get angry. If a pregnant woman in Kotangora needs justice someone in Patani should be able to stand up and fight for her. If an Osu group is being maltreated in Igboland, someone in Zaria should stand up and defend them. But to Achebe, there should be no mercy for the weak in so far as he or she is unfortunate enough to belong to the other side. Take for instance the butchering of the lone shell-shocked “Mali-Chad mercenary” wandering around “dazed and aimless” in the bush Achebe witnessed. To show the fight-to-finish courage of his people in face of overwhelming force, he describes how Major Jonathan Uchendu’s Abagana Ambush succeeded in destroying Colonel Murtala Mohammed’s convoy of 96 vehicles, four armoured vehicle killing 500 Nigerians in one and a half hours. “There were widespread reports of atrocities perpetrated by angry Igbo villagers who captured wandering soldiers. I was an eyewitness to one such angry bloody frenzy of retaliation after a particularly tall and lanky soldier – clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali wandered into an ambush of young men with machetes. His lifeless body was found mutilated on the roadside in a matter of seconds (pg 173).”

Achebe does not tell us if he tried to prevent this cold-blooded butchering even though there was an episode where he intervened to save the life and chastity of a Biafran woman arguing with some wandering Nigerian soldiers who wanted to requisition her goat for food (pg 201). If Achebe couldn’t intervene in the butchering, what did he think of the killing then or now that he is writing the book with the benefit of hindsight? Shouldn’t the man have been handed over as a prisoner of war? Was his killing not a violation of Geneva conventions which he so much accused the Nigerian side of disrespecting (pg 212)? Did villagers behaving this way not rebus sic stantibus blur the lines between soldiers and civilians hence making themselves fair game in war? Also notice how Achebe starts the narration with an active first person voice: “I was an eye witness to…” and how he quickly switches to a passive third person voice in the next sentence: “His body was found…” Achebe quickly goes AWOL “in a matter of seconds” leaving a moral vacuum for the Igbo writer to emerge and the conscientious writer to go under.

When atrocities are being committed against Biafrans, Achebe deploys strong active voice (subject + verb), isolates the aggressive phrases of military bravado with italics or quotation marks. But when Biafra is caught committing the atrocity, he employs passive sentence structures, euphemisms and never isolates pledges of murder in italics or quotation marks. Take the “Kwale Incident(pg 218)” that eventually became an international embarrassment for Biafra. Based on an unsubstantiated source, he writes, “Biafran military intelligence allegedly obtained information that foreign oilmen…were allegedly providing sensitive military information to federal forces – about Biafran troop positions, strategic military manoeuvres, and training.” So they decided to invade. “At the end of the ‘exercise’,” Achebe writes, “eleven workers had been killed”

Also compare these two accounts: the background is the Biafran invasion of Midwest. Despite Ojukwu’s assurance to them before the secession that he would absolutely respect their choice of belonging to neither side, he invaded them, occupied their land, foisted his government on them, took charge of their resources, looted the Central Bank of Nigeria in Benin, set up military check points in several places to regulate the flow of goods and human beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded the airwaves with Biafran propaganda, imprisoned and executed dissidents on a daily basis according to Nowa Omoigui’s The Invasion of Midwest and Samuel Ogbemudia’s Years of Challenge. In fact, “The Hausa community in the Lagos street area of Benin and other parts of the state were targeted for particularly savage treatment, in part a reprisal for the pogroms of 1966, but also out of security concerns that they would naturally harbour sympathies for the regime in Lagos,” Omoigui writes. The Midwesterners regarded Biafrans as traitors. And the Nigerian army came to the rescue.

Achebe writes: “The retreating Biafran forces, according to several accounts, allegedly beat up a number of Mid-Westerners who they believed had served as saboteurs. Nigerian radio reports claimed that the Biafrans shot a number of innocent civilians as they fled the advancing federal forces. As disturbing as these allegations are, I have found no credible corroboration of them (pg 133).” Yes, he can’t find it; they were not his people. Also note his euphemisms: “allegedly beat up”… “shot a number of innocent civilians”(shot not killed). He writes: “a number of innocents” to disguise the fact that massacres took place. He also writes: “saboteurs.” Midwesterners collaborated with federal forces to liberate their lands from Biafran traitors and occupiers, Achebe calls them “saboteurs.” Now note in the next paragraph how he describes what happened to his people when the federal army in hot pursuance of the Biafran soldiers reached the Igbo side of the Midwest. It is noisily headlined: The Asaba Massacre(pg 133).

“Armed with direct orders to retake the occupied areas at all costs, this division rounded up and shot as many defenceless Igbo men as they could find. Some reports place the death toll at five hundred, others as high as one thousand. The Asaba Massacre, as it would be known, was only one of many such post-pogrom atrocities committed by Nigerian soldiers during the war. It became a particular abomination for Asaba residents, as many of those killed were titled Igbo chiefs and common folk alike, and their bodies were disposed of with reckless abandon in mass graves, without regard to the wishes of the families of the victims or the town’s ancient traditions.” Then he goes on to quote lengthily from books and what the Pope’s emissary said about it in a French newspaper, what Gowon said, what was said at Oputa panel etc etc. He found time to research. They were his people unlike other Midwestern tribes’ sufferings he couldn’t find “credible corroboration of.” Achebe is incapable of being interested in the sufferings of others.

In the chapter The Calabar Massacre, Achebe not only totally blanks out the well-documented atrocities including massacres Biafran forces committed against the Efiks, Ibibios, Ikwerre, when they occupied their lands and when they were retreating in the face of Federal onslaught, he goes on to tell lies against the federal forces. Achebe writes: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had ‘shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos[sic], most of them civilians.’ There were other atrocities throughout the region. ‘In Oji River,’ The Times of London reported on August 2, 1968, ‘the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered fourteen nurses and the patients in the wards.’” Achebe continues still referring to the same Times article: “In Uyo and Okigwe more innocent lives were lost to the brutality and bloodlust of the Nigerian soldiers(pg137).” How the fact checking services of his publishers allowed him to get away with these is baffling. I looked up the 1968 piece of course. It is a syndicated story written by Lloyd Garrison of the New York Times to balance the piece by John Young which appeared three days before. In the piece Achebe quotes, there is no mention of Uyo or Okigwe or Oji River at all.

This is what is in the piece – the journalist was quoting Brother Aloysius, an Irish missionary in Uturu 150km away from Abakaliki: “But when they took Abakaliki, they put the 11 white fathers there on house arrest. In the hospital outside Enugu, they shot all the fourteen Biafran nurses who stayed behind, then went down the wards killing the patients as well. It was the same thing in Port Harcourt.” This missionary had believed the ruthlessly efficient Biafran propaganda service. Because of the atrocities Nigeria soldiers committed in the Ogoja –Nsukka front and the revenge killings in Asaba, the world had been alerted and it was hurting Nigeria’s arms procurement abroad. So Gowon agreed to an international observer team made of representatives from UN general secretary and OAU to monitor the activities of the three Nigerian divisions and the claims of Radio Biafra. In their first report released on 9th October 1968, there was no evidence of the killings even though it was brought to their attention. Even Lloyd Garrison and other members of the international press corps in Biafra couldn’t find evidence of that particular killings in the hospital. Also note Achebe’s statement: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had ‘shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos[sic], most of them civilians.’” How can an intelligent mind write “they had shot at least 1,000” which an uncertainty, and then following it up with another uncertainty: “perhaps 2,000 Ibos” and then say with certainty “most of them are civilians”? How can you say for sure that most of them are civilians when you are not even sure whether they are 1000 or 2000? It defies sense and logic to build a certainty on two concurrent uncertainties and then call it the truth. But that is the meaning of propaganda. William Berndhardt of Markpress and Robert Goldstein were on contract from Ojukwu to handle Biafra’s marketing and propaganda. Nathaniel Whittemore’s seminal thesis, How Biafra Came to Be: Genocide, starvation and American Imagination of the Nigerian Civil War revealed how they did it and how it worked.

Achebe proceeds to celebrate “the great ingenuity” of scientists from Biafran Research and Production Unit who developed “a great number of rockets, bombs, and telecommunication gadgets, and devised an ingenious indigenous strategy to refine petroleum.” Then he drops the most disingenuously incongruous jaw-dropping statement in the book: “I would like to make it crystal clear that I abhor violence, and a discussion of the weapons of war does not imply that I am a war enthusiast or condone violence (pg 156).” That is Achebe who pages before lamented the lack of weapons for his people; that is Achebe who travelled the world soliciting material relief including arms for Biafra; that is Achebe who watched the butchering of a lone mercenary without flinching; that is Achebe who told Rajat Neogy on pg 105: “Portugal has not given us any arms. We buy arms on the black market. What we cannot get elsewhere, we try and make.”

But there is a reason why he drops this dishonest statement here; he is preparing us for what is coming next. We all know what happened in The Godfather when Don Michael Corleone renounced Satan and all his evil works: Achebe begins to praise the indigenously manufactured bomb, “Ogbunigwe” (meaning mass killer, a translation unlike others Achebe doesn’t include in the book for obvious reasons). He continues: “Ogbunigwe bombs struck great terror in the hearts of many a Nigerian soldier, and were used to great effect by the Biafran army throughout the conflict. The novelist Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike captures the hysteria and dread evoked by it in a passage in his important book Sunset at Dawn: A Novel about Biafra: When the history of this war comes to be written, the ogbunigwe[sic] and the shore batteries will receive special mention as Biafra’s greatest saviours. We’ve been able to wipe out more Nigerians with those devices than with any imported weapons”

If the other side dare uses “wipe out,” Achebe would have flagged it at an evidence of the plan to “annihilate the Igbos” but here, he let it pass without comment. It is from his side. And Ogbunigwe was not a product of Igbo ingenuity; it was a “bespectacled” American mercenary from MIT uncovered by the Irish journalist Donal Musgrave that was secretly training Biafrans on how to use fertilizers to make bombs (cf 13 August 1968 cable from American embassy in Dublin to the one in the Lagos).

In the book, Achebe narrates the many diplomatic missions – official and unofficial – he embarked on for the secession. A particularly telling one was to the President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor(pg162). He and Ojukwu were attracted to Senghor because of his Negritude philosophical movement. [This story of course is not true. Sam Agbam who Achebe claimed he travelled with was executed alongside with Victor Banjo, Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Philip Alale in Enugu on Saturday 23rd September 1967. What Achebe went to warn Senghor about didn’t become an issue until June 1968 when Biafra was losing and Ojukwu had to move the capital further south to the heartland of Umuahia then to Orlu. And there was a monstrously centripetal migration of Igbos towards the new capital which resulted in the humanitarian catastrophe. And the Uli airport Achebe claimed they flew from hadn’t being constructed before his travel companion Sam was executed on 23rd September 1967. It was constructed and opened for use in August 1968 because Enugu and Port Harcourt which were Biafra’s only airports had fallen into the hands of Nigerians. So let’s take Achebe’s story as story and move on]. Achebe tells us after days of bureaucratic obstacles, he directly delivered to Senghor, Ojukwu’s personal letter that “informs him of the real catastrophe building up in Biafra.” Senghor, Achebe writes, “glanced through the letter quickly, and then turned to me and said he would deal with it overnight…as soon as possible (pg 162).”

...There's still a lot more. Read the rest of the review here:
http://pwc-review.com/submissions/achebe-and-the-moral-obligation-to-be-intelligent/

Damola Awoyokun, a Structural and Marine Engineer in London is also the Executive Editor of Pwc Review. He can be reached at executiveeditor AT pwc-review DOT com

How much?

Looks good. How much?

Hi Kay. Can you post pictures of the interior? Is the AC working fine? Coz this CRV models are known for such probs and may be really costly to fix.

Hi OP... Is this ride still available?

Hi NLders, I am considering buying a 99 Honda CRV and a quick check online sort of indicated that this ride (along with others in it's generation) has a peculiar problem with tightening valves that can damage the engines. The consensus recommendation seems to be to get the valves checked after every 30,000 miles. Many owners have complained of this and Honda seems to recommend every 100,000 miles valve check or so.
This seems to contradict the general reliability perception of Honda engines, and I'm wondering what Nigerian owners' experience have been.
Any experts in the house to shed more light?

The guy should just "pass the mic" go and go grab a seat jor! After being careless with his precious ipad, he turns around to launch a smear campaign on a plane he still sneaks to fly in... Nice try! Double Shior!!! on him and his gullible followers

True danjohn. The interview does seem sort of shabbily put together and maybe staged, but he really did hit home some salient points- albeit in a rather mischievious way

Summary text of the interview below:

Fash Interview

Interviewer: John, you were a major star in the U.K, you met former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and many other world leaders. What would you say are those things that are militating against Nigeria's progress?

Fash: Well, let me begin by saying that the Nigeria that the British handed over to our founding fathers was a good country. Our founding fathers had input into the making of that Nigeria which was founded on social justice. But after the 1966 coup, that Nigeria was no more and we were bequeathed a structurally unsound nation where ethnicity and religion are more important that merit. So now, even if you bring an angel to run the affairs of Nigeria without changing that structure, it would be as Jesus Christ said: you would be putting new wine into old skin.

For a start, Nigeria is not a federal republic as such, but a unitary state with too much power concentrated at the centre; and every ethnic group wants their son desperately in charge at the centre, so that they can have access to the fabled National Cake.

Talk about corruption or terrorism, you cannot use the law successfully to punish those who loot or who covertly sponsor terror because when you do, it will be ethnicized until the public gets so confused they are unable to unravel the matter.

We need True Federalism for one. Now, tell me how a state will even attempt to develop its resources and be self sufficient if the government of that state knows that at the end of the month, they'll get a cheque from oil proceeds. That money is not tied to the work of the citizens of the state, so if the governor steals it, no one really raises enough of an uproar, because it was not their money in the first place. So, we have artificial states that exist solely because of the federal subventions they get. Where else in the world do you have such an artificial system?

The other day, economists were complaining that our economy is growing at record levels, yet poverty continues to exist in our society. The reason is because you have people in some parts of Nigeria whose population is increasing and this population is not being prepared to work; they are being told that the reason why they do not have enough is because they do not get more from oil. So when they need more funds, instead of thinking of how to develop their resources, their responses is we need more from the federal government. This is why, even though areas like Lagos, Rivers and Akwa-Ibom States are witnessing a boom, we still see poverty elsewhere because some people think it is the duty of others to look after them.

Each state has to be the direct beneficiary of its own resources like it is in any truly Federal system. Tax money from Lagos State should not be shared amongst 36 states. What incentive do those states now have to develop their own resources?

So in conclusion, the key to me is that we must have a Sovereign National Conference to fix Nigeria's structure.

Interviewer: Now, we have a lot of critics of the idea of a Sovereign National Conference; what would you say to them?

[b]Fash: [/b]When I read on social media people like Elrufai and his fellow travellers condemn the idea of a Sovereign National Conference, I just laugh because these guys are false progressives. The elrufai who says the government should dialogue with Boko Haram is the same elrufai who does not want Nigerians to dialogue with each other. Does that make sense?

These people are only interested in what benefits their political interests and not what benefits the nation. Didn't this same Elrufai once condemn Buhari to Nigerians as being too old to rule? That was in 2010. Today, he is campaigning for the Buhari, who was too old in 2010, to run in 2015.

How could you take a man like that seriously, someone is benefiting from the present system? Of course he wouldn't want the status quo to change. Isn't Elrufai the fellow who withdrew lands from people then turned around to give the same lands to himself and his friends? The same man who awarded lands to his wives and underage children? He is invested in the system.. He doesn’t want change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSFMrAupwo

I watched this video and was intrigued by the way John Fashanu eloquently analysed the defects of the present Nigerian structure, which he traced back to the 1966 coup. He however didn't make his points without taking some time to lay into the controversial mallam , in what he (John) called being unafraid of "calling names" . I think El-Rufai will have a thing or two to say about this video .

But look for yourself. Quite an intersting video

Anybody?

Waiting...

Waiting...

Hi All. I need a good SUV for the roads in my area, and my budget is 800k . So I'm in need of a Naija-used 2nd Generation (2000 - 2004) Toyota Rav4 in good condition (Engine, factory AC and suspensions).
Please contact (or post yours) by mail on: nazubike@live.com
Cheers