₦airaland Forum

@OneNaija
Lol. He means well, but virtually every sentence in his post has at least a grammatical era of a misspelling.

Wow, Henry101,
You live in Los Angeles and you're preaching to me about being Igbo. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and head back to Igboland and live the real Igbo life?

The solution to the Igbo problem in Nigeria is development. If Igbo were as advanced as you believe you are you would own the country. 250,000 whites in Zimbabwe out of a population of 12 million controlled 98% of the land until Mugabe’s seizures ruined not only the whiter farmers but his country. Throughout the Apartheid era whites were a minority in South Africa. I wonder what Ian Smith, who led Zimbabawe during its racist era, had to say about the country after Mugabe's land seizures. The white's in South Africa built nuclear power stations by the 1980s. The people and culture I have observed as I travel through the East here don’t exhibit that kind of capability. You can’t buy a plastic bottle of Coke out here.
On the other hand if you think war will save you, you have the right to do that too. It ain't my problem.

As for your woodpecker quote, maybe I should tell you that I have only contempt for ancient sayings of dead cultures. What the Bleep do I care what the old people said. They are the problem. A culture that exports only desperate people is dead. It has failed to survive as a culture.

It’s like a man sitting in a house with a time bomb under it. He isn’t worried about the bomb because he does not understand the concept of bombs. He’ll be a happy man because of his ignorance. I think that’s the Nigerian problem. Ignorance is freedom.

Personally, I don’t care what Igbos do for or against Biafra. Igbo culture is dead. In forty years it's greatest cultural export has been the crude and brain dead Nollywood home movie. Compare that with America's cultural conquest of the globe, to the extent that the death of a black American, MJ, shut down the Internet. Compare that with the American flag flying on the moon.
I guess everyone has the right to hurl dumb kids against machineguns to address political and ethnic grievances. If they’re fighting I hope to be as far from it as possible. It’s not my war. America became the envy of the world although there is no specific American ethnicity. It’s a lot of people from all over the world, and more are still going there. if the Igbo think pure ethnicity is the future they are wrong. If niggers are too dumb to make Nigeria work, because of tribalism, well, I hope you at least manage to cull your exploding population. Fight a good, bloody war so you can stop invading the Western world out of hunger. Yup, a lot of those Naija people in the West today left because they could literally not eat anymore in their country.
The Biafra cause was shitty in ’67 and still will be shitty. My only problem is bloodshed. Only people with military training truly hate war. Well, maybe 5 million of you will die (according to a RAND Corporation simulation), and since you have that magical Igbo “bouncebackability”, which Anambra didn’t seem to exhibit as I travelled through it, you’ll start the forty five year cycle of getting ready for another one. Maybe that my little cousin will get his chance to kill some Hausa niggers.
LONG LIVE BIAFRA
LONG LIVE THE IGBO PEOPLE

Hello,
@Eziachi, thank you for your reply. We’ll get knee deep into the discussion of that right away.
Available documentation shows that the Biafra war was not forced upon the Igbo. After the brutal massacres of Igbo in the North, a period of quiet ensued, during which a Gowon who realized the import of what had happened tried to placate Ojukwu and the Eastern elite. The evidence indicates that Ojukwu and a small group of Eastern elites had started planning secession at least by August 1966, however. Aburi was a diversionary tactic or at least diplomatic window dressing. Whatever was agreed there was irrelevant, given that the high Igbo elite were bent on seceding anyway. The most that can be said is that Gowon’s creation of states on May 27 1967 forced Ojukwu and that elite to declare Biafra on May 30, earlier than they had envisaged. It was necessary to do that because Ojukwu’s authority would have started eroding rapidly if people waited.
War is a costly and hazardous undertaking. Meanwhile, a people’s believing in a cause and fighting for it on the war front does not guarantee victory, and does not mean that the cause was sound to begin with. The concept of Biafra was so simple that illiterate peasant boys understood it. The problem is that in a complex world answers are never simple. The question of the soundness of the Biafran option boils down to this: was full-scale war the only way to guarantee the safety of Igbo people in 1967, as Ojukwu’s independence broadcast said? Was leading the Igbo people, ill equipped, with no modern arms industry, no technology competitive with Western arms technology, into a war that cost 2 million lives a justifiable means of protecting people from pogroms that killed 30,000? I will not impose an answer on you. Answer it for yourself. What I’ll add is that the pogroms gave Ojukwu and the Biafran elite carte blanche to push the people to the limit of endurance, even after it was clear that prolonging the war was not achieving anything. The leaders could always scare the people by reminding them that the Hausa were coming to wipe them out.
Meanwhile, rioting that kills 30,000 is not a declaration of war. There is a gulf between anarchic mob slaughter and war. I have some military training so I respect war as formalized destruction. The Northern elite was trying to terrorize the Igbo living in the North. They were not looking to start a war.
One poster argues that my writing indicates I cannot be an Easterner. On the contrary, it is my being an Easterner that prompts my skeptical attitude toward the Ojukwu mythology. I don’t like the idea of Igbos dying to achieve political objectives that are not viable. Meanwhile, I continue to believe that fighting a losing war weakened the Igbo position in Nigeria. As for the alleged nobility of Ojukwu’s cause, why did he keep Colonel Hilary Njoku, at the start of the war the highest ranking Biafran officer and commander of the Biafra army, in house arrest for almost all of the war? Well, it was because Njoku was not only of higher rank than Ojukwu, he opposed the war from the start. He supported secession but realized war would be disastrous and told Ojukwu so. Read his wife Rose Njoku’s book Withstand the Storm.
About 3 weeks before the actual fighting in the war began Obafemi Awolowo and a high powered delegation of mostly Yoruba visited Enugu. They met with Ojukwu and senior Biafran leaders for talks during most of the working day of their visit. Secession was not brought up during those talks. Late at night Ojukwu and some aides and senior officials went to the guest chalets where Awolowo and his team were staying and informed them that the East was seceding and there was no going back. Awolowo then remarked that therefore the talks of the entire day had been a waste of time. ojukuw said he had only deigned to meet with Awolowo because of Awo’s personage.
(The source of this is Wole Soyinka’s book You Must Set Forth At Dawn.)
Meanwhile, there was no plan to wipe out the Igbo on their home territory. That kind of thing would have called for a coordinated operation where perhaps millions of jobless youths from the North, West and Midwest would have been shipped to the East to kill people.
Meanwhile, I continue to puzzle over the Ojukwu cult of personality. It is irrational.
As for what my Anambra relations did during the war I’ll be upfront about that. My father was a student in Czechoslovakia and Germany during the war. My father’s younger brother fought on the Biafra side and rose to the rank of captain and he was killed in action during the war. Don’t preach to me about sacrifice.

Brave, Biafrans,
@Only Truth, one of my parents is from Anambra State. The other one is an American citizen.
@Eziachi,
Maps are important. Countries don’t float on air. Biafra people surely do know themselves. Such as my second cousin, a fifteen year old at the time, arguing with me about Biafra until I told him how geography alone made the entire project impractical and he shut up, at least in my presence. You simply can’t go around with a name for a country and a flag if you don’t have a territory. It’s why this newfound Biafra consciousness is absurd.
I was in Anambra yesterday. Ojukwu is prominent on campaign banners for Peter Obi. A quote on one of the banners declares that having the people vote for Obi is Ojukw’s last wish. Only Africans could worship a man who brought such disaster on his people, a man who pushed some rioting up to the level of a shooting war. Meanwhile you all complain about not having an Igbo president of Nigeria. Well, what will the non-Igbo make of a place like Anambra that's had four governors in six years?
As for the man who says he likes garri, well, here’s a correction. At the end of the Biafra war the soldiers were living on three cups of garri in two weeks. It prompts one to ask a question: in the name of what? 2 million people died because Ojukwu did not like the idea of obeying orders from a lower ranked officer. Also a generation of military officers of Igbo origin realized that their careers were over as far as the Nigerian military was concerned, so they figured carving out their own country was better. If you like garri, given the popilation increase, another Biafra won't even have enough of that. I don't know if you guys noticed but Northern farmers feed the Igbo people.

Actually, I don’t think most of them “feel too big”, especially those who have been abroad for a long time and absorbed the Western mentality. It’s the ones who just left who are the worst ones. They still have fresh memories of the squalid life they escaped from.

Lagos is filthy and a zone of barbaric squalor. Live with it.

Please, Eziachi, kindly show me on a map what you mean by Biafra, since you are using the name in the present tense. What will its territory consist of. What tribes will live in that territiry.

I don’t know about the rest of the world but too much church is one of Nigeria’s problems. Instead of working and being productive and thinking systematically, Nigerians think they can get everything from a god who will bless them. It’s the height of irrationality.

The per capita income of the USA is 40 times that of Nigeria. That is, the average American earns 40 times what the average Nigerian earns. Why wouldnt Naija people abroad feel too big? They have electricity and running water too.

A minimum definition of a nation state is a territory under the control of a recognized government. I call on the Biafra actualizers to kindly show on a map what they mean by the territory of the Biafra II they are hoping to establish.

That pathetic little piece of nonsense someone drew on a map and called Biafra will be defeated in a war in five months at most. It’s already surrounded on that map. You children know nothing of basic military strategy.
I think the Nigerian army is pathetic for needing 30 months to defeat the hungriest and poorest armed army in modern history, a bunch of village boys fighting barefoot on two cups of garri a week.
Listen kids: Biafra is dead. The 15 Soviet republics were already mostly countries when the Soviet Union absorbed them. The Igbo on the other hand have no history of a shared identity before at least the 1940s. Biafra is dead and gone.

I have been visiting the East of recent. I thought an Igbo area would show more entrepreneurial vigor and affluence than the sleepwalking attitude and poverty I notice in Lagos. Well, the East is even more tired and more complacent than Lagos and Anambra looks tired and rundown. You can see the poverty and stagnation everywhere. It’s also not advisable to be outside anywhere in that state except some remote villages after 8 pm. The electricity problem that is a feature of life in Lagos is rife here as well. Large sections of Onitsha have light only every other day, or even less frequently than that.
It is a shame that Nigeria has failed at a technology that Michael Faraday developed in the 19th century. We should not be surprised however. Electricity is a complex technology. You can’t see, feel, touch, smell or lift electricity and we understand it only through mathematical abstractions. Distributing it on a large scale calls for sophisticated coordination and management as well. Therefore, it should not be surprising why Africans failed at it.

When you’re ignorant and given to looking at things through emotion rather than reason you will always be happy. It’s why they say ignorance is bliss.

Whose fault is it? Nigeria has become a country know around the world for its iniquity, criminality, poverty and savagery. You Nigerians must deal with that reality.
It’s really bad. I have been slapped twice in Lagos for using my laptop outside my house. Why? I’m accused of using it for Yahoo-Yahoo. No amount of arguing will convince my accusers that I am using the laptop offline for things like word processing and playing chess.

Nice to know you're still kicking around, ezeagu. Best wishes.

Well, this page has been oddly silent for a while. Apparently, ezeagu has retreated to Biafra to go and lick his wounds suffered here and buy weapons for his Civil War II from the international arms market. What a chap.
Well, he said somewhere that the West is failing because unlike Africa it has not lost its respect for nature. Well, I think, when it’s all added up, one of the principle legacies of the Western World, and one of its great contributions to human civilization, will be its lack of any unwarranted reverence for nature, a belief that first shows up in the West in Ancient Greek thought. While native peoples worship and fear nature the West tries to analyze, understand and control it.
That’s why practically every American home has running water and most Nigerian homes don’t.
Another rejoinder I have is about our argument about genes. He cited TV programs that show people finding their ancestors through DNA as proof that tribal groups are different from each other. Well, people can be linked by DNA analysis to specific groups for one simple reason: human ethnic groups have a tendency to interbreed, with people only marrying people of their ethnicity. It does not mean that those borders cannot be breached however. It is human beings that set up the borders through discrimination, not nature.
The fact remains that humans are remarkably similar genetically.

Jonathan is not a king. A leader of a republic is a president, not a king. It is misunderstandings of political processes of this kind that cause so much trouble and corruption in Nigerian politics.

Abdulmutallab or whatever carried the underwear bomb, not the North or the Hausa people. Besides, Biafra does not exist. It ceased to exist on January 14 1970.

How does a country without a president give an ultimatum? The Americans are probably laughing at Naija right now.

Continuing my narrative about the queue at Shoprite, Nigerians think the quiet man who lives by rules and cognition is a fool, and that civilization hobbles. That is unfortunate, because civilization is about having advanced conceptual schemes for looking at the world and for acting in it.
Much of the last sentence is un-African, however. That’s why I say only God or Western rule can save Africans.
By the way, I use Shoprite as a laboratory for observing Nigerians. You see all their flavors and weaknesses at that truncated temple of consumerism, and they don't know it. They lack the subtlety.

Igbo gene structure. I’m still marveling at the illiteracy and ignorance of that. There is no “Igbo” gene structure. At most it differs from that of any other Nigerian by an insignificant percentage.
Human genetic variation is very small. All humans on Earth today, the now nearly seven billion of us, originate from one woman who lived around 80,000-120,000 in a small band of hunter-gatherers. She was not the only adult woman of reproductive age alive then. She is however the only one who has left an unbroken line of descendants. She lived in Africa, probably around what is now Tanzania.
By the way 95% all Europeans descend from only seven women. The first of them to live, circa 40,000 years ago, also lived in a hunter-gatherer band, and her people must have shared Europe with the Neanderthals. Since Africa is the root of mankind and the most genetically diverse continent, I would guess that all Africans cannot have descended from more than at least twenty women, in terms of basal ancestry.

The remedy for corrupt leaders is not disintegration because the leaders will be just as corrupt in their new territories. The remedy is the increase of respect for law and order and rationality at all levels of society. Simply blaming the leaders is not enough. I was in a queue in a mall, “Shoprite”, in Lagos, the other day and a young man simply cut in front of me in the queue. Maybe he thought he could get away with cutting into line in front of a “gentle” looking person. I mean, when you look at the bumpy and rugged and worried faces of Nigerians, with poverty and struggle and crudity effected into them by years of brutish living, you don’t want to cut in front of them. You look for the fool to jump. He’s the weakest link, right? You know, the average African thinks civilization is the same as being a fool. (qv Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna, etc for what lack of due process leads to. They started a firestorm that did not burn out for 4 years by killing Norhtern officers in their homes at 2 AM.) I told the young fool to leave and he said ‘Relax’. I told him to leave again and he said he would not. I quietly pushed him out of the line and told him if he would like to fight to protest my evicting him from the line I was ready to fight then and there. I do not brook insults from savages.
The young man said nothing more and he quietly joine the queue. By the way, from his accent he must have been Igbo.
If indisicpline and the contempt for discipline are so pervasive in Nigeria, sweeping away the rulers or breaking up the country will not deal with the uynderlying roots of the problem. Nigerians have to rethink their entoire philsophy of life, wheter they stay united or not.

From your posts you seem surprised by my statements about race. Those are not my findings. That’s what science has found. 85% percent of human variation is among individuals. Racial variation, among different races is only 15%. Tribal variation must be even lower than that. And as I said, variation among any group of selected human genes in a large area of Africa like Nigeria does not correspond with conventional notions of “tribe”. But then, I recall a Nigerian who asked me what I thought about mermaids after he and I had a lenghyt discusiion about physics. You’ll do nothing with what I said.
Of course, the title of the blog itself is flawed. What the hell are Nigeria's component parts. There is no clear definition.

Is there healthy competition between independent states in Africa? They either ignore each other, or like the newly seperated Ethiopia and Eritrea, they are in a state of constant preperation for war or actual war. I'll move to America if a war starts here. No Nigerian tribe is worth dying for.

I will gladly use the Nazi appellation when I believe vigilance is necessary. A common argument humans use is ‘They are different from us, therefore let’s kill them, QED.’ That’s an argument from the Stone Age. As a character in a novel said, the chief groups left over from the stone age in the world today are architects and Nazis.