₦airaland Forum

#DearMentee,

Turn off the TV!

#JustSoYouKnow, this device has made and or marred so many #people! You see in this day and age of television, so many people literally spend hours of their time watching television! Sadly, the vast majority of that population are young people who should be working on building their future! But instead, they invest more of their time on television. Just a reminder, you reap what you sow; if you sow or put more energy into watching #AfricaMagic, #Telemundo, #ZeeWorld, #SuperSports etc, you reap just that that; nothing useful for your life’s purpose. You forget that those people you are busy watching are people who are excelling in their rightful place and making their #money too, while you sit idle and complain about how broke you are and how the country has done you a great injustice.

Dear mentee, do you realize that watching too much TV can be as dangerous as smoking and every hour of television you watch shortens your life span by 22 minutes and also decreases your metabolic rate significantly, this is according to a research conducted in the United States of America and featured on Fox News. So while you are busy wasting your time, you are also busy killing yourself as well and also doing humanity great injustice by not discovering, developing and deploying the immense potentials (purpose) God has deposited inside you to the betterment of humanity!

Dear mentee, whether you know it, admit it or not, there is a subtle social conditioning going on on television. As a matter of fact, everything you watch is a deliberate and carefully planned out propaganda to sell some idea to you and most often than not, you will buy into it. Good case in point is when the West tried to sell gay rights to Africa and most African nations rejected it vehemently…but are you aware that there is a deliberate and calculated attempt at getting people to see nothing wrong with being gay and they are propagating that via television. Do you know that Disney has released cartoons where men are kissing and two princes fall in love and end up living happily ever after…and our children are watching and being imbued with gay values, when they grow up what do you expect them to be?

As a beautiful black #African with short kinky hair, you carry yourself gracefully until you begin to watch TV shows that show you that you have to wear #Brazilian hair to look beautiful, that true beauty comes when you are light skinned, not dark skinned and you begin to bleach and damaged your skin and psyche, just because the television said so! As a young man, you watch television and you see your rap icons/musicians sag, braid their hair, wear tattoos become gangsters and you begin to see it as the cool thing to do and sadly, you adopt that lifestyle and ruin your potentially bright future! You forget that in the country where they live, the government does almost everything for them, here; you have to fight to make it! You fail #WAEC and #JAMB and blame it on JAMB for jamming you whereas instead of taking your time to read/study, you spent it watching television!

Dear mentee, whether you like it or not, until you turn off that television and turn on your brain, you will not achieve as much as you are destined to!

Until we talk again next week, be the best you can be…

#Live…#Laugh…#Love

Your mentor


George Natural Onuorah


https:///rKEXet

#DearMentee,

WHO ARE YOU![b][/b]

Once upon a time, there lived a farmer in a remote village. One day, he got tired of the daily routine of running the farm and decided to climb the hills in the nearby bushes to see if the grass was truly greener on the other side. He climbed and climbed till he got to the top of the hill and much to his surprise, he saw a nest full of eggs and immediately recognized them to be eagle’s eggs, he decided to take one of the eggs and carefully put it in his back and began his descent back to the farm since it was already getting late.

Upon getting home, he put the egg in with the few chicken eggs in his yard. The mother hen was so proud of herself, thinking she had laid such a beautiful egg. 3 weeks later, the egret hatched along with the other chicks. Mother hen on seeing the difference between her chicks and the egret, raised them as normal chicks. The baby eagle grew up learning the ways of chickens, scratching in the dirt for worms, flapping its wings furiously and flying only a few feet in the air before crashing back to the ground. The other chickens even laughed at it because it looked awkward and different from them.

One day, much late in its life, the eagle who thought it was a chicken happened to look up in the sky and he saw a bird soaring majestically with scarcely a single beat of its majestic wings. “What’s that?!” cried the chicken-eagle in awe…That’s the king of the birds, it’s a bird of the air not like us, we’re birds of the earth…replied a chicken nearby. Still bothered, the chicken-eagle walked away to a pool nearby to have a drink and upon seeing its reflection in the mirror realized that it looked exactly like the eagle it saw soaring minutes ago. No sooner had he come to this realization, he promptly flapped its wings with determination and never returned to its chicken lifestyle.

Dear Mentee, a lot of people are like that chicken-eagle, they read books, watch movies, listen to other people to find out who those people are, and in the process they forget that they themselves do not know who they are and what their essence is. They fail to realize that “of all knowledge, the knowledge of self is the greatest”! Like the chicken-eagle, they function below their capacity and full potential because they do not understand who they are and what they carry on their inside.

They follow anybody that comes around and says anything that remotely sounds good to them, they jump from one church to the other, switch from one job to the other…they accept offers that is no good to them simply because they think there is no other option…they even follow people who belittle them and talks down on them failing to realize that most times, those people they follow around are not nearly as good as they can be if only they discover, develop and deploy themselves. My dear Mentee, I hope you are not one of them and I dare ask who are you? Look, if you do not know who you are, then you are lost! Whether you know it, admit it or not, there is a subtle social conditioning going on on the various media platforms, whether it is radio, television, internet, social media or wherever…from music stars, actors, the international community etc should you give in? NO!!!!! Why should you even consider it in the first place? Do you bear the same name with them? NO!!! Even if you do, are you one and the same person? NO!!! You see, one of the primary indicators of who you are is your name, you most likely have heard the adage, “give a dog a bad name and hang it!” unfortunately, a lot of people today are ‘hanging’ because of wrong association and their failure to discover themselves.

Dear Mentee, #BrandYourself, never allow people to brand you or give you names, if they do, make sure it does not stick unless you approve of it and it is in line with the you in you that makes you you! The journey to self knowledge/discovery is not an easy one but it is not insurmountable, thankfully, there are a lot of resources/mentors available to help you discover and know you enough to become what you were made to become. But remember, the first step to effectively brand yourself is to define/answer the question ‘who are you?’ in other words, until you know yourself, you will not soar like the eagle that you are!

Until we talk again next week, be the best you can be…

#Live…#Love…#Laugh

Your mentor

George Natural Onuorah

#DearMentee,

Stop being a Photocopy!

You see, in this day and age of television, radio, internet, social media etc, one of the most difficult things for most people to do is to BE ORIGINAL! Somehow, you find yourself following everybody else but yourself and sadly, you don’t even realize it. As a female, you copy #Beyonce, #Rihanna, #NickiMinaj etc, you wear all the ‘fine’ green, blue, pink, red #Brazilian or Peruvian hair…you wear layers and layers of makeup, you dress and walk, talk and slay like your ‘idol’! You forget that the consequence of acting like them is that you lose yourself/your identity and #JustSoYouKnow, there are predators out there that will gladly pounce on you, take advantage of and devour you.

As a guy, you walk, dress, talk, act like Wizkid, T-Pain, Yung 6ix, Solid Star etc…even your hair is copied from them! I have just one question for you… while you are busy being a photocopy, who is going to be the original you? Listen and listen carefully, no matter how well you copy them, YOU WILL NEVER BE THEM. Have you ever heard it said that a photocopy is so good that it is better than the original? No sir, no matter how good the photocopy is, it will remain a PHOTOCOPY!

Dear mentee, just imagine for a second that a fish woke up one morning and decided that since it admires the monkey so very much, he will now begin to climb trees like its idol, the monkey. What do you think the result of this venture will be? A monumental failure of course! Why? Because the fish was created to be an ORIGINAL FISH but instead it chose to be a photocopy of the ORIGINAL MONKEY and obviously, it will take a miracle for it not to die in the process.

My dear mentee, a lot of people have gone down this road only to realize when it is almost too late that they have made a most terrible mistake. Some just simply believe it is too late to turn back and make amends, ending up in their doom! Look, listen and listen carefully, if you are already on this track, STOP, TURN AROUND, FIND YOUR PATH and WALK IT! You see, if you do not walk your path on this earth, then your journey here has been USELESS! No one will do it for you and you will not make any credible, lasting impact and of course, the world will not remember that you were ever here!

My dear mentee, If I were you, I will walk, talk, and work my path and carve an indelible print in history forever. Finally, I leave you with the words of Bernadette Peters “You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?”

Until we talk again next week, be the best you can be…

#Live…#Love...#Laugh…

Your mentor


George Natural Onuorah

#DearMentee,

Stop being a Photocopy!

You see, in this day and age of television, radio, internet, social media etc, one of the most difficult things for most people to do is to BE ORIGINAL! Somehow, you find yourself following everybody else but yourself and sadly, you don’t even realize it. As a female, you copy #Beyonce, #Rihanna, #NickiMinaj etc, you wear all the ‘fine’ green, blue, pink, red #Brazilian or Peruvian hair…you wear layers and layers of makeup, you dress and walk, talk and slay like your ‘idol’! You forget that the consequence of acting like them is that you lose yourself/your identity and #JustSoYouKnow, there are predators out there that will gladly pounce on you, take advantage of and devour you.

As a guy, you walk, dress, talk, act like Wizkid, T-Pain, Yung 6ix, Solid Star etc…even your hair is copied from them! I have just one question for you… while you are busy being a photocopy, who is going to be the original you? Listen and listen carefully, no matter how well you copy them, YOU WILL NEVER BE THEM. Have you ever heard it said that a photocopy is so good that it is better than the original? No sir, no matter how good the photocopy is, it will remain a PHOTOCOPY!

Dear mentee, just imagine for a second that a fish woke up one morning and decided that since it admires the monkey so very much, he will now begin to climb trees like its idol, the monkey. What do you think the result of this venture will be? A monumental failure of course! Why? Because the fish was created to be an ORIGINAL FISH but instead it chose to be a photocopy of the ORIGINAL MONKEY and obviously, it will take a miracle for it not to die in the process.

My dear mentee, a lot of people have gone down this road only to realize when it is almost too late that they have made a most terrible mistake. Some just simply believe it is too late to turn back and make amends, ending up in their doom! Look, listen and listen carefully, if you are already on this track, STOP, TURN AROUND, FIND YOUR PATH and WALK IT! You see, if you do not walk your path on this earth, then your journey here has been USELESS! No one will do it for you and you will not make any credible, lasting impact and of course, the world will not remember that you were ever here!

My dear mentee, If I were you, I will walk, talk, and work my path and carve an indelible print in history forever. Finally, I leave you with the words of Bernadette Peters “You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?”

Until we talk again next week, be the best you can be…

#Live…#Love...#Laugh…

Your mentor


George Natural Onuorah

#DearMentee,

Oh had I Known!

Several years ago, while working on a particular project, I ran into a top official who could have facilitated my work and made it a whole lot easier, IF ONLY I APPROACHED HIM!!! The one thought that came to my mind when I saw him was “what if he snubs me?”, “what if he embarrasses me?”, what if his security embarrasses me, what will people say?” How will people look at me? What if they laugh at me? What if…what if…what if…?! I did not have enough confidence in me to simply walk up to the man and ‘sell my market’! The consequence? I did not achieve as much as I should have! Oh had I known! I would simply have followed my heart and did what I should have done.

Dear mentee, Listen and listen carefully, there is no statement worse than “Oh had I known!” of all the pains in life, there is none more painful than the pain of regret! It was Rafael Sabatini who said that “Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell a living soul can inhabit”! Simply put, regret is the worst thing that can happen to a human in this life or in the afterlife! Need I expatiate further on this topic? I think not… surely, we all have experiences that when we think about, makes us cringe about our (in)actions!

A research was carried out on 100 elderly people on their death beds, they were asked to reflect on their life’s biggest regret, nearly all of them said they regretted, not the things that they did, but the things that they didn’t do…the risks they never took…the dreams they didn’t pursue…the businesses they never started… What would your last words be? OH HAD I KNOWN?

My dear mentee, life is not meant to just work, earn money and spend on whatsoever you so desire…listen and listen carefully, every person, no matter how poor/rich/wise/stupid they maybe, has a gift, a talent(s) with which (s)he is meant to positively advance humanity IF ONLY THEY ACT ON IT! You need to realize that that dream that you have actually chose you, you did not choose to have that dream and it chose you because you are the BEST PERSON to achieve that dream and affect humanity! DUMP YOUR FEAR AND ACT ON IT! I recently came to understand that airplanes are safer in the air than on the ground because that is where it was built to perform…the longer it stays on the ground, the more it begins to rust and wear out! Every person was built to live out the dream they have inside!
Would there be struggles…of course! Struggles and criticisms are prerequisites for greatness! Nobody was ever given a trophy because they struggled and quit…but because they struggled and won! Imagine if Beyonce had decided to give up singing because the critics told her she couldn’t sing… or Steven Spielberg gave up because he was rejected from film school 3 times …. Or Oprah Winfrey who was fired and told she wasn’t fit for television, but today, who knows or even cares about the names of those television executives?

My Dear Mentee, the journey of life is riddled with pain, but you can choose between the pain of success or the pain of regret. What will your story be? One of fulfillment or one that begins with ‘Oh had I known’? George Halas said that, “Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it!” always remember that it is better to look back on life and say: “I can’t believe I did that” than to look back and say “Oh had I known!

Until we talk again next week, be the best you can be…

Live…Laugh…Love

Your mentor


George Natural Onuorah

exporttraining:
God Bless You

And bless you too, thanks

Thanks a bunch, you are definitely right

#DearMentee,

WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?!!!

This one statement has killed and will continue to kill a lot of dreams that could have changed our world!

It was Les Brown who said "the graveyard is the richest place on earth" how right he was and still is! Imagine for a minute that the person who had the cure to cancer died with his idea, because he was overly concerned with what people will say, what his parents or spouse or neighbors might think about his spending too much time researching...they will most likely call him mad and of course he wouldn't want that so he quit researching and resorted to living a 'normal' life and of course, died a normal person who we never got to hear about!

My dear mentee, I have news for you, until you are doing something and are so passionate about it that the world calls you mad, then you haven't begun yet!!!

Shocked? You shouldn't be! Thomas Edison, ha! "That guy who gave us the incandescent bulb huh?!" Clap for yourself, you know him! But how well do you know his story? It is only a mad man who will continue perfecting one idea 9,999 times until he broke through the 10,000th time! Do I need to tell you people called him mad? Imagine what would have happened if he listened to what people had to say and stopped working?

Next case scenario, "Eureka" - you have heard the word or you may even use it, but do you know the story behind it? Well, if you did physics at O'level, you will have come across Archimedes principle...The exclamation 'Eureka!' is famously attributed to the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes. He reportedly proclaimed "Eureka! Eureka!" when he stepped into a bathtub of water and his body displaced a volume of water proportionate to his size, a previously intractable problem. He is said to have been so eager to share his discovery that he leapt out of his bathtub and ran through the streets of Syracuse naked! How else do you define madness? What people will say did not matter to him so long as he was making progress!

My dear Mentee, you may say well these are far fetched examples, their world was different bla...bla...bla...okay, let us use an example that is close to you...look around you, whether it is in class/school you will realize that the best brains are usually the weird ones and they are the most talked about, they often tend to move alone but do they stop to care about what you and others think or say about them? No! While you people are busy talking, t he y are busy making good grades/progress in their lives, leaving you all behind to continue backbiting! And you backbite because you are behind them...you don't backbite someone you're in front of!

My dear Mentee, do you realize the difference between you and them? They chart their course, focus on their goal and work to achieve it. You on the other hand that is very concerned about 'what will people say'! What have you achieved?

There are 3 questions I ask myself when embarking on a project:

Is it right with God?
Is my conscience clear?
Is it line with my vision?

If my answer to these questions are yes, then I go ahead to do it no matter who is saying what! If I were you I'd adopt this approach!

My dear Mentee, there is a lot to say but I'm afraid you'd find this too lengthy, so I have to stop. Remember, if even Jesus was called mad, then don't expect to be exempt when you are on the right track!

Until we talk again next Tuesday, Live...Love...Laugh!

Your mentor,

George Natural Onuorah
#JustSoYouKnow

Dear Mentee,

If you are reading this, please stop buying into the lie that you are still young and there is still time! Guess what? You don't have time!

Yes! Your time here is limited, use it wisely! If you intend to make global impact, the younger you are, the easier for you! There is an age you will get to and certain doors of opportunities simply close to you!

Ages 15-25 are critical years...But here we are told it's time to play around, we're still too young. Have you heard about Malala Yousafzai, at less than 18years of age, shewas and still is currently the youngest Nobel Prize winner ever! You know Young John 'the wicked producer', a lot of hit songs you dance to were and are produced by him, he is 22 years old! And a lot of those songs you dance(d) to were produced in his teenage years. Have you heard about Zuriel Oduwole? At under 15 years of age, she has interviewed major world presidents like Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Goodluck Jonathan, etc!

Our parents are majorly to blame, they encourage our intellectual laziness, THEY DO NOT KNOW BETTER, so I don't blame them much! You can't give what you don't have! Guess what? Once you become an adult, most of the blame becomes yours!

Take for instance, you are an adult who cannot make a simple coherent sentence and communicate effectively, you claim it is your parents' fault, they did not send you to good schools, your uncle did not help you etc.

Guess what, WE DON'T CARE! What we know is that you can't even speak good English or communicate effectively! You lack communication skills! It is your fault! Nobody says it is your parents' fault!

My dear Mentee, I am telling you this because I really care about you and I love you enough to tell you the truth.

However, if like me, you are over the age range of 15-25, then 26-35 are the double up years, where you need to strategize, do a personal SWOT analysis and move into action. You're young, I agree, but guess what, you're getting old! There are certain opportunities you cannot key into once you're beyond this age range, unless you really couldn't care less. But if I were you, I would, because it would afford you opportunities you may otherwise not get.

At this age you may need to reconsider your full time employee status, resign if you have to, set up your own business, start a foundation, a cause, DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR LIFE! Stop giving excuses, it limits you! Stop caring too much about what people about what people say, they will always talk, when you make it, they will rejoice with you including those who didn't support you! If you fail in the process, get up and continue trying regardless of who is laughing at you! Dont let anyone including you talk you down! It is very critical!!!

Live your life to the fullest, who knows, you may just be the catalyst we need to transform our world. #Act!

Live...Laugh...Love...

Your mentor,

George Natural Onuorah

I'm Not Dead Yet!: The Story of Victor Banjo - (A Rejoinder to Deji Yesufu) by George Natural Onuorah

Dear Kind Sir,

I read with rapt attention your missive and I must say it was quite insightful. Thank you for taking the time to write this. However, there are certain salient points that you raised that I wish you'd kindly throw more light on, viz:

“…The country was boiling. Killings were being carried out every day in every part of the country.”

Dear Sir, kindly recall that despite the fact that over 30,000 (over thirty thousand) Easterners were killed in the North in 1966, and the truck load of corpses that were being shipped down to the East from the North, when Biafra was declared, the foreigners who resided here were rounded up, escorted to the train stations, put on trains and were bade farewell from the East…

Dear sir, please note that the killings were carried out in different parts of the country like Lagos, Abeokuta, Ibadan and especially the North against the Igbos and not “Killings were being carried out every day in every part of the country” like you said…It is either you are unaware of this fact or perhaps it is simply an oversight or a mere attempt at damage control.

You further purported that: “Biafra lost the war because it was ill prepared and because one man, Ojukwu, was chasing a pipe dream. "The man who caused all these is today being buried as a national hero, while my father lies somewhere buried in an unmarked grave". The bodies of those four men were never found. Many of their families have found it difficult to reach closure on them.”

Dear Sir, it is most unfortunate that some of those incidents occurred but you will agree with me that in war they often do and sometimes unnecessarily. It is my sincere prayer that God gives the family(ies) the fortitude to bear their irreparable loss(es).

However, you opined that “Ojukwu, was chasing a pipe dream” and I beg to differ and vehemently so, but of course, you are entitled to your opinion on this matter. I leave it at this, going further will entail an entirely different article.

“Unfortunately those beating the drums of secession and war today are the same youths who have refused to learn from our history. The man Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous people of biafra - IPOB is asking Nigeria to go back to this painful lane again. Someone has said that a call to secession is not the same as a call to war. I have however reminded him that history has equated most calls to secession to a call to war. If it were not so, why are IPOB members armed to the teeth today? Why are they brow beating their people to obey some sit at home order?”

Why, kind sir, was History as a subject extrapolated from the Nigerian school curriculum and where it is in existence, the issue of Biafra is totally avoided like a plague? What are they afraid of? If the government is being sincere, wouldn’t they bring the issue to the table, negotiate with aggrieved people(s) and give it a proper closure! Besides, if they refuse to teach young men and women their history with the same pervading conditions that led to the war still in effect, is it not possible that the youths will rise, cry foul and even chant the songs of war once again? It is sad and indeed such a shame that man does not learn from history!

Dear Sir, you mentioned, with a tone of finality or the absoluteness of one who has inside information or facts, that “IPOB members are armed to the teeth today”! I wonder how you came by this information, perhaps you can share with us so we can confirm or ascertain the veracity thereof. If indeed it were true that the “IPOB members armed to the teeth today”, one wonders why they did not use their arms against the Police, Soldiers, Air Force, Navy et al, who have always provoked them and opened fire on them in their gatherings in the recent and distant past…I sincerely hope you are not assuming since we all know assumption is the basest form of knowledge. You sir are an academic and so you definitely are aware of this fact.

Oh and just to clear the air, I am not an IPOB member, I am just a journalist, from the East who is committed to the truth being told at all times.

Furthermore sir, in your article, you ask “Why are they brow beating their people to obey some sit at home order?” Dear sir, you reside in the West and I work and reside in the East, so I am in a better position to inform and intimate you on what happened on May 30th, 2017, which was the day of the sit at home order.

First off, the #IPOB did not brow beat anyone to obey the sit at home order, it was a mere instruction to mark the fallen heroes of the #Biafra struggle both at home and abroad. I imagine this course of action was chosen to prevent further bloodshed of innocent civilians, which normally happens on 30th May. Compliance to this order was wide spread and just to be modest, I would rate it a 90% compliance rate across the South East. I personally transversed Enugu and Anambra states and posted about 30 pictures of my findings on my Facebook wall, which you may want to check out.

“While this country can very well call for a referendum to decide on the question of Biafra, the mere fact that free and fair elections cannot hold in the Eastern part of this country is proof that no free and fair referendum can hold in the East.”
I am at a loss on this statement of yours sir, are you in any way questioning the credibility of the elections that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) HAS conducted and WILL EVER conduct? Or you simply believe that the Igbos are not developed enough to have a free and fair elections and as such, a free and fair referendum cannot hold in the East? You sir, will need to clarify your position on this so I and others do not misconstrue you.

“When all these is done, we will then settle the matter of the thousands of intermarriages between Biafrans and other parts of this country.”
As regards the issue of intermarriages, I am certain that you are aware that once a woman is married into a family, she is now a member of that family and I do not see how this is supposed to be a challenge. Perhaps you can school me…I am open to learning.

“As far as I can see with all these matter on ground, Biafra is a dead agenda.”
On this, I will not say much, because if you are on ground in South East Nigeria, I am sure your opinion will be entirely different! However, my best response to you is; Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu’s statement while speaking to Times Magazine on January 16, 1970, when he articulated that “As a people, we have endured as only giants endure, we have fought as heroes fight, we dared as only gods dare, we are disillusioned by the world’s insensitivity to our plight, yet because I believe that our cause is just, Biafra will return again, Biafra cannot be destroyed by mere pause of arms, Biafra was born out of the result of pogrom in Nigeria in 1966, I do not believe that any man can use force to overthrow Biafra. The only difference is that now the battlefront has changed”

“A united Nigeria is better than a splintered one, he's saying. He's telling us that if Nigeria divides, there will be no end to its division because every region of this country are still made up of people groups. If we cannot live together now, we will not live together in splintered groups.”
Before the amalgamation of the northern and the southern protectorates by lord Luggard, we lived totally independent of each other! And in case you were not aware, Louis Vernon Harcourt, said that they “are marrying the South as a lady of means to the North and that Lord Luggard is going to perfect the ceremony”, at a time when women had no right to vote in the Britain!

Dear Sir, let me refer you to the utterances of the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, on 11th October, 1960, “the new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather Usman Dan Fodio, we must ruthlessly prevent any change of power, we must use the minority in the North as willing tools and the South a conquered territory, we must never allow them to rule over us, we must never allow them to have control over their future”. I am certain that with this quote in perspective, the reason for their (in)actions are lucid.

"He's calling on us to jaw jaw, rather than war war."
Is that not the exact thing that the IPOB and other aggrieved groups in Nigeria have been gunning for but instead, the Nigerian government has consistently either paid deaf ears or lip service to calls to negotiate the terms and conditions of remaining ‘one indivisible entity’.

“He's saying that if we do not do the hard work of living together, the easy path of secession, which we think is better, will only be littered with the body and blood of our best minds. The motives of those calling for secession today is even more insincere than those who called for it years back. If Biafra of Ojukwu days was born out of the genocide perpetrated against lbos, who is killing IBOs today?’’

Dear Sir, of all the questions you raised in your article, this for me, is the most unexpected! Perhaps because you are not in the South East, you are out of touch with the realities on ground, where all manner of operations and forces are used to intimidate people. At a time, 2016 precisely, (I have not bothered to count this year) there were 11 operations running concurrently in the South East, with military, police, customs check points as if we are in a war zone!

Perhaps kind sir, you are also not aware of the several Soldiers and Policemen massacre of over 800 unarmed IPOB members in the East between 2015 and 2017, and the attack they carried out, where they went inside a church in Onitsha and shot and killed several IPOB members praying for the soul"s of their beloved ones lost to the war.

Did you sir, not also hear or at least watch on TV or even a rumour of the massacre of innocent civilians in Port Harcourt, Aba? Did you kind sir not read the Amnesty International Report on the atrocities being committed by the Military, Police etc on innocent unarmed civilians in the South East? Perhaps a quick Google search might help.

Are you, kind sir, not aware that the Nigerian Air Force used Napalm incendiary bomb on innocent unarmed civilians in 2015, killing over 350 under the guise that they were chasing militants!

I do not know much about how widely you have traveled and domiciled across Nigeria, but I have spent 20 years in the North and every crisis that happened was an opportunity to kill the Igbos and loot their property, yet you ask “who is killing the Igbos?”

How come the Igbos will get to an almost moribund place, develop it, make it viable, build markets, houses etc and the government of the day will wake up one morning and decide to demolish the market and possibly to relocate it to another remote interior because they know the Igbos will still go and develop those places and continue their businesses…Lagos is a great example!

Dear kind sir, I can continue and keep going on and on but for the sake of brevity, (which I know I have failed at, given the circumstance), I need to stop; but before then, please note that the accurate spelling of the nomenclature of the ethnic nationality that are domiciled in Eastern Nigeria is IGBO not IBO.

Finally, I leave you with a very interesting quote from Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the current emir of Kano, while delivering a speech in September 11, 1999, during a conference, he said that “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 denied public services; the Northern bourgeoisie and the Western bourgeoisie have conspired to keep the Igbos out of the scheme of things…the rest of Nigeria forced them to remain in Nigeria and have continued to deny them equity. In the recent transition when the Igbos supported the PDP with the hope of an Ekwueme presidency, the West and the North treated it as a Biafran agenda, every agreement set forth was set aside to ensure that Obasanjo and not Ekwueme emerged as the PDP candidate but the Igbos have taken this upon their stride because they believe they brought some of these upon themselves. There are so many young Igbos who are out there who never knew what their fathers did, who will never accept the current situation and the nation is sitting on a time bomb!”

Sincerely yours,

George Natural Onuorah

For those who are forwarding or have forwarded this article of yours on WhatsApp or elsewhere, I hope they will equally forward this rejoinder of mine as well so that people will have balanced information.

#JustSoYouKnow