₦airaland Forum

Afam4eva: It depends on the part of Enugu that you want a house. Cut your coat according to your size.

why is it that some people result to cheap blackmail in situations like this. So, landlords should decrease house rent because some people want to relocate from the north to Enugu? These same people are the ones that will build mansions in other parts of the country and when they're asked to pay a measly amount for house rent in their own home town, they result to blackmail. Why not go back to the north and live with bokoharam. Nonsense.

Its not everybody that live in the north built a house. Ua now insinuating that we should welcome only the rich ones that come back from the north,no. I guess u don't live in enugu. The main problem now in enugu is house rent,most people now have good road,cheap transportation within and out the town,water is becoming a thing of the past,security is now better...if the prices are not controlled,it might escalate and many people will be sent parking..

Achara lay-out,uwani,amechi,gariki,camp,transekulu ,every where in enugu,the cost of living is high.how can u tell someone to pay 25k every month when their is no job,no big industry in enugu that can pay people.how do you expect those that are coming back from north to survive.the govt of enugu state should as a matter of urgency look into this.

By Alvan Ewuzie
Why did it take the literary icon, Albert
Chinualumogu Achebe over four decades to tell his
civil war story? Most intellectuals and writers in his
ilk have put down their experience of those trying
days of a people’s fight for freedom. Although some
of his short stories and poems were anchored on the
gruesome Nigerian civil war, his latest book, There
was a country showed that he had not said or written
much about his involvement and thoughts on the
incident. It must have been a rather difficult one for
the master storyteller. But he had to tell it and in the
process achieved a genre of writing, which weaved
poetry, prose and academic research in one volume.
One described by Nadine Gordiner, Nobel Laureate in
Literature ‘as surpassing expectations’.
The 335-page book, difficult as it must have been for
Professor Achebe, the work begins with Nigeria’s
birth pangs after nationalist struggles by early
purveyors of calls for self-rule exemplified by Herbert
Macualay, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and the rest. It must
have pained Achebe that the country his generation
enthusiastically welcomed at independence with
high hopes has come to a sorry pass.
‘Most members of my generation who were born
before Nigeria’s independence remember a time
when things were different, Nigeria was once a
nation of great hope and progress, a nation with
immense recourses at its disposal…’ writes Achebe
in the introduction of the new work.
The pains of a wasting nation that had refused to
integrate a part of it decades after a harrowing civil
war that claimed no less than three million lives on
both sided if the divide. Two of his poetry collections
published in 1971 and 2004 dwell on the war but
that genre hardly permits details. In the new work,
he juxtaposed poetry and prose to tell
complimentary stories in two art forms. As he put it:
‘It is for the sake of the future of Nigeria, for our
children and grandchildren that I feel it is important
to tell Nigeria’s story, Biafra story, our story, my
story’
The story dates back to his coming of age, the
extensive town-to-town travels with his father who
was a ‘Church Teacher’, some of the few whose early
embrace of Christianity exposed to having value for
education. Little wonder his children embraced
education, which was why young Chinua was an early
bird to school. An incident at St Philip’s Primary
school Ogidi in Anambra State, his hometown,
perhaps set in motion his affinity to Igbo cosmology
and the need not to denigrate your roots and, indeed
see the good in it. The incident went thus: under the
shed of a large mango three, their teacher took them
on Geography of Britain. The village ‘mad man’ came
by and stood listening to the teacher. After a short
while, he stepped up, snatched the chalk from the
teacher, wiped the blackboard and proceeded to give
the pupils an extended lesson on the history of Ogidi,
his hometown. It was ironic that a man whose sanity
was assumed to be questionable saw the need to let
the young lads know about their own history and
environment.
It was in secondary school at the famous Government
College, Umuahia that Achebe met some of his life-
long friends including Christopher Okigbo , Chike
Mommah. Benjamin Uzochuwku, Ekpo Etien Inyang,
among others. But it was Christopher Okigbo that
became his soul mate. It was to Okigbo that Achebe
always handed over his young family on his many
diplomatic trips for Biafra. It was with Okigbo that he
founded Citadel press in Enugu at the wee hours of
the pogrom and published one or two books before
bombs shattered his Enugu residence and the
publishing house and thus sent the venture into
oblivion. When Okigbo secretly joined the Biafran
Army and fell in battle at the Nsukka end, Achebe
was devastated. Even now, 42 long years after the
war, his fond memories of the poet and restless
intellectual whom he believes to be one of the finest
poets, drop like rain in the book. He puts it thus :…
Christoher Ifekandu Okigbo was the finest Nigerian
poet of his generation, but I believe that as his works
becomes better and more widely known in the world,
he will be recognised as one of the most remarkable
anywhere in our time, while others wrote good
poems, Okigbo conjured up for us, amazing,
haunting, poetic firmament of a wild and violent
beauty. Forty years after, I still stand by that
assessment.’
But Achebe’s early days were not heart wrenching.
When he graduated from the University of Ibadan
where he was admitted on scholarship to read
Medicine but was driven by passion and talent to
drop the stethoscope, as it were, for the pen, he
became a teacher briefly before joining the Nigeria
Broadcasting Corporation. It was there he wrote the
monumentally successful ‘Things Fall Apart’. The
circumstance under which the manuscript would
have been lost in England and how it was recovered
should teach useful lessons to any budding writer. He
grew into the few Nigerians who replaced the
departing expatriates in the civil service, inheriting
some of the perks of office, living in Ikoyi with his
wife, Christie.
He blossomed in his writing and had just published
his fourth novel a prophetic political satire, in 1966. It
predicted a coup which to surprised even the writer
in its fulfillment. The country literally ceased to exist.
A counter coup six months later further sent the
country down the precipice. When people from the
east became victims of a genocide which caught the
authorities looking the other way, an exodus of
easterners to their home stead became inevitable.
Achebe smuggled his family to the east in a boat
from Lagos where he worked. He persevered until
close friends told him to leave Lagos or go to an early
grave. Soldiers had invaded his Ikoyi residence and
missed him shortly before he bolted to join his family
in the east.
His war time misery and that of a people had begun.
In response to the calculated genocide against Igbo
people across the country, Colonel Ojukwu who was
military Governor of Eastern Nigeria had been
mandated to declare the Republic of Biafra. Achebe
went back to his country in Ogidi in Anambra State
but when soldiers mounted weapons in the
compound to repel Nigerian forces approaching from
the River Niger end, he evacuated his family to
Enugu in the fiset leg of a refugee staues which saw
them traverse no less than four towns including
Uguta and Orlu in the war-ravaged land.
The young republic defended it self with bare hands
were two hurriedly trained soldiers would go to battle
with only one rifle; the game plan being that one
would forge ahead with the weapon of a fallen
colleague.
In the wake of initial fiasco of a surprise attack by
Biafran soldiers led by Victor Banjo, whose troop had
reached Ore before capitulating, forcing the Biafran
forces back, the battle grew worse. Banjo was
executed for that seeming sabotage. But Biafra had
been weakened.
They did not give up and the federal forces became
more vicious. In page 137 Achebe writes ‘ in actions
reminiscent of the Nazi policy of eradicating the Jews
throughout Europe just twenty years earlier, the
Nigerian forces decided to purge the city[Calaber,
inserted by this writer] of its Igbo inhabitants. By the
time the Nigerians were done they had shot dead at
least one thousand and perhaps 2000 Igbos, most of
them civilians. There were other atrocities in the
region. In Oji River, the times of London reported on
August 2, 1968, the Nigerian forces had opened fire
and murdered fourteen nurses and the patients in
the wards’
The Biafran people being land locked after federal
forces had captured Port Harcourt and Calarbar,
effectively cutting supply sources via sea to the
fledgling Republic resorted to self-ingenuity. They
manufactured weapons, refined petrol and
constructed a makeshift night landing airport and
held on to the struggle. The Resarch and Production
unit manned by Gordian Ezekwe, Benjamin
Chowkuka Nwosu and less known technician Willy
Achuwke produdes Ogbuniwge which was a lethal
mass killer.
Ojukwu engaged Ahebe as one of war diplomats who
travelled around the continent to drum up support
for the new Republic. He met with the then president
of Senegal, Senghor, who gave backing to Biafra.
Achebe and and four other intellectuals namely
Ifemesia, Ikenna Nzimiro, Emmanuel Obiechina, Eyo
Bassey, Anthony Aniagolu and Ifegwu Eke wrote the
impregnable document titled Ahiara declaration
which had the potency to end the struggle.
When Biafra did not capitulate in spite of the evil
machinations against it, the Nigerian government
resorted to starving the people through blocking of
supplies, an ingenuous but sad war plan which
Achebe said was hatched by top echelon of the
Nigerian government. He writes that by the
beginning of dry season in 1968 Biafran civilians and
soldiers were starving. Bodies lay rotting under hot
sun by the roadside side, and the flapping wings of
scavengers could be seen circling, waiting patiently
nearby. Some estimates were that hunger killed no
less than one thousand Biafrans every day. The
policy seemed to say ‘starve them into submission’ .
Upward of 50,000 Biafrans, most of them children,
died of starvation every month.
An American child set himself ablaze to ptotest the
killing of Biafran children which was regularly
beamed live on television screens across the globe.
The war eventually ended at the point seeming
inevitable surrender. Achebe over four decades says
the Igbos were not and continue not to be
reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for
the continued backwardness in his estimation.
The book must have pained the famous writer. Yet he
had to do it. Again, he has swept the country’s woes
to the doorsteps of leadership. This time in the mode
of selection. He says something must be done with
the mode of selection. Today, it would seem that
political alienation- starvation has replaced the
general handout of twenty pounds for every Biafran
after the war irrespective of what they have in the
bank. If four decades have gone by and none of their
ilk has sat on the saddle to preside over the affairs of
the country, Achebe may well be right. It took Achebe
so long to write this book. But the wait is worth it.



sunnewsonline.com/new/cover/chinua-achebe-1930-2013-once-upon-a-country/

Did not cover the match,just took only pics.

Ranger vs enyimba match..Rangers 4 life

After the match against enyimba..