₦airaland Forum

eduj:
the bone of contention here isn't which ethnic group is a majority in naijas ICT sector on the contrary ,the debate is how advanced our ICT sector is .No matter what we state here on nairaland ,it won't change the status quo out their hence let's agree to disagree on that point.

Okay,if that is your flavour...ciao

ehikwe22:
There is nothing you can do to make the nose of a dog to be white. What is bad is bad. Even the war itself is evil. People like you do evil and come up with excuses why you did it same way Jibrin is giving reasons why he shared in an illegal fund of the people he's blackmailing.

You are RIGHT.But some misinformed IGBOS are full of hatred that one just has to make the record straight.THIS HATRED HAD MADE IGBOS ATTACK YORUBAS ON THE MILDEST OF ISSUES THAT WE HAVE TO RECIPROCATE....

Indigenisation Decree

The true winner of the civil war was the Nigerian military class, which succeeded in using everybody against everybody and continued its indefinite aggrandisement of the self by fleecing the country to the bone as the next 30 years confirmed. After the January coup, Aguiyi-Ironsi used Dr. Nwafor Orizu, the acting president, to capture power. What Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna wanted to use bloodletting to achieve, he grabbed it on “a scrap piece of paper” as Shehu Shagari’s eyewitness account, Beckoned to Serve, discloses. The New York Times describes it as a coup within a coup. Gowon used Awolowo for the war and to keep the country economically viable. He took advantage of the failed secession to perpetuate himself in power. “Go On With One Nigeria (GOWON),” he stumped. Ojukwu, too, as Wole Soyinka observes in his own ipsissimaverba, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, was also interested in conquering Nigeria not only in seceding.

Unknown to Victor Banjo and his Third Force, Ojukwu had embedded special companies within the Third Force to topple Banjo and hand control of Nigeria to him in case Banjo succeeded in conquering the West and Lagos. The Indigenisation Decree had nothing to do with disenfranchising the Igbos or other Biafrans of economic power. As was the vogue in 14 African nations then, indigenisation and nationalisation was the ruling military class and their friends’ way of dressing their bottomless impulse to loot with the populist cloak of fighting western imperialism and neo-colonialism. For their roles during the war, Awolowo or Enahoro should be getting major oil blocs. But they did not. Can Achebe blame the maltreatment on the Igbo populace by many of the governors in the zone on any indigenisation decree?

Indeed Awolowo could be ‘tribalistic’. The Yoruba region, like pre-EU Europe, was always in a state of constant war. Ibadan vs Ekiti vs Egba, Ondo vs Ijebu, Ife vs Ijesa, etc. This internecine war made Yorubaland susceptible to easy French colonisation to the west (Dahomey) and British Royal Niger Company taking the rest. When Awolowo “resuscitated ethnic pride”, he used it to rally Yoruba to stop fighting and killing each other. This resuscitation was not to elevate the Yoruba so that they would dominate other tribes. Achebe observes: “Awolowo transformed the Action Group into a formidable, highly disciplined political machine that often outperformed the NCNC in regional elections. It did so by meticulously galvanising political support in Yorubaland and among the riverine and minority groups in the Niger Delta, who shared similar dread of the prospects of Igbo political domination (pg45).”

Achebe never addresses this dread, though he mentions it in two other places. Nowhere in the book does he stump for brotherliness or make a stand for tribal harmony. In 1961, the British Cameroonians had to decide their fate through a UN plebiscite since their lands were too small and landlocked to stand as a country. The peoples of the Northern Cameroons voted to belong to northern Nigeria, while the peoples of the Southern Cameroons not wanting to belong to the Igbos decided to belong to Republic of Cameroon despite being French-speaking. The reason minorities needed to be very afraid at the prospects of collaborating with the Igbo is an important topic Achebe conspicuously skips. Instead, he spends the final pages of the book resurrecting the 44-year-old propaganda of genocide.

To prepare us to be swindled, he litters the book with hyped phrases and sentences like “Smash the Biafrans”, “presence of organised genocide” (pg 92)… “the Nigerian forces decided to purge the city of its Igbo inhabitants (pg137)”… “the cost in human life made it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history (pg227)… “prospect of annihilation (pg217)”… “Standing on the precipice of annihilation (pg 217).” Those that can rightly talk of annihilation were the people of Abudu. The American document of 15/10/67 noted: “As the ‘Biafrans’ retreated from Benin to Agbor, they killed all the men, women and children they could find who were not Ibos. The town of Abudu, one of the larger places between Agbor and Benin, lost virtually all of its population with the exception of a small who had escaped to the bush.” Those that can rightly talk of annihilation were the Jews. Not only do Nazi policy documents say so, on-the-ground facts support that. In Poland, Germany, Austria and the Baltic countries alone, Hitler aiming for 100 per cent, killed 90 per cent of Jews. Cyprian Ekwensi, a chief of Biafran propaganda says: “We gave the number of children dying per day as 1,000. Can you prove that? Can you disprove it? But can you believe it? That is propaganda.” So let us take the Biafran propaganda at its highest and assume three million, i.e. 100,000 per month died in the 30-month war. The Vietnamese genuinely lost close to three million to the Vietnam War, but they do not talk of America’s plan to annihilate them. Neither do the Japanese, the world’s first and only victims of nuclear explosion. Azikiwe repeatedly argued that though Igbos were killed in the North, it does not mean the tribe was “slated for slaughter” as a policy. Colin Legum, whom Achebe claims was the first to describe the 1966 revenge killings of Igbos in the North as pogroms (pg 82), does not think so, too. This is curious. Instead of stating the source of the Legum article, Achebe references his own interview in Transition. In the London Observer of 26 May 1968, Legum writes: “It is clear that there is no systematic attempt at exterminating Ibos to justify charge of genocide.” Also, Ojukwu’s hitherto unknown Director of Intelligence and External Communications, the American priest, Rev Fr Kevin Doheny, said in a secret but frank conversation with an American diplomat that the claim of genocide is “highly exaggerated but, without it, Biafrans would have given up fighting long time ago”.

If there was any intention to exterminate Igbos, why after Ojukwu had fled and the Biafran military had been completely paralysed, did the Nigerian military not use the opportunity to turn the guns on the defenceless Biafrans or carpet bomb them? Instead, there were steps to welcome them back into the fold. It is disingenious of anyone to talk of “genocide” or “prospect of annihilation” when the context and facts on ground say otherwise. It is insulting to the memory of true genocide victims. “If you are blind, describing an elephant is easy,” Achebe writes in The Education of a British-Protected Child. “You can call it, like one of the six blind men in the fable, a huge tree trunk; or perhaps a gigantic fan; or an enormous rope, and so on. But having eyes, far from making such descriptions easy, actually complicates them.” Achebe, throughout the book, chooses the easy path of the blind over the complex task of a conscientious writer. Having taken a low road, he wants to arrive at a high point by invoking the Mandela Example in the final pages. Mandela described Achebe as the writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down”. With There Was A Country, Achebe is the writer in whose company dangerous walls are rising up: walls of tribal hatred, walls of lies, walls of sloppy thinking and lazy research, walls of propaganda and walls of moral ineptitude.

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/03/05/biafra-the-facts-the-fiction/





Roy
March 5, 2013 - 12:35 pm

Hello Mr Awoyokun. I appreciate your comprehensive riposte to what I totally agree is a divisive book by the hallowed Chinua Achebe. Books like There Was A Country would naturally stimulate impassioned reactions. However, it is very obvious that just like
Achebe’s book, your article is very one-sided and equally divisive. You paint to the Igbo people as an singularly scheming, ruthless and dishonourable bunch. This is totally untrue. The truth is all sides in the Biafra War were culpable. I don’t intend to enter a detail-by-detail argument with you. But your article way better if you acknowledged that all sides made mistakes. Indeed Achebe’s arguments are not entirely without merit. Did he go overboard? Yes. But are his arguments entirely baseless? No. If we are to learn good lessons from the past, please, please and please let us give balanced accounts. Thanks.
Arafat
March 5, 2013 - 1:01 pm

Another “ME TOO” write up
Pastor onyemah obidiegwu, spain
March 5, 2013 - 1:57 pm

Br. Damola i pitied the precious time you wasted in your research and write up, you could have spent it in something profitable, the summary of your article is HATE and thus you are indeed in the same boat with so many other self-acclaimed purists, who not understanding the purpose of life here on earth, parade your intelligence competitively in obvious ignorance, professing to be wise but ending up being fools, have you ever stop and ask yourself who am i?, you and the rest of us are all pilgrims here on earth, you and i brought nothing into this world, the air we breath, the water we drink, the soil on which we build and walk is not ours when we die, we will be buried in a cold grave abandoned by families, tribe, country and race, if you hate a yoruba, igbo, hausa or a white person, it clearly shows that you are not human and still lack understanding of what life is all about, LOVE is the tonic of life , those who hate will never stop at hating, inside their tribe they will hate people based on their state of origin, inside their state they will hate people based on local government origin, inside their LGA, they will hate people based on their town, inside their town they will hate people on the basis of their village and they will hate down to their family, no matter how much they try pretend, they are sick with sorrow and complaining and need prayers because Love is a spirit, please all haters irrespective of their tribe and color should ask for it.
hart
March 5, 2013 - 3:07 pm

The writer, i think deserve commendation for setting the records straight and revealing facts not known by many like how and where Nzeogwu died. If we are to implore the two watchwards: honesty and sincerety, this is a high intellectual literature. He placed both the cards and facts on the table before the journey. Only a deaf person will label him ether being partial or biased because he can only see but don’t hear nor speak. This is a masterpiece, BRAVO !!!
BISIKAY
March 5, 2013 - 4:14 pm

Very detailed analysis reflecting the “other side’s view”. Thank you. Well done, sir…
iyke
March 5, 2013 - 4:29 pm

im a crown prince in igboland, married to a yoruba lady against all odds. Today we have 2 boys and a girl. She has become the darling of the whole town and for her behaviour, three of my kindsmen is married to yorubas. In a tribe, not all is bad or good likewise in family. The mistakes of Awo or Ojukwu should not be visited on their tribes. pls let the sleeping dog lie. I can give my life for my wife to live and i mean it.
Anonymous
March 5, 2013 - 5:29 pm

@ Roy, the essence of a rejoinder is to either give a contarary view or to agree with the original write-up. The writer does not agree with Prof. Achebe, and that is the essence of this piece.
@ Arafat, if you think this is another “me too” write-up, then this masterpiece is certainly above your comprehension. Do something else and stay away from intellectual discussions!
Thank you Mr Awoyokun, this is about the best analysis of “There Was A Country” that I’ve read. I read the book several times over, and you are so spot on.
Uche Mbaise
March 5, 2013 - 7:32 pm

Its time when we Africans recorgnize that our problem is the so called white man and all about him. Religously Afrika had no problem untill these wicked overiped paw_paw introduced christainity and islam into Africa and today states like Nigeria is a victim of their religion. Today we kill ourselves in the name of xtainity and islamism ;woe unto us. Talking about the Nigerian crises ,we should know that we must come together to recorgnize that we were Afrikans and blacks before we became a state. Let us all say NO to the western DIVIDE AND RULE. Let one love keep us together. Remember the more we fight the more we remain under developed and the more they call us THIRD WORLD PEOPLE. We Afrikans thought them how to reason like human beings. Aristotle and socrates cannot deny this because the studied in EGYPT . I always laugh at Greeks when they claim to be the first developed people when we all know that it is Egypt. They burnt the EGYPTIAN LIBRARY and now wants to burn us with hatrade. We must say NO. Afrika, lets forget our differences and unite to move foward. PROUDLY AFRIKAN. Nigeria learn from what i have written. YORUBA, HAUSA, IGBO LETS UNITE TO MOVE FOWARD. Lets ignore the westerners’ advice please. Adolph Hetler said that Afrika he will use as a zoo. So my people lets unite to face the task ahead. Even Some western philosophers said that we are not rational beings . But EMEAGWALI PHILIP IS NOT A WHITE MAN. Obama is equaly not. Lets move on we can and will make it. HELLO AFRIKANS I GREET YOU ALL. Ndewonuooon.
kukunmba
March 5, 2013 - 9:00 pm

mr damole,you must be a great writer to sit down and write all these without pay! i respect you.iam a lawyer in Nigeria but i find it hard lifting my pen if i would not be paid.
Riot5000
March 5, 2013 - 9:01 pm

ANOTHER AWOLOWO?
Wonder why Igbos will NEVER forgive Awo. There are so many more of them today, despite that Igbos have no problems with an average Youruba, but AWOLOWO.
Damola was likely not alive when it all happened but has put put in his own three pence to finally express his Igbophobia.
I yet have to read from Wole Soyinka who most likely would give an account of his own experience without the typical Awolowo tribal glasses on his face.
AWO was a TRIBALIST, not a Nationalist.
Even after what he did to Ojukwu, Ojukwu had class enough to speak well of Awo in their later years.
I wonder if Awo would have done the same.
Mr Londoner, we read from the man, the novelist, the insider, and the witness. PLEASE DO US ALL A FAVOR, GO AWAY. Will you please tell Nigerians why their country is worse today than it was before the North took over?
Banji-F
March 5, 2013 - 9:32 pm

I as a person decided not to bother myself over most of the accounts of the civil wars because i believe the younger generation should not live in the mistake of the past but to forge ahead with a better ideal to make Nigeria great but for the Achebe’s book i became interested and thank God for the America version of it which reveals and confirms my believe that unguided ambition pushed ojukwu to that war that could have been resolved through other means. The above analysis also hasshown that Achebe is not true to himself and he is not doing other young ibos who believe him any good.
Dapo
March 5, 2013 - 9:58 pm

So which gene does my children posess? God almighty, my lovely wife, my lovely inlaws from Enugu, my great father who speaks five Nigerian languages and can smartly dress in their ethnic attires, where does all these accusations leaves my children, what kind of history about Nigeria should i advise them to read? that their mother’s kinsmen freaks the hell out of their father’s kinsmen?LOL!!! or the other way round? that they should in the future ask a black man of his ethnic group before defending/helping him? we are all human beings, no one is a saint and portraying some leaders/intellects as saints might put us and our future in more trouble than imagined, We Africans have more enemies in the world than turning against one another, and Nigerians in particular needs to start standing up for one another for we have so many enemies outside our territory.
Josh
March 6, 2013 - 4:10 am

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/03/05/biafra-the-facts-the-fiction/

JUST A LITTLE NUMBER OF IGBOS HAD MONEY IN THE BANK THEN COUPLED WITH WHAT OJUKWU STOLE

[b]On The Mythical £20 Policy

Throughout the war, as the US State Department’s confidential files disclose, there was no shortage of people and “isms” to blame for the failure of war. At different times and to different audiences, Biafrans blamed racism, neo-imperialism, colonialism for the war. When Ojukwu sent Pius Okigbo to the mainly Latin American countries to solicit for funds and arms for Biafra, he blamed the war on “the desire of Arab Muslims who saw Biafra the only obstacle to the spread of Islam in Africa”. Okigbo noted to his audiences that “Biafra is 60% Catholic and 40% Protestant.” Also, during several of his radio addresses, Ojukwu blamed the war on the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who supplied 15% of Nigeria’s arms. He called the kwashiorkor afflicting Biafran children Harold Wilson Syndrome or Herod Disease. Like the biblical King Herod, Ojukwu said, Wilson wanted to exterminate the children of Biafra.

While the blame-Arabs/Hausa/Islam narrative, blame-Wilson/racism/imperialism narratives, that were so potently alive during the war are now safely dead, the blame-Awolowo-for-starvation narrative is well alive, going from generation to generation. To the Americans, who monitored and documented everything about the war, there was no time Awolowo was blamed for the starvation or deaths on any of these 21,000 pages. However, after the war, it was through the £20 policy that the blame-Awolowo narrative began. To develop it, they seized on this policy and worked their way back to include what Awolowo may have said or done, and mixed it together to form a narrative.

The £20-for-every-Igbo was a myth. What happened then was a currency crisis. On 30 December 1967, Awolowo decided to change the Nigerian currency in circulation in order to render useless the £37 million Ojukwu had for buying foreign weapons. The Biafran leadership quickly took the loot, mopped up the ones they could get in circulation and headed to Europe to exchange them for hard currencies. Eventually, they introduced Biafran notes as the only legal tender. There was around 149 million Biafran pounds in circulation by the end of the war–an average of £10 per every Igbo. After the war, there was a general scramble to exchange these notes for the new Nigerian notes. As Awolowo explained, he didn’t know on what basis these notes were produced. It is like someone bringing a single 50 billion Zimbabwean dollar note to the bank and expecting to be given N50 billion. The exchange rate should be known to determine the worth of the Zimbabwean dollar. Currently, 39 billion Zimbabwean dollars is worth 1 US dollar. In the case of Biafra, the worth of the currency was unknown; they were produced out of desperation, with lax security features to boot. In his statement of 1 February 1968, Dr. Okigbo, Biafra’s Commissioner of Economic Affairs, said “the lack of international acceptance and lack of a commensurate exchange rate was immaterial since the currency was intended only for circulation in Biafra.” In other words, it was worthless outside Biafra. After the war those that had this money were carting them to Nigerian banks, hoping to get the equivalent in new Nigerian notes. No banker or economist worth that description would approve that. Awolowo, in his bid to rehabilitate the Igbo and restore economic normalcy, approved the payment of 20 Nigerian pounds flat rate for every Biafran notes depositor. It was never £20 for every Igbo. Twenty pounds for every Biafran? That would have been around £300 million, when Nigeria’s annual budget before the war was £342.22 million, for a population of 57 million.[/b]

Starvation Policy

In Achebe’s book one could see several places where Biafrans violated the basis of the Geneva Convention. You could see where villagers who were non-combatants and should have been protected under Geneva Convention were taking machetes to federal soldiers, hence becoming legitimate targets of war themselves. Another striking instance was when Achebe was with his extended family and overnight their compound was turned into military base without their consent (pg 172). Heavens forbid the Nigerian side bombed the base. Yes, the Biafran propaganda machine would go to work that an innocent illustrious family had been eradicated by the “genocidal Nigerian army” and may even use it as an evidence of war crime. But it was the Biafran army that compromised Achebe’s household.

As part of security preparation for the last Olympics, the British Army commandeered a strategic high-rise residential building and placed surface-to-air missiles at the top. The residents protested and went to court. Let us assume a war broke out and the enemy flattened the whole building. He would not have committed a war crime because it was the British Army that made the civilian residents legitimate targets in the first place. Unfortunate though it may sound, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, relief centres become legitimate targets once military activities begin to go on there in the event of a war. Check for instance the current Hamas tactics against Israel or the bombing of University of Nigeria, Nsukka, when it allowed itself to become headquarters of local Biafran Army, with several professors joining in expedition force to hunt down lost federal soldiers in the bush and their wives back on campus took care of wounded Biafran soldiers and students were going for daily drills and rifle shooting practice under Prof. John C. Ene, Dean of Faculty of Sciences and Commander, University Defence Corps, as revealed in the US secret cable of 16 June 1967. Or the federal raid on the Catholic Cathedral of The Most Holy Trinity, Onitsha, when it was discovered Biafran snipers were operating from there.

When a plane or ship is designated as flying relief supplies to war sufferers, it must not be used to supply arms. Once it does, it is no longer covered by Geneva Convention. There was an Austrian Count, Carl Gustaf von Rosen, whom Achebe praises a lot for his humanitarian assistance in flying relief efforts to Biafra. This is what the Count’s wife had to say: “He told me he was going to Biafra, but he didn’t say he would be bombing MIGs (pg 300).” Achebe writes of von Rosen: “He led multiple relief flights with humanitarian aid into Uli Airport – Biafra’s chief airstrip. Fed up with Nigerian Air Force interference with his peaceful missions, he entered the war heroes hall of fame after leading a five-plane assault on Nigerian aircraft in Port Harcourt, Benin City, Ughelli, Enugu, and some other locations. He took the Nigerian Air Force by total surprise and destroyed several Soviet-supplied aircraft in the process.” That was someone flying humanitarian aid. How would the federal side begin to see other humanitarian flights that were supposed to be carrying food and medical supplies to war-ravished children? Cyprian Ekwensi, writer and head of external publicity for Biafra, admitted in his post-war reminiscences that the relief materials had arms built into them. The American documents too confirmed. The same Hank Warton, who the relief agencies were using to fly food into Biafra, was the one Ojukwu was using to deliver arms.

Of course the Nigerian side knew this and mandated all relief flights to Biafra to submit themselves for inspection at the Port Harcourt Airport. That was the interference Achebe claimed von Rosen was fed up with. In any event, he never claimed such in that 6 July 1969 interview he gave the London Observer. Those planes that passed their inspection delivered their relief. Those that did not were shot down. One particular case was the Swiss Red Cross DC7 Flight heading towards the Uli Airstrip (pg 101). After repeated warnings to change course and land for inspection, it was shot down, disgorging its arms and ammunition. The Biafran propaganda went to work, saying it was part of the genocide policies of Nigerian military to destroy food supplies meant for the kwashiorkor-stricken children.

It is also a fact that some of the relief supplies meant for the children were either ambushed by soldiers or ended up on the black market. Ekwensi again: “People were stealing and selling the food. You could buy it in the market, but you couldn’t get it in the relief centres.” But why would Biafra rely on food from thousands of miles away when their normal antebellum route of supply was merely tens of miles nearby in the Midwest and Northern Nigeria? It was because of the supply of arms and ammunition.

In a memorandum to the White House, Benjamin Read, the Executive Secretary of US State Department, writes: “Because of the absence of other airlines willing to make hazardous flights into Biafra, the ICRC [International Committee Of The Red Cross] has been forced to charter planes from Henry Wharton, an American citizen, who is widely known to be Biafra’s only gun runner. In engaging Wharton, the ICRC is risking its good relations with the FMG, which has long feared that ICRC flights might provide opportunity for gun running.” When Awolowo offered to re-open the usual food corridors, Ojukwu flatly refused. Achebe writes: “Ojukwu like many Biafrans, was concerned about the prospect that Nigerians could poison the food supplies (pg211).” Awolowo let in the food supplies for the children anyway, working with the cover of Caritas and Red Cross. “In America, the Nixon administration increased diplomatic pressure on the Gowon administration to open up avenues for international relief agencies at about the same time, following months of impasse over the logistics of supply route,” writes Achebe on pg 221. There was neither pressure nor its increment.

Independent evidence from the US declines to support this. “The problem of disaster relief in Biafra is not the lack of supplies or means of transport but the lack of access, particularly by a land corridor to Biafra. The authorities [Biafran] on the spot, under the conditions of civil war have given a higher priority to politico-military considerations than to arranging food to be delivered to Biafra. In early November 1968, the Nigerian government told the ICRC that it would agree to daylight relief flights to the major airstrip now held by Biafra if the ICRC could give assurances that the strip would handle only relief flight in daylight hours. We welcome this step by the Federal Government (FMG), which would substantially increase the flow of relief. So far, however, the Biafran authorities have refused to agree. We find it incomprehensible that despite the millions of Biafran lives at stake, the Biafran leadership has not yet given its agreement. The Nigerian government has also offered to cooperate in efforts to open a land corridor to Biafran-held territory. We hope that the Biafran authorities will respond positively to this but heretofore they have alleged they fear the food may be poisoned while transiting FMG territory,” William B. Macomber, Jr, Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations wrote in a letter dated 20 December 1968 to Congresswoman Florence Dwyer, when she sought clarification on the plight of Biafran refugees she kept seeing in the media.

Later when Awolowo visited the battlefronts and saw the kwashiorkor-ravaged children, he asked about the food supplies, only to discover that soldiers were ambushing the supplies, feeding themselves and the top hierarchy so as to continue the war. Awolowo decided this “dangerous policy” must stop.

If Awolowo was a devil as contemporary Igbo folklore and Achebe’s private demonology have him, he would have arranged for the food supplies to be poisoned, knowing they were going to the soldiers. To protect those children, who were suffering because of the war, he asked for a stop to the food supply that was inevitably going to the soldiers and the Biafran plutocrats unnecessarily elongating a war they would never win.

Once Cameroon too realised that to the Biafran authorities, the suffering children existed for show business and arms trade, they not only refused to take them into their country, they disbanded the newly formed relief agency dedicated to their welfare. What is more, Achebe boasts of Biafran prowess in manufacturing Ogbunigwe and the Biafran imaginative refinement of petroleum that kept Biafran vehicles on the road throughout the war without western technological help, but the most basic of human necessities – the production or the supply of food – they had no clue. And the farmers that were supposed to grow food, as the US documents noted, were conscripted into the Biafran Army during planting season of 1967. The fertilisers that could have been used to better their lands were used to make Ogbunigwe. And so the starvation was Awolowo’s fault.

Blockade

To talk about a blockade on Biafra is to concede that the control of Biafra’s borders was already in Awolowo’s hands. The control or defence of borders is the main aim of any war since the beginning of war making all over the world. But the 34-year-old Ojukwu led Biafra to secede based on 2,000 professional soldiers and extremely few artillery; they did not have enough to defend their borders. “If the Nigerian side had known the state of Biafran troops including their morale, they would have pursued them even on canoes across the River Niger. Had the Nigerians taken up such pursuit, they might have taken Onitsha, Awka and Enugu that same day.” That is Achike Udenwa, who was a Biafran soldier and later became the governor of Imo State, writing about the federal defeat of Biafra in the Midwest during the early weeks of the war in his own recollection, Nigerian/Biafra War. Even, the so-called January boys, Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna, both voiced their concern that the Biafran soldiers were vastly underprepared for any kind of war. Achebe writes: “Biafran soldiers marched into war one man behind the other because they had only one rifle between them, and the thinking was that if one soldier was killed in combat the other would pick up the only weapon available and continue fighting(pg 153).”

Therefore, even before the first bullet was fired, the secession was not only a failure but was an epic humanitarian catastrophe waiting to happen. Awolowo told Ojukwu one of the reasons the West was not keen to join the secession was because the region already occupied by northern troops did not have enough loyal men in the Nigerian Army to defend it. Weaned on the hermeneutics of Yoruba history, Awolowo was not persuaded by the seductive but flawed logic that the Nigerian forces would lose because they would be incapable of prosecuting war on two fronts if the West joined the East in seceding. At one point during the Kiriji war in the 19th century, Bashorun Ogunmola (Omoarogundeyo), the Kingdom of Ibadan’s generalissimo, was simultaneously warring with five neighbouring and far-flung kingdoms. Ibadan never lost. To defeat Ibadan you did not have to defeat even its retreating soldiers only, you had to defeat those dull-looking hills surrounding it. In fact, one of the reasons Ibadan was so belligerent in its history was that those mighty hills allowed it to spend little resources defending and more on attacking. But Biafra was not surrounded by hills, literally or figuratively. Its borders were so porous that they fell easily into the opponent’s hand. Days after declaration of secession, the sea boundary of Biafra was already being manned by Nigeria’s battleships and boats. By the sixth week all the boundaries of Biafra were already under the control of Nigerian government. What remained was zooming in. In fact, had only Awolowo’s Western Region seceded, the strategy to recapture it would not be a variance with the one used against Biafra because the West is geographically an enantiomer of the East. It was the same blockade Nzeogwu used to capture and kill their targets, Sardauna and his senior wife; Ademulegun and his wife, Latifa, who was eight months pregnant, in the presence of their two children, Solape and Kole. As Solape recollected years later, Nzeogwu, who shot her mother, was a family friend that regularly visited to eat pounded yam and egusi soup. The little girl was even calling him uncle while he shot her mother in the chest in their bedroom. It was the same blockade Captain Emmanuel Nwobosi used to capture Remi Fani-Kayode and kill S.L Akintola, the Western premier. It was the same blockade American Navy Seals used to capture and kill Osama bin Laden.

What about Cameroon? Whose side was it on? Of course, Cameroun was firmly on the Nigerian side, yet it had a sizeable Igbo population and Azikiwe’s party was NCNC – National Council for Nigerian and the Cameroons. But Ojukwu had stepped on their toes: he had stolen enough of their goods and supplies that they helped the federal side to take Calabar and cooperated with the Naval blockade of Biafra. As the US State Department’s cable of 29 November 1968 discloses: “GFRC [Government of the Federal Republic of Cameroon] continues to support FMG [Federal Military Government] and recently ordered the dissolution of newly formed Cameroon Relief Organisation (CAMRO) which was being organised to receive Biafran children in west Cameroon.”

Blaming Awolowo

By the time truth finally triumphed over propaganda, the Biafrans had to find another man to blame for the war and the deaths. Enter Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whom Achebe falsely claimed Ojukwu released from prison. First, this is what the autobiography of Harold Smith, one of the colonial officers the British Government sent to rig Nigeria’s pre-independence elections in favour of the North, had to say about Awolowo:

“But the British were not treated as gods by the Yoruba. In my experience, the Yoruba regarded themselves as superior to the British and one only had to read a book written by Awolowo, the Western leader, to know why.[b] The Yoruba were often highly intelligent and they taunted the British with sending inferior people to Nigeria. The Igbo would be humble and avert his eyes in the presence of a European. The Yoruba child would look at an important European and shout, ‘Hello, white man,’ as if he were a freak.”

What is more: “Awolowo in the West had taunted the British by claiming that his government had accomplished more in the space of two or three years for his people than the British had since they arrived in West Africa.” Of course, Achebe knows about these facts because he quoted from the book in his (pg 50), but only the part favourable to his agenda. Smith again:

“The thrust of the British Government’s policy was against the Action Group led by Chief Awolowo, which ruled in the Western Region. Not only was the British Government working hand in glove with the North, which was a puppet state favoured and controlled by the British administration, but it was colluding through Okotie-Eboh with Dr. Azikiwe – Zik – the leader of the largely Igbo NCNC, which ruled in the East. We tricked Azikiwe into accepting to be president having known that Balewa will be the main man with power. Awolowo has to go to jail to cripple his genius plans for a greater Nigeria.”[/b]

Achebe reveals his own mentality we never suspected before: “We [intellectuals] were especially disheartened by the disintegration of the state because we were brought up in the belief we were destined to rule [pg 108].” He uses this mind-set of his to judge Awolowo:

“It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for his Yoruba people in general…However Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacle to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigeria-Biafra War – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case, it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the number of his enemies significantly through starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generation (pg233).”

[b]It is a mystery that a man of his stature could be so persuaded. Awolowo built the first stadium in Africa, the first TV station in Africa, the first high-rise building in Nigeria, first industrial estate, cocoa development board and the Odua Investment Group. He offered free universal education and free universal primary healthcare. Remarkably, Awolowo never situated any of those landmarks in his hometown of Ikenne in Ogun State; he spread them round the region he presided on. And the free universal education and free primary healthcare were available to anyone of any tribe or nationality including Nupe, Igbo, Ijaw and Ghanaians living in the Western Region. Awolowo was interested in bettering the lives of everyone, not just the Yoruba.

Of course, we know that the lasting legacy of the Biafra war was the creation of a well-organised Yoruba-bashing industrial complex headquartered in Igbo consciousness, working with machine regularity from generation to generation and whose genuine aim is to fundamentally deflect blame from Ojukwu and his sycophants like Achebe until misunderstandings are perverted into evidence of Yoruba guilt, outright lies are perverted into undisputed truth.

Undoubtedly, Awolowo was a master architect of the war to defeat the secession. Therefore, the case against him requires scrutiny.[/b]

eduj:
even though you obviously mistook me for another,I refuse to engage you in an exchange of insults.I hate it when guys instead of stating facts to prove a point resort to fallacy of argumentum ad hominem (attack against the author). By the way,an illiterate is one found wanting in the basic socio-human skills of reading and writing hence, by virtue of this post (which shows I can read and type a reply to your post) am not illiterate.A better adjective would be misinformed.Back to the theme of the issue,until Nigeria has it version of the silicon valley(pls don't mention computer village) our ICT is insignificant.Yes we expect a prodigious growth in 5 years time but ,its still basic in structure. At best brother,you are an irrelevant authority on the issue of naijas ICT.

I am young man but I know,with what I have seen here...more than you do.What I and some ICT savvy people know is that Yorubas control ICT HOME AND ABROAD if you talk about NIGERIANS.....

Go to these links.One opened by somebody...IGBO... in the ICT sector.
The other one capturing some ICT savvy Yorubas home and abroad......you have to read from start to end to enjoy yourself

https://www.nairaland.com/2674858/yorubas-cornered-nigerias-ict-sector

https://www.nairaland.com/2684014/yoruba-commonwealth-politics/14

I Above Others

Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and goes on to pivot the “pogrom” on the fact that the Igbo were resented because they were the most superior, most successful nationality in the country. He claims (on pg 233) that they were “the dominant tribe,” “led the nation in virtually every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the arts (pg 66),” which included having two vice-chancellors in Yorubaland; they the Igbo 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 colonising British so many headaches and then literally 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 headstart, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950 (pg74).” Besides 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 in Journal of Modern African Studies, titled Modernisation and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Ibos by Paul Anber.

I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this “scholar” was designated as “a member of staff of one of 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 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 realised again that it says “he is a staff of a Nigerian university.” 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 of 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 January1966 coup and the inflammatory provocations they published to resentment for being allegedly the most successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.

Had Achebe not overdosed on Igbo nationalism, he would have had his chest-beating ethnic bombasts inflected with a deeper and more sober 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 fuelled 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 the Igbo heading University of Ibadan and University of Lagos, both in Yorubaland, 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 the Igbo. “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 Igbo 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 Kontagora 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 the face of overwhelming force, he describes how Major Jonathan Uchendu’s Abagana Ambush succeeded in destroying Colonel Murtala Muhammed’s convoy of 96 vehicles, four armoured vehicles, 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, 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 could not 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? Should the man not have been handed over as a prisoner of war? Was his killing not a violation of Geneva Convention, which he so much accused the Nigerian side of disrespecting (pg 212)? Did villagers behaving this way not 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 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 checkpoints in many places to regulate the flow of goods and human beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded the airwaves with pro-Ojukwu propaganda, imprisoned and executed dissidents on a daily basis, according to accounts of Nowa Omoigui and the recollections of Sam Ogbemudia. 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 Midwesterners, 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 cannot 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 Biafra, Achebe calls them “saboteurs.” Now, note in the next paragraph how he describes what happened to his people, when the federal army in hot pursuit 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 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 e.t.c. He found time to research. They were his people unlike other Midwestern tribes’ sufferings he could not find “credible corroboration of.”

eduj:
even though you obviously mistook me for another,I refuse to engage you in an exchange of insults.I hate it when guys instead of stating facts to prove a point resort to fallacy of argumentum ad hominem (attack against the author). By the way,an illiterate is one found wanting in the basic socio-human skills of reading and writing hence, by virtue of this post (which shows I can read and type a reply to your post) am not illiterate.A better adjective would be misinformed.Back to the theme of the issue,until Nigeria has it version of the silicon valley(pls don't mention computer village) our ICT is insignificant.Yes we expect a prodigious growth in 5 years time but ,its still basic in structure. At best brother,you are an irrelevant authority on the issue of naijas ICT.

I am young man but I know,with what I have seen here...more than you do.What I and some ICT savvy people know is that Yorubas control ICT HOME AND ABROAD if you talk about NIGERIANS.....

Go to these links.One opened by somebody in the ICT sector.
The other one capturing some ICT savvy Yorubas home and abroad......you have to read from start to end to enjoy yourself

https://www.nairaland.com/2674858/yorubas-cornered-nigerias-ict-sector

https://www.nairaland.com/2684014/yoruba-commonwealth-politics/14

I Above Others

Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and goes on to pivot the “pogrom” on the fact that the Igbo were resented because they were the most superior, most successful nationality in the country. He claims (on pg 233) that they were “the dominant tribe,” “led the nation in virtually every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the arts (pg 66),” which included having two vice-chancellors in Yorubaland; they the Igbo 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 colonising British so many headaches and then literally 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 headstart, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950 (pg74).” Besides 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 in Journal of Modern African Studies, titled Modernisation and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Ibos by Paul Anber.

I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this “scholar” was designated as “a member of staff of one of 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 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 realised again that it says “he is a staff of a Nigerian university.” 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 of 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 January1966 coup and the inflammatory provocations they published to resentment for being allegedly the most successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.

Had Achebe not overdosed on Igbo nationalism, he would have had his chest-beating ethnic bombasts inflected with a deeper and more sober 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 fuelled 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 the Igbo heading University of Ibadan and University of Lagos, both in Yorubaland, 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 the Igbo. “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 Igbo 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 Kontagora 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 the face of overwhelming force, he describes how Major Jonathan Uchendu’s Abagana Ambush succeeded in destroying Colonel Murtala Muhammed’s convoy of 96 vehicles, four armoured vehicles, 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, 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 could not 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? Should the man not have been handed over as a prisoner of war? Was his killing not a violation of Geneva Convention, which he so much accused the Nigerian side of disrespecting (pg 212)? Did villagers behaving this way not 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 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 checkpoints in many places to regulate the flow of goods and human beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded the airwaves with pro-Ojukwu propaganda, imprisoned and executed dissidents on a daily basis, according to accounts of Nowa Omoigui and the recollections of Sam Ogbemudia. 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 Midwesterners, 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 cannot 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 Biafra, Achebe calls them “saboteurs.” Now, note in the next paragraph how he describes what happened to his people, when the federal army in hot pursuit 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 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 e.t.c. He found time to research. They were his people unlike other Midwestern tribes’ sufferings he could not find “credible corroboration of.”

P.M. NEWS Nigeria > News > National > BIAFRA: The Facts, The Fiction
BIAFRA: The Facts, The Fiction
Published on March 5, 2013 by · 34 Comments

Placed side by side independent accounts of the Nigerian Civil War, Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country is a pot-pourri of deliberate misrepresentations, outright inventions and a one-eyed view of events

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 falsehood to reality just because it serves 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 higher considerations, they can prove more destructive than nuclear weapons. Four months after America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the dead eventually totalled 240,000. In the ethnic rivalry between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, within two months 500,000 were murdered with ordinary machetes.

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 does not become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Chinua 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.

There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be fingered for the cause. 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 inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206 countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation 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.
• Ojukwu reviewing a parade of Biafran soldiers

• Ojukwu reviewing a parade of Biafran soldiers

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with every step you make. 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. But in every encounter that shows the Igbo 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 end notes 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 fact-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. 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’s wife in a swanky 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 and 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 Nwankama’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 slated for revulsion. Pity, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what is on sale throughout the book. Achebe, of course, is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.

Real Reasons For The Pogroms

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 the Igbo 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 he 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 (p79).”

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. 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 enough incentive for Azikiwe to return, 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 Ifeajuna, the coup’s mastermind, used to capture the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Once Ifeajuna and Major Okafor, Commanding Officer of the Federal Guards, tipped off Azikiwe about the planned bloodshed, Okafor, Ezedigbo and other guards became freer to meet 12 kilometres 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 murdered. Third, the head of state, Major-General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, did not try to execute the coup plotters as was the practice in a purely military affair. Ojukwu told Suzanne Cronje, the British-South African author, that he asked Aguiyi-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 were imprisoned for sedition, they served their terms in Calabar, away from their regions as it was the normal practice. When Wole Soyinka was imprisoned at the beginning of the civil war, he was sent to Kaduna and Jos prisons, but the ring leaders of the coup 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. That was Achebe’s Hausa-speaking, kaftan-wearing Kaduna man, who was 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 Midwest from Hausa-Fulani domination when it was simply another Igbo coup for Igbo ends, planned in Enugu and headed by a Yoruba man.

However, the January coup did not foment a much more visceral response in the Western Region since their assassinated political leader was viewed as part of the corrupt, troublesome, election-rigging class. To Westerners, the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish. But to the Northerners, who were feudal in their social organisation, it was a different matter. Sardauna 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 the fact that the Igbo in the North were widely taunting their hosts on the loss of their leaders. Celestine Ukwu, a popular Igbo musician, released songs titled Ewu Ne Ba Akwa (Goats Are Crying) and others celebrating “Igbo power”, the “January Victory.” Posters, stickers, postcards, cartoons displaying the murdered Sardauna begging Major 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 44 of 1966 banning them. The Igbo did not 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.” These images and songs 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, the Igbo 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 does not 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 Igala-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 worthy to note that these Northerners never published nor circulated irreverent or taunting pictures of Eastern leaders unlike the Igbo of the North; they were just massacred for being Northerners. The government of Eastern Region did not stand up to stop these massacres. Neither did the Igbo intellectuals. Ojukwu, the military administrator, even made a radio broadcast, saying he could no longer guarantee the security of non-Eastern Nigerians in the East and that Easterners, who did not return to Igboland, would be considered traitors. This was the time Professor Sam Aluko, who was the head of Economics department at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and 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. 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].”

READ ABUT SOME LIES OF IGBOS THAT WERE BUSTED WITH REFERENCES.IGBOS ALWAYS LIE AND BELIEVE THEIR LIES

P.M. NEWS Nigeria > News > National > BIAFRA: The Facts, The Fiction
BIAFRA: The Facts, The Fiction
Published on March 5, 2013 by · 34 Comments

Placed side by side independent accounts of the Nigerian Civil War, Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country is a pot-pourri of deliberate misrepresentations, outright inventions and a one-eyed view of events

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 falsehood to reality just because it serves 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 higher considerations, they can prove more destructive than nuclear weapons. Four months after America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the dead eventually totalled 240,000. In the ethnic rivalry between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, within two months 500,000 were murdered with ordinary machetes.

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 does not become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Chinua 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.

There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be fingered for the cause. 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 inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206 countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation 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.
• Ojukwu reviewing a parade of Biafran soldiers

• Ojukwu reviewing a parade of Biafran soldiers

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with every step you make. 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. But in every encounter that shows the Igbo 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 end notes 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 fact-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. 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’s wife in a swanky 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 and 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 Nwankama’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 slated for revulsion. Pity, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what is on sale throughout the book. Achebe, of course, is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.

eduj:
lemme correct you ,the calculator was invented by a Yoruba boy.zenox computers- which falsifying your Yoruba ICT dominance claim- is owned by an igno guy hence by your logic he invented the computer? Nigeria's ICT is very primitive and dominated by expatriates. The Yoruba's are dominant in its service sector though(konga and its ilk).

Nigeria's ICT is very primitive and dominated by expatriates you see why I said you are an illiterate...pls,go and learn.THX.

Marcelini:
Stats is in conflict with your Yoruba lies:

Paul Anber's essay "Modernization and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Ibos" published in the journal of Modern African Studies vol. 5, No 2 (Sep, 1967) 163-179. See pp 171-172 for excerpt:
" '' A system of Universal primary education was introduced in Eastern Nigeria in 1953, though the mission schools had already prospered in the Region long before then. Despite the fact that there was a requirement for limited contributory fees, education continued to be very much in demand. Even at the time when universal primary education was first introduced, the percentage of the population over seven years of age who were literate was lower in the East than in any other Region: East, 10.6 per cent; West 9.5 percent; North, 0.9 percent. Since 1959, the East has had less teachers and pupils than any other area of the country, with the he74y emphasis on primary education. Figures for elementary and secondary education indicate that the approximate ratio of teachers to population in 1963 was 1 to every 1,500 in the East, 1 to every 2,500 in th West, and 1 for every 10,000 in the north. Other statistical data reveal how rapidly the standard of living rose among Ibos. The East had the most extensive hospital facilities in the country by 1965, the largest regional production of electricity in the country by 1954, and the greatest number of vehicle registrations by 1963. The economic orientation of the Ibos was also reflected through membership of credit associations:in 1963 the East had 68,220 individual members, the west 5,776, and the north a mere 2,407 ." ''... His source was the Annual Abstract of Statistics ( Federal Office of Statistics, Lagos, 1965)

YOU SEE WHY HAROLD SMITH SAID YORUBAS ARE HIGHLY INTELLIGENT THAN IGBOS.NOW READ THIS:LOOK AT THAT BOLDEN th showing that you doctored it...lol

Paul Anber's essay "Modernization and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Ibos" published in the journal of Modern African Studies vol. 5, No 2 (Sep, 1967) 163-179. See pp 171-172 for excerpt:
" '' A system of Universal primary education was introduced in Eastern Nigeria in 1953, though the mission schools had already prospered in the Region long before then. Despite the fact that there was a requirement for limited contributory fees, education continued to be very much in demand. Even at the time when universal primary education was first introduced, the percentage of the population over seven years of age who were literate was higher in the East than in any other Region: East, 1.6 per cent; West 9.5 percent; North, 0.9 percent. Since 1959, the East has had more teachers and pupils than any other area of the country, with the heaviest emphasis on primary education. Figures for elementary and secondary education indicate that the approximate ratio of teachers to population in 1963 was 1 to every 11,500 in the East, 1 to every 2,500 in th West, and 1 for every 10,000 in the north. Other statistical data reveal how rapidly the standard of living rose among Ibos. The East had the most extensive hospital facilities in the country by 1965, the largest regional production of electricity in the country by 1954, and the greatest number of vehicle registrations by 1963. The economic orientation of the Ibos was also reflected through membership of credit associations:in 1963 the East had 6,220 individual members, the west 555,776, and the north a mere 2,407 ." ''... His source was the Annual Abstract of Statistics ( Federal Office of Statistics, Lagos, 1965)

YOU CAN SEE THAT YORUBAS STILL LED IN MINE.USE YOUR BRAIN...POST LINKS OR SCREENSHOTS..

Leez:
lol aiii now run along kiddo the grown ups wanna talk aiii?

lol.....illiterate

Leez:
ok inbred boy u win u win lmao

lol....inbreed and factory baby,you lose,you lose..... ah ah ah

LordValor:
U claim Yorubas r. Dominating 70% of IT n can't boast of a single achievement in dat....d so called Igboz u r hating on possess an indignous company where dey build PC n Laptop(Zinox). Dey started n developed one of Africa biggest IT market. Without govt help(computer village)...its funny hw all d Yorubas can cum here n blab n rant with factz of being d first educated in dis or dat but not n neva d first in applyin or usin such knowledge....I rada be a Chest beater dan an Empty Vessel

I do not have much time now but Yorubas are leading you in ICT....too much...

Did you notice the transparent electronic calculator used in WAEC all over WEST AFRICA this year? It was invented by a Yoruba dude.Have you seen Solo phone before?It is being produced by a Yoruba boy Akindele.You can verify from Forbes.Give me one of yours...

LordValor:
U claim Yorubas r. Dominating 70% of IT n can't boast of a single achievement in dat....d so called Igboz u r hating on possess an indignous company where dey build PC n Laptop(Zinox). Dey started n developed one of Africa biggest IT market. Without govt help(computer village)...its funny hw all d Yorubas can cum here n blab n rant with factz of being d first educated in dis or dat but not n neva d first in applyin or usin such knowledge....I rada be a Chest beater dan an Empty Vessel

lol...Computer village...this guy no go kill person.Go and ask people wey dey educated and don't beleive tales by moonlight wey una dey tell una sef for township meetings.Yorubas control 70% ICT in Nigeria..

LordValor:
.


Tell who eva is fuelin u with hate for d igboz 2 pls tell u d truth pls.....get ur facts right, did dey eva tell u dat most of d igbo officers were murdered Even b4 dey cud make it 2 d east, most of d so called 100,000 soldier u made up were mere easterners sum who made it 2 d east after survivin d massacre in lagos n d north, people got tire of runnin n dying so most voluntered 2 stop d killin, men were drafted without even given gunz....d so called boko haram u mentioned 2 a point had superior power dan d nigerian troopz dats why d war is still lingering because both parties possess quality fire power but if u claim 2 be as logical as u write,In ur right sense hw wud u compare d war btw nigeria n biafra 2 dat of boko haram....ask ur parent,dats if dey decide 2 b truthful void of any govt propagada used 2 brain wash dem during d war....Federal troops were first 2 strike,most of what happened during dat war was jus a group of people(igbos) tryin 2 survive hate,marginalization n envy which is still d order of d day....Ur family n their peers sat down in lagos n listen 2 lies spread by d govt n those same lies n hate dey told u thru out ur life,all of a sudden u think u knw it all bout a War u pple neva experinced....and I used achebes title 2 explain a likely situation...don't understand hw u went all d way 2 analyse ur hate n negative rantz bout a masterpiece accepted worldwide......and if u knw ur history well enough void of lies of ur tribe u wud knw b4 d war,Igbo were leading in education,commerce,trade n technology...even thiers a BBC Documentry dat supports dat fact n up till date wen u talk bout Tech,d Iboz r still leadin...bout IT like u mentioned D Iboz r slayin in dat same field...Ur. Fathers n brothers can only boast of d free education dey got from awolowo cos he knwz dey all lazy bunches who can't fend for demselves....Up till date till livin on anytin free,

Most of you Igbos are traders and mostly illiterates.So we 'lazy'ones are the ones who were and are more developed than you..even lent your real lazy people money two times dueing regional system....laziness has gotten another meaning from the hard drugging and in-drug-ious Igbos.. ah ah ah

Yorubas are far more developed than Igbos and far more intelligent.If you say you are good,you give reasons and not propaganda and we will attest to the facts enumerated.
Let us compare...
Before colonialism:
Yorubas built empires like Britain,Rome etc up to Dahomey,Ghana and Togo while Igbos were very primitive during this period and practising great primitivities that you are conversant with.
2.Yorubas were civilized and living in organised environment,used higher materials for building e.g what you call brown roof now as against palm tree leaves been used by Igbos.
3.Yorubas were never Unclad or half Unclad as against Igbos who were still half Unclad as near as1921...you can visit wikipedia and see pix of some of their women in 1921.
There are still more but let me go to when each region was controlling its destinies..
1.Yorubas were first in everything development-wise..
2.They built the first skyscraper in tropical Africa.
3.First Olympic swimning pool.
4.First Television in tropical Africa.
5.First newspaper etc
Had many firsts in almost everything and still having it till date.

20th and 21st centuries till date..
1.Yoruba has 2 Nobel Laureates Igbos have none.
2.Yoruba has several youngest phd holders in Nigeria and in the world Igbos have none
3.Yorubas have more than 10 gramny awards in their kitty from a couple of Yorubas.Igbos have none.
Yorubas are the only ones who have repeatedly broken the records of universities and polytechnics home and abroad by taking 5.0 and 4.0 CGP respectively.THE FUNNY THING IS IGBOS HAVE NONE.
Yoruba even controls 70% of the ICT world in Nigeria.As we speak,SW is the 3rd economy in Africa
The list is endless.
Anybody that says Igbos are anything near the Yorubas should compare and contrast...

Leez:
but they can produce ewedu na
masters of inbreeding hence the high amount of low iq demented idiots

If you Ojukwus have 1/40 of the achievements of the Afonjas,you would thank God.No wonder most Ojukwus are bastards from baby factories.You too were made from factory...
Give me anything to say you are up to Yorubas.

Yorubas are far more developed than Igbos and far more intelligent.If you say you are good,you give reasons and not propaganda,lies that have been busted and we will attest to the facts enumerated.
Let us compare...
Before colonialism:
Yorubas built empires like Britain,Rome etc up to Dahomey,Ghana and Togo while Igbos were very primitive during this period and practising great primitivities that you are conversant with.
2.Yorubas were civilized and living in organised environment,used higher materials for building e.g what you call brown roof now as against palm tree leaves been used by Igbos.
3.Yorubas were never Unclad or half Unclad as against Igbos who were still half Unclad as near as1921...you can visit wikipedia and see pix of some of their women in 1921.
There are still more but let me go to when each region was controlling its destinies..
1.Yorubas were first in everything development-wise..
2.They built the first skyscraper in tropical Africa.
3.First Olympic swimning pool.
4.First Television in tropical Africa.
5.First newspaper etc
Had many firsts in almost everything and still having it till date.

20th and 21st centuries till date..
1.Yoruba has 2 Nobel Laureates Igbos have none.
2.Yoruba has several youngest phd holders in Nigeria and in the world Igbos have none
3.Yorubas have more than 10 gramny awards in their kitty from a couple of Yorubas.Igbos have none.
Yorubas are the only ones who have repeatedly broken the records of universities and polytechnics home and abroad by taking 5.0 and 4.0 CGP respectively.THE FUNNY THING IS IGBOS HAVE NONE.
Yoruba even controls 70% of the ICT world in Nigeria.As we speak,SW is the 3rd economy in Africa
The list is endless.
Anybody that says Igbos are anything near the Yorubas should compare and contrast...
NOW A TRIBE LIKE YORUBA SHOULD BE THE ONE BEATING THEIR CHESTS THAT THEY ARE BRILLIANT THAN ALL BLACKS BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT SEEN ANY BLACK TRIBE WITH THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS
BUT WE KNOW GOD HAS CREATED EVERYBODY AND EVERY TRIBE TO BE GREAT IN THEIR OWN RIGHT.
WE ARE ALL GREAT IN THE DIFFERENT FIELDS GOD HAS ENDOWED US WITH.

lordkhalifa:
lol we all knew how cowardice and lazy u guys are... bravely yellow-bars defeated Biafran soldiers... hahahaha I'm laughing at ur ignorance... are u that brave and one of ur own who happens to be fluent in Hausa escape ethnic cleansing @ mile12 market... brave guy continue being an ass licker to ur pay Masters Hausa/Fulani's... ask ur dad he will tell u inexperienced Nigeria solders couldn't defeat Ill-equip Biafran soldiers, they manage e achieve that with the help of foreign Ally's and help of saboteurs from river line areas

.
lol...This one is a stark illiterate.Go and learn from half literate Igbo like Ikechu1 and he will lie to you illiterate that it was Banjo...the only warrior...leading Igbo cowards and weaklings...that made 200 yorubas decimate ten thousands Igbos.He has forgotten that Yorubas are empire builders.. the considerate warriors...the SCORPIONS...ah ah ah
.

lordkhalifa:
yeah we are chest beaters because we are achievers... after the pogrom which we all know how it was won, without western ally I wonder would have become of you by now... probably in shackle pounding fufu,
the only thing u can be proud of



1 ewedu and amala
2 owamber

No wonder 200 Yoruba soldiers defeated battalions of Biafran soldiers ao Ore.The weaklings.You feel bad that the typically intelligent yorubas do not swallow your lies.

new2020:
Typical yorubba...can't contain their envy of Igbos. Keep disgracing your kinsmen!

YES,TYPICALLY INTELLIGENT YORUBA.CAN'T CONTAIN AND SWALLOW THE LIES OF THE IGBOS.YOU ASK YOURSELF...HOW SUDDENLY WOULD IGBOS BE TECHNOLOGICALLY SAVVY DURING THE WAR WHEN THEY COULD NOT DO ANYTHING BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR.AS WE STAND YORUBA CONTROLS 70% OF THE ICT WORLD IN NIGERIA.WHERE ARE THE IGBOS?
MOREOVER WE HAVE SEEN THAT MOST OF THOSE THINGS WERE BROUGHT IN BY FRANCE AND THE MERCENARIES.DON'T BELEIVE YOUR LIES...

Afonjas:
Ibgo states is free and opened for all Nigerians, ''only the strong survives'' oder tribe won't easily make it there because it's full of supper humans, the hausa people there only do the little poor job igbos refused to do

Maybe that is why they were so backward during the regional system and even more backward now...
Yorubas do not beat chests but they are a very much achieved people than the Igbos and highly intelligent than the Igbos-HAROLD SMITH

bigdot1759:
U people sabi lie pass anything. Which factory in igboland then during ojukwu built this is the factory still operating u beta stop all dis trash we've heard of INOSSON, PRO FORCE ETC...... So which factory did dis one ooooo

lol...na underground factory.The problem of the Igbos are the educated Yorubas who when you say you are flying..would look if you are really off the ground unlike some people that will tell you to believe whatever you hear..IGBOS LIKE TO BELIEVE THEIR LIES.THOSE THINGS WERE BROUGHT IN BY THE MERCENARIES....

LordValor:
Prof. G. O Ezekwe graduated a mechanical engineer
He holds an M.Sc. in Metallurgical Engineering
and PhD in Engineering Sciences
from Higher Institute of Chemical Technology,
Sofia – Bulgaria. He started his career in 1982 as
Lecturer II in ASUTECH (now Enugu State
University of Science and Technology) in
Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
Department and rose to the rank of a Professor.
....So I bet dat answers it all bout d tank&refinery being forged or built....minds like prof Gordian help develop weaponz n tech used during d war,in some cases dey even went as far as scavagin destroyed federal craft too, ask ur fathers(that's d educated ones) in west hw many of their great lecturers of igbo origin eva returned after d war....and if u laff at we d igbo about lossing d war,ma dear so called patriot Nigerians,it is not a shame dat people without any good military trainin n lil or no international aid,support or fund or weapons cud hold off u so called gallant nigerian army with all d support,aid,fund n support for gud 3years....with nutin we fought nigeria for gud 3years...imagine if we had half what d federal troop had den....today we wud ve a topic like d title of achebes book....there was once a country called Nigeria

You know nothing about war.Biafran army was about 100,000 and Nigeria had 10,000.Biafrans fought for 3 years but Boko Haram are still engaging Nigeria for 7 years running now with lesser army.. One thing about Igbos is they want you to believe their lies even when you found out that that they are lying.Igbos are not known for anything technology-wise before the civil war like the Yorubas and Benin.As at the moment,Yorubas still control 70% of ICT in Nigeria.
GO AND READ IGBOS LIES...

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/03/05/biafra-the-facts-the-fiction/

There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be fingered for the cause. 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 inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206 countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation 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.

• Ojukwu reviewing a parade of Biafran soldiers
Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with every step you make. 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. But in every encounter that shows the Igbo 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 end notes 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 fact-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. 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....

eduj:
while at it you can post links on how France sent the ogbunigwe bomb to Biafra too.

Biafrans tried but they invented nothing.In a war such as the Nigerian civil war,you don't always get all the information because there is a lot of secrecy but a couple of journalists got something.READ THIS AND GO TO THAT LINK AND READ SOME OF IGBOS' LIES THAT HAVE BEEN BUSTED.Have you asked yourself why Igbos could not perform those feats before and even after the civil war.Ib this 21st century,Yorubas control 79% of the ICT world in Nigeria...

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/03/05/biafra-the-facts-the-fiction/


And Ogbunigwe was not a product of Igbo ingenuity; it was a “bespectacled” American mercenary from Massachussets Institute of Technology, uncovered by the Irish journalist Donal Musgrave ,that was secretly training Biafrans on how to use fertilisers to make bombs (cf 13 August 1968 cable from American Embassy in Dublin to the one in the Lagos).
Propaganda and Diplomatic Moves
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 Victor Banjo, Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Philip Alale in Enugu on Saturday 23 September 1967. What Achebe went to warn Senghor about did not 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 had not been constructed before his travel companion was executed on 23 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).” Throughout the book Achebe never says what Senghor’s response was. That alone should alert the reader that the response was not favourable to the Biafran cause since.....

Aigbofa:
Those were parts bought from the international market and crudely put together by the Biafrans. If those parts were indeed made in Biafra what happened to the foundries that made the parts? Did anyone destroy any factory after the war?
I don't understand why people are lying to themselves.

lol...And one thing is they like to believe their lies.Most of those things were brought in by the mercenaries that prosecuted the war with them.Their scientists tried but they invented nothing but fabricated some with the help of the white people....
I am going to post a researched article now that will throw more light on their lies.. with evidences of course. .

The second season of IB PLC’s Entrepreneurship Initiative for youths has taken off. The first edition of the initiative for youths between the ages of 18 and 35 which took place in Ibadan, Oyo State, last year saw 25 lucky winners receive grants to kick start their business dreams and ideas.

This year’s initiative officially commenced on www.ibpkickstart.com penultimate week. The applicants stand a chance to win million naira grants and other benefits for their youth- owned businesses in Nigeria.

IB PLC Foundation, a subsidiary of SABMiller has promised to keep fulfilling dreams and support young and brilliant minds on how to get employed, generate employment and create wealth for themselves through its KickStart programme.

The foundation is aimed at instilling a culture of entrepreneurship among youth in the South West by encouraging them to develop their big ideas into sustainable businesses or expand their existing businesses through the provision of material and financial support which include business development skill training, business mentoring and coaching and provision of grants for business start-up or expansion.

First launched in South Africa in 1995 by SABMiller, the major Shareholder of IB PLC Ilesha, as a poverty alleviation initiative, the programme has also been implemented in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Tanzania. The programme is open only to Nigerians from 18 to 35 who live or have their business within the South West


http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/08/26/entrepreneurship-initiative-for-south-west-youth-returns/

cktheluckyman:
Lol empty chest beaters!! Example indeed! The earlier you realised the dullard is powerless in stopping the avengers the better for you.

You should stop this joke,sir.I think it is better they dialogue with the govt.

nnachukz:
With this mindset, you will search for love forever because you don't deserve to be loved.
Change your moniker to searching for hate.

Yes,his sobriquet says it all.He should not be loved if he continues to fail to reason positively.It is pertinent that Buhari dialogues with the militants because they are fighting for a just cause albeit wrongly.
I AM IMPLORING BUHARI TO CHOOSE JAW JAW RATHER THAN WAR WAR....