₦airaland Forum

Two choice property said to belong to the former Bayelsa State Governor, Timipre Sylva, have been uncovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, which is currently in court with the suspect over a case of corrupt enrichment while in office.

A competent source in the commission told Saturday Vanguard last night that the property which worth over N1 billion were traced to companies owned by Sylva.

The source said that the property, which are located in choice areas of Abuja, were discovered in the ongoing investigation into how Sylva looted Bayelsa during his tenure as the governor of the state.

The source added that the anti- graft agency had also uncovered a network of fronts through which the former governor acquired choice property in major cities especially Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory.

One of the properties linked to the former governor is a duplex valued at N310m situated at Cachez Estate, Mpape, Abuja while the other is a mansion valued at N700m located off Ademola Adetokunbo Crescent in high brow Wuse 2, Abuja.

The Wuse mansion was acquired in the name of Marlin Maritime Limited, a company owned by Timipre Sylva.

The managing Director of the Company, Gbenga Balogun, is said to have fled as EFCC operatives closed in on him in the course of investigation of the Sylva era in Bayelsa, during which billions of naira is said to have been looted by him and his officials.

In spite of the escapee of the fronts, the operatives of the commission are reported to be working round the clock to arrest the culprits and bring them to account for the public funds.

Several accounts have already been traced to the front (name withheld) who allegedly opened many of them in his name using different passport photographs. The front, (name withheld) is currently on the run. Meanwhile, Sylva is already standing trial before a Federal High Court in Abuja on a six-count charge bordering on fraud and money laundering.

But in a swift reaction, the spokesman for Timipre Sylva, Mr. Ola Doife, challenged EFCC to stop trying the former governor in the media but to collate any evidence at its disposal and present it in court since the matter was already pending.

Doife maintained that Sylva remained innocent of the charges until proved otherwise by a competent court of jurisdiction in the land.

I am a historian and I have always believed that if we want to talk history we must be dispassionate, objective and factual. We must take the emotion out of it and we must always tell the truth. The worst thing that anyone can do is to try to re-write history and indulge in historical revisionism. This is especially so when the person is a revered figure and a literary icon.

Sadly, it is in the light of such historical revisionism that I view Professor Chinua Achebe’s assertion (which is reflected in his latest and highly celebrated book titled ”There Was A Country”) that Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the late and much loved Leader of the Yoruba, was responsible for the genocide that the Igbos suffered during the civil war. This claim is not only false but it is also, frankly speaking, utterly absurd. Not only is Professor Achebe indulging in perfidy, not only is he being utterly dishonest and disingenuous but he is also turning history upside down and indulging in what I would describe as ethnic chauvinism.

I am one of those that has always had tremendous sympathy for the Igbo cause during the civil war. I am also an admirer of Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu who stood up for his people when it mattered the most and when they were being slaughtered by rampaging mobs in the northern part of our country.

At least 100,000 Igbos were killed in those northern pogroms which took place before the civil war and which indeed led directly to it. This was not only an outrage but it was also a tragedy of monumental proportions.Yet we must not allow our emotion or our sympathy for the suffering of the Igbo at the hands of northern mobs before the war started to becloud our sense of reasoning, as regards what actually happened during the prosecution of the war itself.

It is important to set the record straight and not to be selective in our application and recollection of the facts when considering what actually led to the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Igbo women, children and civilians during that war. And, unlike others, I do not deny the fact that hundreds of thousands were starved to death as a consequence of the blockade that was imposed on Biafra by the Nigerian Federal Government.

To deny that this actually happened would be a lie. It is a historical fact. Again I do not deny the fact that Awolowo publicly defended the blockade and indeed told the world that it was perfectly legitimate for any government to impose such a blockade on the territory of their enemies in times of war. Awolowo said it, this is a matter of historical record and he was quoted in a number of British newspapers as having said so at the time.

Yet he spoke nothing but the truth. And whether anyone likes to hear it or not, he was absolutely right in what he said. Let me give you an example. During the Second World War a blockade was imposed on Germany, Japan and Italy by the Allied Forces and this was very effective. It weakened the Axis powers considerably and this was one of the reasons why the war ended at the time that it did. If there had been no blockade, the Second World War would have gone on for considerably longer.

In the case of the Nigerian civil war though the story did not stop at the fact that a blockade was imposed by the Federal Government which led to the suffering, starvation, pain, death and hardship of the civilian Igbo population or that Awolowo defended it. That is only half the story.

There was a lot more to it and the fact that Achebe and most of our Igbo brothers and sisters always conveniently forget to mention the other half of the story is something that causes some of us from outside Igboland considerable concern and never ceases to amaze us.

The bitter truth is that if anyone is to be blamed for the hundreds of thousands of Igbos that died from starvation during the civil war, it was not Chief Awolowo or even General Yakubu Gowon but, rather it was Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu himself. I say this because it is a matter of public record and a historical fact that the Federal Government of Nigeria made a very generous offer to Ojukwu and the Biafrans to open a road corridor for food to be ferried to the Igbos and to lessen the suffering of their civilian population.

This was as a consequence of a deal that was brokered by the international community who were concerned about the suffering of the Igbo civilian population and the death and hardship that the blockade was causing to them.

Unfortunately Ojukwu turned this down flatly and instead insisted that food should be flown into Biafra by air in the dead of the night. This was unacceptable to the Federal Government because it meant that the Biafrans could, and indeed would, have used such night flights to smuggle badly needed arms and ammunition into their country for usage by their soldiers. That was where the problem came from and that was the issue.

Apart from that, Ojukwu found it expedient and convenient to allow his people to starve to death and to broadcast it on television screens all over the world in order to attract sympathy for the Igbo cause and for propaganda purposes. And this worked beautifully for him.

Ambassador Ralph Uweche, who was the Special Envoy to France for the Biafran Government during the civil war and who is the leader of Ohaeneze, the leading igbo political and socio-cultural organisation today, attested to this in his excellent book titled ”Reflections On The Nigerian Civil War”. That book was factual and honest and I would urge people like Achebe to go and read it well.

The self-serving role of Ojukwu and many of the Biafran intelligentsia and elites and their insensitivity to the suffering of their own people during the course of the war was well enunciated in that book. The fact of the matter is that the starvation and suffering of hundreds of thousands of Igbo men, women and children during the civil war was seen and used as a convenient tool of propaganda by Ojukwu and that is precisely why he rejected the offer of a food corridor by the Nigerian Government.

When those that belong to the post civil war generation of the Igbo are wondering who was responsible for the genocide and mass starvation of their forefathers during the war they must firstly look within themselves and point their fingers at their own past leaders and certainly not Awolowo or Gowon. The person that was solely responsible for that suffering, for that starvation and for those slow and painful deaths was none other than Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the leader of Biafra, himself.

I have written many good things about Ojukwu on many occasions in the past and I stand by every word that I have ever said or written about him. In my view he was a man of courage and immense fortitude, he stood against the mass murder of his people in the north and he brought them home and created a safe haven for them in the east.

For him, and indeed the whole of Biafra, the war was an attempt to exercise their legitimate right of self-determination and leave Nigeria due to the atrocities that they had been subjected to in the north. I cannot blame him or his people for that and frankly I have always admired his stand.

However he was not infallible and he also made some terrible mistakes, just as all great leaders do, from time to time. The fact that he rejected the Nigerian Federal Government’s offer of a food corridor was one of those terrible mistakes and this cost him and his people dearly. Professor Chinua Achebe surely ought to have reflected that in his book as well.

When it comes to the Nigerian civil war there were no villains or angels. During that brutal conflict no less than two million Nigerians and Biafrans died and the Yoruba who, unlike others, did not ever discriminate or attack any non-Yoruba that lived in their territory before the civil war or carry out any coups or attempted coups, suffered at every point as well. For example prominent Yoruba sons and daughters were killed on the night of the first Igbo coup of January 1966 and again in the northern ”revenge” coup of July 1966. Many of our people were also killed in the north before the outbreak of the civil war and again in the Mid-West and the East during the course and prosecution of the war itself. It was indeed the predominantly Yoruba Third Marine Commando, under the command of General Benjamin Adekunle (the ”Black Scorpion”) and later General Olusegun Obasanjo, that not only liberated the mid-west and drove the Biafrans out of there but they also marched into Igboland itself, occupied it, defeated the Biafran Army in battle, captured all their major towns and forced the Igbo to surrender. Third Marine Commando was made up of Yoruba soldiers, and I can say without any fear of contradiction that we the Yoruba therefore paid a terrible and heavy price as well during the war because many of our boys were killed on the war front by the Biafrans.

The sacrifice of these proud sons of the South-West that died in battle to keep Nigeria one must not be belittled, mocked or ignored. Clearly it was not only the Igbo that suffered during the civil war. Neither does it auger well for the unity of our nation for Achebe and the Igbo intelligentsia that are hailing his self-serving book to caste aspersions on the character, role and noble intentions of the late and revered Leader of the Yoruba, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, during the civil war.

The man may have made one or two mistakes in the past like every other great leader and of course there was a deep and bitter political division in Yorubaland itself just before the civil war started and throughout the early ’60′s. Yet by no stretch of the imagination can Awolowo be described as an Igbo-hating genocidal maniac and he most certainly did not delight in the starvation of millions of Igbo men, women and children as Achebe has tried to suggest.

My advice to this respected author is that he should leave Chief Awolowo alone and allow him to continue to rest in peace. This subtle attempt to denigrate the Yoruba and their past leaders, to place a question mark on their noble and selfless role in the war and to belittle their efforts and sacrifice to keep Nigeria together as one will always be vigorously resisted by those of us that have the good fortune of still being alive and who are aware of the facts. We will not remain silent and allow anyone, no matter how respected or revered, to re-write history.

Simply put by writing this book and making some of these baseless and nonsensical assertions, Achebe was simply indulging in the greatest mendacity of Nigerian modern history and his crude distortion of the facts has no basis in reality or rationality. We must not mistake fiction and story telling for historical fact. The two are completely different. The truth is that Professor Chinua Achebe owes the Awolowo family and the Yoruba people a big apology for his tale of pure fantasy.

Nigerian men 4x400m team at the Sydney 2000 Olympics elevated to the position of gold by the International Olympic Committee has been given up to November 1, 2012 to return the silver medals in their possession before the process of awarding the gold medals could be commenced.

The United States was stripped of the gold after a member of its 4x400m team, Antonio Pettigrew confessed to dope use during the Games. The Nigeria quartet of Jude Monye, Clement Chukwu, Sunday Bada and Enefiok Udo-Obong clinched the silver in that memorable race.

The IOC executive board confirmed before the London 2012 Olympics that gold medals will be formally awarded to Nigeria four years after it had stripped the Americans.

In a letter to the Nigeria Olympic Committee, the IOC instructed that the silver medals and second placed diplomas awarded to the team, be returned.

“In order to proceed with the re-allocation of items in line with the new ranking, we kindly ask your NOC to return the following items received by your team in connection with the Men’s 4x400m relay event,” the letter stated.

The other members of the team include Nduka Awazie and Fedelis Gadzama who were reserves.

NOC spokesman, Mr. Tony Ubani confirmed the reception of the letter. He added that all the concerned athletes have been contacted and that the NOC will meet the November 1 deadline.

Jarus: A Hassan Martin Mathew Kukah presidency wont be bad.

A skeptical scientist who had spent his career studying the mechanics of the brain and dismissing patient tales of journeys to heavenly realms has revealed his extraordinary conversion after his own encounter with the afterlife during a near-death experience.

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Dr Eben Alexander spent 15 years as an academic neurosurgeon at Harvard but he was struck with a nearly fatal bout of bacterial meningitis in 2008 and had no brain activity when he lay comatose for seven days at a Virginia hospital.

Though he was unconscious and unresponsive during that period, he is now describing a 'hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey' to a place beyond, filled with butterflies and resounding music that has shaken his scientific viewpoint on human consciousness.

He says he entered a place filled with clouds and the sound of chanting, and was met by a beautiful blue-eyed woman.

Dr Alexander describes his paradigm shift from focusing solely on the scientific make up of the brain to considering the spiritual realm of the mind, in a deeply reflective essay in Newsweek in advance of the release of his book, Proof of Heaven.

'As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences,' he writes in his article, explaining how he had previously relied on 'good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.'

Though he considered himself a nominal Christian he said he lacked the faith to believe in eternal life. When his patients would tell tales of going to heaven during near death experiences, he relied on 'current medical understanding of the brain and mind' and disregarded them as wishful thinking.

But after he became the patient, he says he 'experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.'

The 58-year-old has an impressive pedigree. His ancestors were well regarded politicians and prominent fixtures in society in Tennessee. His father was Chief of Neurosurgery at Wake Forest University from 1948 to 1978.

The younger Alexander graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and received his bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975. He earned his medical degree from Duke in 1980.

He spent 15 years teaching neurology at Harvard Medical School and the University of Virginia - lecturing on and researching brain mapping, the treatment of brain tumors and trying to understand cognition.

In 2008, the father-of-two was in 'good health and good shape,' preparing to embark on a hike with his son of a volcano in South America, he said in a July interview about the ordeal with Skeptiko.

Little did he know that he would soon become a patient at the very hospital where he taught.

The doctor's life was nearly cut short on November 10, 2008, when he awoke at 4:30am to get ready to go to work at the Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, where he worked as a neurosurgeon.

All of a sudden, he developed a severe pain in his back and within 15 minutes he was paralyzed in anguish and could barely even move.

His wife, Holley, rushed in to assist him and began to rub his back to relieve the tension but his condition worsened.

Before he began convulsing in a seizure, his last words to his wife were, 'Don't call 911,' and he lost consciousness and has no memory of what happened for an entire week.
Fortunately for him, his wife disregarded his advice and he was rushed to an area hospital and was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis.

'My entire cortex - the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human - had shut down,' he writes in his essay.

'Doctors determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain,' he added.

He was placed on a ventilator at the intensive care unit and for six days he was treated with triple antibiotics to fight the bacteria but his brain had little functionality and he was unresponsive, leaving doctors to believe he would not recover.

As his family prepared for the worst, on the seventh day he suddenly opened his eyes. His breathing tube was removed and he miraculously told doctors, 'Thank you.'

He suffered from amnesia and could not remember his life at all prior to his illness and remained in a haze for the first few days after he came out of the coma.

As he recovered though, he began to recall vivid memories of a magical mental experience during his time in the coma.

'There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.

'While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility,' he writes.

He says he entered a 'place of clouds - big, puffy and pink-white,' filled with butterflies and angel-like creatures that were 'simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.'

In this heavenly realm, he says he heard 'a sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above,' providing him with a sense of joy and awe.

A beautiful young woman accompanied him during his stay, 'she was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face.'

Alexander admits his description might sound like something straight out of Hollywood, but to skeptics he says he has a clear sense that is was indeed real and 'not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.'

After his remarkable experience in 2008, Alexander says the impact has been both on the professional and the spiritual.

Now the scientist has committed his energy to 'investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.'

But the self-described Christian-in-name-only, now says his experience with heaven has deepened his understanding of God and strengthened his faith.

'At the very heart of my journey [is this], that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned,' he concludes.

Two pioneers of stem cell research, Professor John Gurdon from the UK and Professor Shinya Yamanaka from Japan, have shared the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology.

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The two were awarded the prize for transforming specialised cells into stem cells, which can become any other type of cell in the body.

The Nobel committee said they had “revolutionised” science.

Prof Gurdon used a gut sample to clone frogs and Prof Yamanaka altered genes to re-programme cells.

In 1962, John Gurdon took the genetic information from a cell in the intestines of a frog and placed it inside a frog egg, which developed into a normal tadpole.