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Igbo elders: We want votes not bullets in S’East *Obi, better option to Biafra
Ndigbo are not known for killing each other, leaders of the South East, said on Tuesday, to underscore why the people must vote in the 2023 general elections, especially the presidential elections, scheduled for Saturday, in which Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, is running on the platform of the Labour Party (LP), is a front-line candidate.
Led by Simon Okeke, former Chairman of the Police Service Commission (PSC), the group, bemoaned a situation where blood-thirsty miscreants have plunged the area into an arena of bloodletting, adding that the “South East today is not what we are known for.”
In a statement, signed by the Okeke alongside other Igbo leaders like former Governor of Anambra State, Chukwuemeka Ezeife, Prof. Ihechukwu Maduike, Fidelis Ozichukwu, Charles Nwokeaku, Onrou Arua, Austin Egwuagu, and Lincoln Ogunewe, both retired Generals in the Nigerian Army and Osita Obierika, a retired Air Vice Marshal (AVM) in the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), warned those responsible for the killings in the name of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), that violence would never achieve their purpose.
“The state of South East today is not what we are known for. Our homeland had the tradition of peace and tranquility, industry, academic adventurism and culture of family wellbeing. Today, a small clique of misguided persons mostly youths, has inflicted mayhem and blood letting to contaminate the orderly life of Ndigbo to the extent that one cannot freely go about one’s daily pursuits. People of the South East have been cowed into submitting to a sit at-home order. This irregularity which has also been extended to the election day, when people are looking forward to using their vote to speak their mind, must not be allowed to happen,” the group said.
The group, comprising elders, youths, men, women and our retired military and paramilitary officers, said its combined voice was to state unequivocally the rejection of the situation in its entirety, added: “We must speak up against those who say there should be no elections. Elections in the South East must hold. We call on the people of the South East to come out en masse on the 25th February, to vote and vote in candidates of their choice.”
Assuring the safety of the people during the exercise, the body saluted the courage of Igbo traditional rulers for assuring all of their subjects of safety on the election day, 25th February and subsequent election days and President Muhammadu Buhari for his recent broadcast in which he promised adequate security measures to allow everyone to come out and cast their votes freely without any intimidation. “This is quite re-assuring. The President of the country has given his assurance for safety. The Royal Fathers have followed suit in the assurance of your safety. The police and armed forces have been fortified to protect you all throughout the election period. Even as we speak, our armed force.
“The police and other security agencies are now being positioned in strategic places all over the country including and particularly in various states of our South east Geopolitical Zone. This is aimed at providing adequate protection and safety for all to come out to exercise their civic right and to vote for candidates of their choice.
Therefore, come out and do the needful. Come out and vote in whom you think will make the change you want. If you don’t come out to vote on February 25, 2023, you have no one to blame other than yourself.”
Speaking on the agitation for Biafra, given as reason for the parlous situation, in which facilities of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had been attacked and many people killed by those who claimed that IPOB would not allow elections in the area, the Igbo elders urged those involved not to forget that their fathers and grandfathers had demanded and fought to have that same Biafra roughly 52 years ago.
“Millions died in action and out of sheer starvation. Some of us here participated in that bloody war. What makes you believe that you can win that war this time through extreme activism? That war was fought with guns armoured tanks etc. We must think strategically in determining how to structure the future for our people, children and grandchildren.
“Yes, you may say that it is your fundamental human right to demand separate existence. But the quest for separate existence is not restricted to Nigeria. In Britain for instance, Scotland which is part of that country is seeking a separate existence. So also, is the case with Spain where Barcelona is demanding same. None of them is demanding it by killing and maiming their fellow country men and women or by imposing a needless sit-at-home order or carrying out unspeakable acts of violence and destruction against their own people.
“They do it by participating actively in their country’s general elections where they sponsor candidates that will be their voice in their parliament where they argue their case and push it via a referendum to decide which way to go. Why not borrow a leaf from them and pursue your demand in a civilized manner? You can never get Biafra through violence and slaughtering yourselves and sitting at home when parents should be at work and children should be in Schools. That system makes the world look on you as both unserious, or at best immature. Let us go the way of the wise.”
Arguing that Ndigbo had never had a better chance in the Nigerian project since Independence in 1960, the group stressed that the opportunity being presented by Obi emerging President of Nigeria was so immense that it would be suicidal not to support it.
“Since our Independence in October 1960, this is the best chance of South East to produce a President. Both North, East and West have come to accept that our son Peter Obi is the best out of all the Presidential candidates canvassing for votes to win the presidential election on 25th February 2023. Any Onye Igbo thinking otherwise or standing on the fence may be of doubtful genealogy and needs to submits to DNA for proper proof of his or her true parentage.
“We request that you come out and be part of the history to vote in Peter Obi and Datti Ahmed to take the mantle of leadership and rebuild our badly divided country, to save the boat from sinking. We need your Votes not Bullets. In a democracy, your vote is your weapon, not bullet or sit-at-home. Peter Obi is Primus inter pares i.e 1st among equals.
You use your vote to get what you want. Only your votes will make the President we need. You vote in the person you trust will help you get who or what you want. You vote in the person who is sympathetic to your cause.
“Let us move enmass and cast our votes to Labour’s Obi-Datti Box. Your vote works better than the bullet from the gun. It is better you are alive to achieve your desire in peace. Best way to achieve a purpose is by use of your vote. The peace you achieve with bullets from the gun is the peace of a grave yard. Your vote does a better job than the bullet from the barrel of the gun. If you fail to come and vote you perpetuate your problems and your detractors will mock and lord it over you until the next election (in 4 years) when you may have a chance to change your situation, using your vote to vote in your choice candidates.
“If you don’t vote, those you regard as your oppressors, who have denied you your rights will be voted in again and you will continue to grumble. Your one vote can change the fortune of this great country. Let your vote and my vote speak eloquently that Nigeria today needs OBI-DATTI Presidency.”
I will always refer to the encounter I once had with Kenneth Idiodi. He was then the leader of the Rosicrucian Society in Nigeria, otherwise known as Amok. It was a sit-down at Zodiac Hotel Enugu. Then, I was the reporter of The Guardian in the Coal City.
You know the Amok faith bases its philosophy or belief on the law of Retributive Justice – the law of Karma. That is to say, everything you do in life has its rewards or punishment in equal measure – much like the measure you give, the measure you receive.
I don’t know how much this society draws or links this belief from or with the Bible, but I do recall Jesus Christ warning Simon Peter – return your sword to the scabbard – for he who kills by the sword, dies by the sword.
As a child growing up I listened to one of the epics of Oriental Brothers with the lyrics – ogbu mma ga-esi n’mma na, ogba egbe ga-esi n’egbe na ooo! Translated – he who kills by the sword will die by the sword, he who kills by the gun will die by the nozzle of the gun.
Now, here is where this is relevant in present Nigerian reality – the reason I’m putting details of that encounter out publicly once again, having done so previously.
During that encounter, Idiodi used one event in Nigeria to illustrate his point. He told me of a Nigerian leader who commanded the troop that carried out the Asaba massacre in the heat of the Nigerian civil war – an episode, said to have claimed over 2,000 able-bodied men who had come out to welcome the Nigerian soldiers with songs and dances only to fall in the hail of bullets that descended on them like rainstorms – was not spared by fate.
That commander was to meet his own death in a hail of bullets even as a Head of State. He never mentioned the name of the military top brass. But I used my tongue to count my teeth to come to the answer. You could also do same – use your tongue.
Now, how does this relate? You may have followed the outing of General Yakubu Gowon at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, where he presented his autobiography titled: My Life of Duty and Allegiance, that contained what seemed his memoir on the Nigerian civil war, which he prosecuted as Head of State.
I’m sure you must have been observing the debate therefrom that event. Now, I’m not so much enamoured of the debate as I’m of the nuances surrounding that unfortunate episode and the role of Gowon in it, given my takeaway from that Idiodi encounter some two decades ago.
Does Gowon, now a nonagenarian really believe that presenting a pious, if not saintly account of himself to the world as snippets of his book, which I picked up here and there suggests, truly suffices for the atrocities of that period?
Take the Asaba massacre for example. Was that the handiwork of Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, whom the former Head of State seems to blame for everything that went wrong. Was he also the one that commanded that mass slaughtering of innocent men?
Under your nose as Head of State, you watched citizens slaughtered mercilessly like infested herds in the streets – you watched young girls corralled into leprosy colonies and wantonly raped before being wasted – you watched as train coaches bearing people fleeing the scene were stopped and their human cargoes thrown alive into River Benue like rotten goods for fishes to feast on – you watched all these and didn’t lift a finger.
Then as Head of State, you not only supervised but watched millions of children with distended stomachs, tiny feet, glazy eyes, heavy heads on ropelike necks, practically begging for death to come quickly and save them from further punishment.
You supervised and watched the cataclysmic eruptions from the blitzkrieg on churches, markets and hospitals – all to keep Nigeria together. In your mind the brutal and merciless butchery of innocent people who were not soldiers and had nothing to do with the war could be explained away just like that?
O! It was Ojukwu that caused it. Ojukwu was the one who released the bombs, caused the blockades that led to the kwashiorkor that killed millions or other atrocities thereof? What a pity!
Now, I return to Idiodi. How else could anyone interpret today’s Nigeria without introducing the law of retributive justice that the Amok leader spoke of? How do you fault the link of the commander who massacred over 2,000 souls dying by the barrel of the same gun, even as Head of State?
How could anyone fail to relate what is happening to our Gowon today with the past? This is a Geneal that wakes up to see hundreds of his brothers and sisters being buried in mass graves as was done during the onslaught he supervised against another people and he still thinks it has nothing to do with him?
Now, the story you told at that event in Abuja on Tuesday, is not new. You simply repeated yourself. My interpretation of that event is that you’re a man undergoing daily torture. You wouldn’t be a human being otherwise, given what is before you, which didn’t start today.
You’re probably trying to escape your fate by appealing to public sympathy. How helpful could that be in the face of the clear evidence of your culpability in the deliberate wasting of more than three million souls? Nobody would believe you.
Yes! They could humour you. But that’s the best anyone could do for you. I hear money rained like a fountain and that you left the scene with billions of naira in your kitty. At 90? Haba General!
Now, here is the thing General. None of these would help.
None would work. You have tried prayers. But you forget that the prayer of sinner is an abomination and a reproach before God, unless he repents. You have also written the book. Surely, this too would end up in the trashcan of history – meaningless piece of conjectures, propaganda, half-truths and outright lies – perhaps!
But, why don’t you try the one thing you have been running away from, for more than five decades – go on your knees in total supplication and surrender, repentance and penance – then rise, call all Nigerians and empty yourself with the truth.
Thereafter openly apologise to the millions of souls whose tormenting wailing you probably hear every day during your disturbed sleep and in your quiet moments, but choose to suppress with these baby tales. Ask them for forgiveness, genuinely and see. There may lie the answer you seek.
Try that and see if it wouldn’t be a more efficacious cure for this decades-old wound than this Ojukwu-bashing and those wasted prayer sessions. You might not only have atoned for the past, but saved the future. May God guide you.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice
“Now that the court has ruled against it, we are sure that, in the coming days, we will witness a mass exodus from the ruling party,” were the words with which the African Democratic Congress (ADC) welcomed Wednesday’s ruling of the Federal High Court, Abuja reversing the deadline for party primaries, among others.
Bolaji Abdullahi, spokesman, who conveyed the party’s excitement over the development, said it viewed the ruling as vindication of its objections to key aspects of the electoral body’s guidelines at the time they were issued.
Recalling its specific objections to the strict timelines on membership registration as well as the conduct of party primaries, the statement, said: “The decision of the court on these issues, including those that directly contradict the constitution, is therefore a welcome vindication of our position.”
Stressing that the ruling, which removed the impediment placed by the guidelines on politicians who wished to seek alternative platforms to contest elections, was a positive development that would promote freedom of association, the statement, added: “We believed at the time that that particular restriction was designed to prevent people from leaving the ruling party, APC.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Cuba on Thursday that the United States was laser-focused on changing the communist system, after the island was stunned by a US indictment of its former president Raul Castro.
The US military announced that the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and its escort warships had entered the Caribbean, although President Donald Trump, asked if the deployment was meant to intimidate Cuba, said, “No, not at all.”
Rubio, a Cuban American and vociferous opponent of Havana’s government, described the island 90 miles (145 kilometres) from the US shore as a “failed state” as it suffers a major economic crisis.
“Their economic system doesn’t work. It’s broken, and you can’t fix it with the current political system that’s in place. What they’ve gotten used to all these years is just buying time and waiting us out.
“They’re not going to be able to wait us out or buy time. We’re very serious. We’re very focused. The US preference is always a diplomatic solution, but President Donald Trump has other options at his disposal.”
Stating that Cuba had tentatively accepted an offer by the United States of $100 million in aid in return for reforms, he said it was unclear if the United States would accept Cuba’s terms, as Washington insists on circumventing the military-backed conglomerate GAESA, which dominates the island’s economy.
Rubio said Thursday that the GAESA chief’s Florida-based sister, Adys Lastres Morera, had been arrested and was being held by US immigration authorities, adding in an X post: “Managing real estate assets…while also aiding Havana’s communist regime, until I terminated her permanent resident status.”
The charges against Raul Castro — younger brother of Fidel Castro, the late iconic US nemesis who led Cuba’s communist revolution that culminated in 1959 — stem from the deadly downing of two civilian planes manned by anti-Castro pilots in 1996.
Cuban authorities called on citizens to protest the “despicable” indictment, with the official newspaper Granma urging Cubans to gather outside the US embassy in Havana on Friday at 7:30 am (1230 GMT).
“This isn’t really an accusation, something from more than 30 years ago, but rather a public attack on a public figure,” Fabian Fernandez, a 30-year-old accountant, told AFP in Havana.
Trump in January seized on a US domestic indictment of Venezuela’s leftist leader Nicolas Maduro to send in US forces to depose him and take him into custody.
“The idea is to say, we can do to you what we did to Nicolas Maduro,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House.
The Maduro operation led to the end of free oil from Venezuela to Cuba, which relied on its ally for nearly half its needs.
Cubans have suffered power outages of up to 20 hours a day and taps running dry.
Runaway inflation has caused the price of basic goods to soar and mountains of trash have piled up on the streets of Havana.
In addition to murder, Castro has been charged with conspiracy to kill Americans and destruction of aircraft.
The Cuban government called the 1996 shootdown was “legitimate self-defense” against an airspace violation.
China and Russia both criticized Trump’s steps on Cuba, which come as he tries to end an unpopular war he started with Israel against Iran.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a press briefing that Washington “should stop brandishing the sanctions stick and the judicial stick against Cuba and stop threatening force at every turn.”
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We believe that under no circumstances should such methods — which border on violence — be used against either former or current heads of state.
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