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Igboland: Why Obasanjo must be stopped now
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Few now doubt that
President Olusegun Obasanjo is hell-bent on wrecking further havoc in Igboland.
The word “further” is stressed here because as I explained in my
January 2004 essay on the subject entitled "Year 34: Obasanjo, Biafra and
Igboland," Obasanjo has been waging an undisguised, multi-pronged
“low intensity” war against the Igbo since he became President of
Nigeria in 1999. Despite the formal end of the Nigerian war of genocide against
the Igbo in 1970, Obasanjo does not believe that his own war against the Igbo
is yet over. In 1967-1970, three million Igbo, or one-quarter of the
nation’s population in the 1960s, were slaughtered by the rampaging
forces of the Nigeria military in Biafra. Earlier on, in 1966, 100,000 Igbo
were massacred across most of northern Nigeria and elsewhere in the country in
a premeditated pogrom meticulously planned and executed by the northern
regional state and religious establishment with the total connivance of the
Yakubu Gowon-led central government in Lagos. This was a holocaust of
unprecedented proportion in recent African history. Such was the extent of the
devastation wrecked across Igboland by its savagery that at the end of the
invasion, the Igbo, solely by themselves, embarked on the reconstruction of
each and every facet of their broken lives and inheritance. This was at once a
single-minded and concerted enterprise that, nearly 40 years later, is a
triumph of the dogged resilience of the human spirit and an African success story.
If anyone thought that
the savagery of this holocaust would cease with the formal end of direct
Nigerian military operations in Biafra on 12 January 1970, they were extremely
mistaken. All successive central governments since then (headed by Generals Gowon,
Muhammed, Obasanjo, Buhari, Babangida, Abacha, Abubakar, and Messrs Shagari and
Shonekan) have pursued a brazen policy of economic siege on the Igbo country:
blanket freeze on worthwhile development projects, atrocious communication
infrastructure, nonchalant disposition to grave environmental degradation
caused by soil erosion and land slides particularly in the North-west
provinces. And to underscore this virtual economic boycott and blockade of
Igboland both politically and culturally during the period, the Nigerian
establishment has shut the Igbo off from accessing and occupying critical
levers of power in the country. Furthermore, it has, through the relentless
promotion of ‘Igbophobia’, popularised this policy of exclusion
across the land.
Unlike other Nigerian
leaders since 1970, Olusegun Obasanjo is most fanatically desperate on the
subject of the Igbo, Igbo exclusion, and ‘Igbophobia’. Obasanjo
does not really believe that the Igbo lost the Biafra War. After all, he
reckons, the Igbo, as a people, did not disappear. They survived. For
Obasanjo, this outcome was “incomplete”. It falls short of the
defeat of the Igbo that he had envisaged: erasure, total erasure. As a result,
of the nine Nigerian heads of state since the war, Matthew Obasanjo suffers and
exhibits the most virulent contagion of ‘Igbophobia’. He refuses to
be content with the economic isolation of Igboland and the political
marginalisation of its people. He does not believe that this dual-track
continuing violation of the fundamental human rights of the Igbo is having its
desired effect to “seal the fate” of the Igbo permanently. Aso Rock
aides of the president variously report that Obasanjo raves around the place in
regular bouts of rage and angst, screaming of “teaching the I[g]bo a
lesson,” or “crushing these I[g]bo who don’t seem to have
learnt the lessons of 12 January 1970” or “ensuring that these
I[g]bo never rule this country in my life time… Never!”
Consequently, Obasanjo has expanded the 34-year old
established Nigerian political and economic “encirclement” of the
Igbo to incorporate an added military and quasi-military sphere of
confrontation. Currently, this latter sector of hostility is exemplified, most
tragically, by Obasanjo’s dispatch of fiendish squads of vandals to destroy
every conceivable asset of State institutions including executive, legislative,
judiciary, and information and communication infrastructure in the Anambra
region of Igboland. The total cost of the rampage runs into millions of
dollars. About 30 people were killed during this brigandage. In effect,
Obasanjo has unleashed a campaign of state-sponsored terrorism on the Igbo
which the world must now deal with. Obasanjo’s ‘Igbophobia’
has deteriorated drastically in recent times, particularly in the light of the
Igbo legitimate campaign to produce the next president of Nigeria in 2007. The
current signs that the hitherto robust consensus within the Nigerian
establishment to keep the Igbo out of this crucial arena of politics may be
cracking, especially even if ironically from the North, have thrown Obasanjo
into depressive fits of rancour and vile. (Obasanjo himself does not wish to
step down when he completes his second term in 2007; he has since set up a
secret committee to find ways to subvert the mandatory constitutional
provisions which limit him to a 2-term presidency in order achieve his
ambitions of perpetuation in office.) The August 2004 countrywide success of
the Igbo one-day strike for Biafran national affirmation, organised by the
Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereignty of Biafra, ensured that
Obasanjo’s desperation worsened. But it was Professor Chinua
Achebe’s last month’s steadfast rejection of Obasanjo’s
so-called “national award” to the renowned author that freed
Obasanjo from any residual constraints that he still had to order the vandals
(Nazi-style, 1930s; Nigerian central government-style, 1960s) to Igboland to
attack, kill, maim and lay waste a number of public buildings and institutions
in Awka, Onitsha and elsewhere in the Anambra region.
Pointedly, it should be
noted that besides the killings and the utter disruption of daily life and
societal well being in Anambra, the Niger River-gateway to Igboland,
Obasanjo’s vandalism here has unleashed an economic disaster. The costs of
reconstructing the burnt-out institutions will be overwhelming. As should be
expected, no funds from the perpetrator of the mayhem will be forthcoming. The
Igbo will, once again, have another plan added to their trajectory of
reconstruction. The Anambra regional government would probably end up diverting
limited critical resources budgeted for schools, hospitals and communication
infrastructure-maintenance to cope with this emergency. In case it isn’t
now obvious, the financial implications of the reconstruction work in Anambra,
in the wake of this terrorism, dovetail crucially to the overarching programme
of Nigeria’s economic strangulation of Igboland in the post-Biafra War as
we sketched above. Matthew Obasanjo, the totalist genocidist, has aptly, or so
he feels, effected a cyclical drive that interpolates his quasi-military
strategy on the long practised economical: kill the Igbo, destroy their state
and allied assets, and increase their financial burden of reconstruction…
Once again, the wolves
are gathering ominously to pounce on the Igbo, and in Igboland. The world must
stop this now. Another genocide on the African scene is one too many. Since
Biafra, 12 million more Africans have been killed in the other killing fields
stretched across the continent. Aremu Matthew Obasanjo, who played an activist
role in the first Igbo genocidal war and who has no qualms in launching
another, must be stopped.
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