Friday, June 30, 2017

USA Africa Dialogue Series - BRONX GOTHIC -Trailer: Okwui Okpokwasili

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9BcpgpDGFo


"In 2014, I saw Okpokwasili in her piece Bronx Gothic, and the top of my head blew off. A tour de force." -Hilton Als, New Yorker


BRONX GOTHIC


Poster


From director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York TimesThe First Monday in May) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show, Bronx Gothic. Rooted in memories of her childhood, Okwui – who's worked with conceptual artists like Ralph Lemon and Julie Taymor – fuses dance, song, drama and comedy to create a mesmerizing space in which audiences can engage with a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s. With intimate vérité access to Okwui and her audiences off the stage, Bronx Gothic allows for unparalleled insight into her creative process as well as the complex social issues embodied in it.


Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives. 

http://www.cafeafricana.com

On Twitter: @Bookwormlit

On Instagram: Aramada_Obirin


Culture, Art History, Film/Cinema, Photography, World Literature, Criminal Justice, Sociology, Child Welfare, Lifestyle & Community. 

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - THE CONFESSIONS - Trailer: Toni Servillo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK_zCsfZV9E

THE CONFESSIONS

Poster
A G8 meeting is being held at a luxury hotel on the German coast. The world's most powerful economists are gathered to enact important provisions that will deeply influence the world economy. One of the guests is a mysterious Italian monk, invited by Daniel Rochè, the director of the International Monetary Fund. He wants the monk to receive his confession, that night, in secret. The next morning, Rochè is found dead...
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Runtime: 108 min 
Language: English, French, Italian  

Director: Robert Ando  
Cast: Connie Nielsen, Daniel Auteuil, Lambert Wilson, Mortitz Bleibtreu, Toni Servillo  

Awards:
  • Winner, Award of Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 
  • Nominee, Crystal Globe, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival




Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives. 

http://www.cafeafricana.com

On Twitter: @Bookwormlit

On Instagram: Aramada_Obirin


Culture, Art History, Film/Cinema, Photography, World Literature, Criminal Justice, Sociology, Child Welfare, Lifestyle & Community. 

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - OSINBAJO'S SPEECH

What is undemo ratic about zoninng? How would you approach the problem of ensuring ethnic equity yourself?

By the way I agree good speeches should be matched by good accountability but it is not necessarily one or the other.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.opara@gmail.com>
Date: 30/06/2017 21:35 (GMT+00:00)
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - OSINBAJO'S SPEECH

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There is no shortage of good speeches in Nigeria, unfortunately, these good speeches do not go hand in hand with good governance.

Osibanjo's class rides to power on the back of ethnicity. The position of Vice-presidential candidate was zoned to Osibanjo's Yoruba ethnic nationalility by his party in 2015, an undemocratic action that cleared the way for only Osibanjo and members of the party of Yoruba stock to contest as Vice-president in the 2015 presidential election.

My point is that fine speeches should go hand in hand with good governance, our leaders should walk their talks and the led will surely follow.

CAO.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: The 20 Pounds Ex-gratia Payments

I dont know myself. The reason I ask is unless we investigate we may be unable yo ascertain whether some got more than a flat allocation to all.

Best..



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Ogbuagu Anikwe <oanikwe@gmail.com>
Date: 01/07/2017 01:32 (GMT+00:00)
To: Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Cc: Obi Nwakanma <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>, Julius Fakinlede <jfakinlede@gmail.com>, ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com, usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com, corneliushamelberg@gmail.com
Subject: Re: The 20 Pounds Ex-gratia Payments

No I have not. This is also the first time that this question is being raised. It is worth investigating, especially because we all have assumed that this was not the case. Do you have any information yourself to put forward?

Having said this, let me reiterate that my intention was to challenge Kadiri's false claim that post civil war ex-gratia payments were some sort of "social grant" made to "any returnee Biafran who requested for it," rather than what they were - payments in lieu of savings and money left behind by Easterners who fled to the Biafran enclave at the beginning of hostilities. 

Best wishes.

On 30-Jun-2017 7:55 pm, "Olayinka Agbetuyi" <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ogbuagu Anikwe:

Have you personally investigated whether the committee paid ex-Biafrans who had savings where the records were not burnt?  What are your findings?


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Ogbuagu Anikwe <oanikwe@gmail.com>
Date: 30/06/2017 10:03 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: The 20 Pounds Ex-gratia Payments

Frankly, I am awed by Kadiri's boldness in revising historial records and pushing forward new interpretations. Here is another one on ex-gratia payments made by the federal government to returnee account holders from the Eastern Region after the Civil War:

"All the bank operations inside Biafra during the war were null and void and moreover the Biafran currency (pound) was illegal and not tenable anywhere in the world. For almost three years, Biafra was an enclave of starving citizens, therefore, the Biafran pounds were not printed on any real economic activities. It should not be forgotten that Nigeria prosecuted the war without borrowing a farthing from the outside world. Despite that, the federal government could still offer £20 social grant to the liberated Biafrans who requested for it. As of today, less than 30% of Nigerians have bank accounts which was even much more less in 1967-1970. Thus, it is dishonest and fraudulent to pretend as if all Igbo had bank deposit in Nigeria at the end of."

Rather than dispute this claim, allow me to offer what Chief Awolowo himself said on the subject when he was interviewed by a group of journalists at a town hall meeting in Abeokuta in 1983:

"That's what I did, and the case of the money they said was not given back to them, you know during the war all the pounds were looted, they printed Biafran currency notes, which they circulated, at the close of the war some people wanted their Biafran notes to be exchanged for them. Of course I couldn't do that, if I did that the whole country would be bankrupt. We didn't know about Biafran notes and we didn't know on what basis they have printed them, so we refused the Biafran note, but I laid down the principle that all those who had savings in the banks on the eve of the declaration of the Biafran war or Biafra, will get their money back if they could satisfy us that they had the savings there, or the money there. Unfortunately, all the banks's books had been burnt, and many of the people who had savings there didn't have their saving books or their last statement of account, so a panel had to be set up.

I didn't take part in setting up the panel, it was done by the Central Bank and the pertinent officials of the ministry of finance, to look into the matter, and they went carefully into the matter, they took some months to do so, and then make some recommendation which I approved. Go to the archives, all I did was approve, I didn't write anything more than that, I don't even remember the name of any of them who took part. So I did everything in this world to assist our Ibo brothers and sisters during and after the war."


So Mr Kadiri sir, the federal government DID NOT "offer £20 social grant to the liberated Biafrans who requested for it," as falsely claimed. Rather, ex-gratia payments were made ONLY TO those who were able to satisfly a mystery committee set up by the government that they had savings in Nigerian banks prior to the Civil War.

Should we blame Chief Awolowo for the fact that the bank books were burnt and that many of the returnee account holders had lost their savings passbooks? I should not think so. But we can ask questions about issues that remain unclear from his explanations above.

Was the burning of bank records of Biafran returnees a deliberate act? To understand the import of this question, here's another question: Why were ex-gratia payments made to those who had accounts in banks located in other parts of the country, outside the Eastern Region? Whle it is reasonable that bank records in the eastern region could be destroyed during the war, what about bank records in other parts of the country where they also maintained accounts - - in the midwest, west, and north - prior to the Civil War? If these category of bank customers were equally paid ex-gratia of 20 pounds in lieu of their bank savings, does this mean that their records in these places were also burnt? If so, who did the burning and why?

The work of the committee that recommended ex-gratia has continued to be shrouded in secrecy to this day, so much so that Awo had to confess that he could not recall who were its members, and how it determined the criteria used to pay claimants.

I thank Kadiri for trying on this one but he should know that it is not in any doubt that  ex-gratia payments (a) rightly neither contemplated nor accommodated account holders from defunct Biafran Banks, and (b) were not made as social grants to just any returnee Biafran who felt like showing up to ask for it.

Ogbuagu


strategic communication . media brokerage . events services
p.o. box 5644 garki .
abuja fct 900001
+234 803 622-0298
Reply to: anikwe@oanikwe.com
Website: www.oanikwe.com

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: The 20 Pounds Ex-gratia Payments

No I have not. This is also the first time that this question is being raised. It is worth investigating, especially because we all have assumed that this was not the case. Do you have any information yourself to put forward?

Having said this, let me reiterate that my intention was to challenge Kadiri's false claim that post civil war ex-gratia payments were some sort of "social grant" made to "any returnee Biafran who requested for it," rather than what they were - payments in lieu of savings and money left behind by Easterners who fled to the Biafran enclave at the beginning of hostilities. 

Best wishes.

On 30-Jun-2017 7:55 pm, "Olayinka Agbetuyi" <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ogbuagu Anikwe:

Have you personally investigated whether the committee paid ex-Biafrans who had savings where the records were not burnt?  What are your findings?


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Ogbuagu Anikwe <oanikwe@gmail.com>
Date: 30/06/2017 10:03 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: The 20 Pounds Ex-gratia Payments

Frankly, I am awed by Kadiri's boldness in revising historial records and pushing forward new interpretations. Here is another one on ex-gratia payments made by the federal government to returnee account holders from the Eastern Region after the Civil War:

"All the bank operations inside Biafra during the war were null and void and moreover the Biafran currency (pound) was illegal and not tenable anywhere in the world. For almost three years, Biafra was an enclave of starving citizens, therefore, the Biafran pounds were not printed on any real economic activities. It should not be forgotten that Nigeria prosecuted the war without borrowing a farthing from the outside world. Despite that, the federal government could still offer £20 social grant to the liberated Biafrans who requested for it. As of today, less than 30% of Nigerians have bank accounts which was even much more less in 1967-1970. Thus, it is dishonest and fraudulent to pretend as if all Igbo had bank deposit in Nigeria at the end of."

Rather than dispute this claim, allow me to offer what Chief Awolowo himself said on the subject when he was interviewed by a group of journalists at a town hall meeting in Abeokuta in 1983:

"That's what I did, and the case of the money they said was not given back to them, you know during the war all the pounds were looted, they printed Biafran currency notes, which they circulated, at the close of the war some people wanted their Biafran notes to be exchanged for them. Of course I couldn't do that, if I did that the whole country would be bankrupt. We didn't know about Biafran notes and we didn't know on what basis they have printed them, so we refused the Biafran note, but I laid down the principle that all those who had savings in the banks on the eve of the declaration of the Biafran war or Biafra, will get their money back if they could satisfy us that they had the savings there, or the money there. Unfortunately, all the banks's books had been burnt, and many of the people who had savings there didn't have their saving books or their last statement of account, so a panel had to be set up.

I didn't take part in setting up the panel, it was done by the Central Bank and the pertinent officials of the ministry of finance, to look into the matter, and they went carefully into the matter, they took some months to do so, and then make some recommendation which I approved. Go to the archives, all I did was approve, I didn't write anything more than that, I don't even remember the name of any of them who took part. So I did everything in this world to assist our Ibo brothers and sisters during and after the war."


So Mr Kadiri sir, the federal government DID NOT "offer £20 social grant to the liberated Biafrans who requested for it," as falsely claimed. Rather, ex-gratia payments were made ONLY TO those who were able to satisfly a mystery committee set up by the government that they had savings in Nigerian banks prior to the Civil War.

Should we blame Chief Awolowo for the fact that the bank books were burnt and that many of the returnee account holders had lost their savings passbooks? I should not think so. But we can ask questions about issues that remain unclear from his explanations above.

Was the burning of bank records of Biafran returnees a deliberate act? To understand the import of this question, here's another question: Why were ex-gratia payments made to those who had accounts in banks located in other parts of the country, outside the Eastern Region? Whle it is reasonable that bank records in the eastern region could be destroyed during the war, what about bank records in other parts of the country where they also maintained accounts - - in the midwest, west, and north - prior to the Civil War? If these category of bank customers were equally paid ex-gratia of 20 pounds in lieu of their bank savings, does this mean that their records in these places were also burnt? If so, who did the burning and why?

The work of the committee that recommended ex-gratia has continued to be shrouded in secrecy to this day, so much so that Awo had to confess that he could not recall who were its members, and how it determined the criteria used to pay claimants.

I thank Kadiri for trying on this one but he should know that it is not in any doubt that  ex-gratia payments (a) rightly neither contemplated nor accommodated account holders from defunct Biafran Banks, and (b) were not made as social grants to just any returnee Biafran who felt like showing up to ask for it.

Ogbuagu


strategic communication . media brokerage . events services
p.o. box 5644 garki .
abuja fct 900001
+234 803 622-0298
Reply to: anikwe@oanikwe.com
Website: www.oanikwe.com

--
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - OSINBAJO'S SPEECH

It's a great and learned speech that, for the most part, addressed Nigeria's self-imposed ethno-religious shackles forthrightly. In their quest for power, our civilian ruling elites have valorized all of the forces that tend to cause division rather than the forces that tend to unite the component communities of the nation. However, the acting President may want to re-think his position that the bubbling centrifugal forces that germinated out of the mis-rule of our civilian elites are purely motivated by hate. To ascribe it all to hate is to refuse to acknowledge that there are, indeed, identifiable areas of national life where the governing entities—at all the three tiers of governance—have fallen substantially short of basic expectations.


On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 6:22 PM, Segun Ogungbemi <seguno2013@gmail.com> wrote:
This was a great speech. Nigerians must have a mindset of living together in peace. 
SO

Sent from my iPhone 

On Jun 30, 2017, at 1:32 PM, Kayode J. Fakinlede <jfakinlede@gmail.com> wrote:

This speech, in my opinion ranks as the greatest ever made by a Nigerian leader in support of the continuing existence of our country. It completely deflates the aspiration of those seeking for Biafra Republic, Oduduwa Republic, Arewa Republic etc. I just knew that somewhere, somehow, a statesman will emerge from the rubbles of our self inflicted wounds that will put our agitations at ease.
To our Acting President: Thank you very mush sir; and May your tribe incease


I am yet to see a speech so powerfully put together by any one on this shores..
Listen O ye purveyors of hate speeches and violence perhaps the narrative of our mutual existence could yet be saved!! 

OFFICE OF THE ACTING PRESIDENT

PRESS RELEASE

WE CAN BUILD A NEW NIGERIA

SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, THE ACTING PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE GRADUATION CEREMONY OF SENIOR COURSE 39, THE ARMED FORCES, COMMAND AND STAFF COLLEGE, JAJI, KADUNA STATE ON FRIDAY JUNE 23, 2017 

PROTOCOL

I am especially pleased and indeed privileged to share this special day with you the staff, graduands and proud family members of the graduands of Senior Course 39.

We must give glory and thanks to the Almighty God by whose mercy and grace we are able to witness this celebration of achievement.

You have made a success of this course after 48 grueling weeks. Congratulations.  Of course we must specially commend all the spouses of our graduands here, but for whose sacrifices and personal deprivations there would have been no celebrations for many here today.

It is also gratifying to note that amongst the 187 graduating students are 10 students from sister African countries, and 5 senior members of Staff from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Defence Intelligence Agency, Nigerian Defence Academy, Nigeria Police Force and the Federal Road Safety Commission.

I must commend the governments of Cameroun, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, The Gambia and Togo who nominated their officers to attend this course. By so doing they have strengthened the brotherhood we share as Africans but more so they have shown great foresight on the issue of our common security concerns on the continent. 

The occasion of the graduation of the elite corps of our Military, armed services, intelligence and Foreign Service members is one that offers an opportunity for reflection on national issues. 

We are the identifiable public service elite of our nation, paid for with taxpayers money, and so we must be its foremost think-thank. So, permit me to address you for a short while on the subject - We can build a new Nigeria.

The last two decades in Nigeria have witnessed the quickened retreat of the Nigerian elite to their ethnic and religious camps.

I would like to emphasize the fact that this was essentially an elite phenomenon - unity and disunity are promoted by the elite to which the vast majority of the Nigerian people were only later conscripted.

In these past few years, more and more, we began to hear expressions such as Nigeria's ethnic nationalities; we began to see more identification by race and geopolitical zones, Ndigbo people, Arewa people, the Yoruba people, South-South, North-East, South-West, North-West and South-East; and other parochial description that were hitherto unknown.

The rise of ethnic chauvinism rode on the wings of several agitations. The narrative of most agitations centres around alleged marginalization and fears of dominance of one faith over the other.

In the 2015 elections, the ruling party repeatedly tried to cast the opposition as a party of Islamists determined to islamize Nigeria. The expression Janjaweed party took root. 

Most ethnic agitations are centered around getting a larger share of the national cake or more favoured placement in the food chain because they were essentially elite claims: the vast majority of the populations of the ethnic groups that win some concession or the other never really benefit.

So, the mere fact that a South-South person became President did not necessarily translate to prosperity for the tribe, neither was it the case when a President from the North-West emerged, nor one from the South-West.

Aside from a few individual beneficiaries of some appointments or the other, there is usually nothing to show for the ethnic group of those who emerge in Nigeria's numerous ethnic contests for power. Yet, the contests of the tribes are heightened by the elite, usually for personal political or commercial ends.

When you hear a person say that my tribe has been marginalized usually what he is saying is appoint me. The ethnic card is an effective bargaining tool.

A major drawback of ethnic chauvinism is the way that it is used to mask wrongdoing and promote impunity. Notice that when people are charged with looting public funds they quickly find a counter narrative. It is because I am Yoruba, Fulani or Igbo; or the Christians or Muslims are after me.

Appointments in the public service are no longer even judged on merit. The question is how many are from my own ethnic group. A terrible affliction, when you consider that what we are looking for are men and women of integrity and talent to run our economy and create a future for our children. Why is that when we want to win at football we don't ask which ethnic group the players are from? But perhaps at its most extreme and dangerous are hate-filled agitations for secession or autonomy.

In the past few weeks we have as a nation witnessed the escalation of such agitations usually couched in deliberately intemperate and provocative language. The reckless deployment of hate speech and the loud expressions of prejudice and hate, name calling of those of other ethnicities and faiths is a new and destructive evil in our public discourse. But even more divisive words, expressions, and actions calculated to create fear and uncertainty have also been freely used.   

Young people in the South-Eastern states under the aegis IPOB, issued a stay at home order as part of actions to prove support for their agitations for secession. In the Northern states young people under the aegis of the Arewa youth, issued an ultimatum to Igbos living in the Northern states to vacate before the 1st of October.
 
The problem with hate-filled and divisive speech is that they tap into some of the basest human instincts, bringing up irrational suspicions, fear, anger, and hatred and ultimately mindless violence. People who have lived together as neighbours and friends suddenly begin to see each other as mortal enemies.

The tensions that led to the killing of over 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus considered Tutsi sympathizers in the Rwandan genocide, were roused by hate media. The most notorious was the Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), which became immensely popular as a young, hip alternative to the official voice of the government. It played popular music, and encouraged the public to phone-in and participate in radio broadcasts. Amongst its listeners, RTLMC attracted the unemployed youth and Interhamwe (Canadian NGO). The station also became notorious for its covert and overt naming of Tutsi individuals who it claimed deserved to be killed.

General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, said: "Simply jamming [the] broadcasts and replacing them with messages of peace and reconciliation would have had a significant impact on the course of events." 

Fortunately the purveyors of this tragic hate media did not escape unpunished. The ICC in Arusha eventually sentenced the owners of the hate radio stations and newspapers to long prison terms.

Some of our youth groups urging secession already are deploying hate media, using radio and social media. The language on those media are inciting, provocative and insulting to the individuals who are named, and to the beliefs of others.

While we must remain irrevocably committed to freedom of expression and the tenets of a free press, we must draw the line between freedom that conduces to healthy democracy and that which threatens and endangers the entire democratic enterprise. It is an important balance that we must strike. Failure in any way will be tragic.

The truth is that our nation and national unity is worth preserving and protecting. We are the pre-eminent power in Africa today in terms of population, size of our markets, natural resources and economy.

We are a factor in the geopolitics of the world and no one can ignore a nation-state that is home to one in every four black persons. Smaller is weaker not stronger today. 

Your Excellency, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, history and experience has shown that countries can alter their destinies. Italy, India and Nigeria – to use just three examples, share one thing in common: at one point early in their existence people questioned their viability as nation-spaces; spoke of them in terms of being no more than mere geographical expressions.

Indeed not many Nigerians seem to know that the often quoted line about Nigeria being a "mere geographical expression" originally applied to Italy. It was the German statesman Klemens Von Metternich who dismissively summed up Italy as a mere geographical expression exactly a century before Nigeria came into being as a country. Churchill describing India said it was no more a nation than the equator, (which is just an imaginary geographical line.)

But what fate saddles a country with, and what that country makes of itself, we have since learned, can be two very different things. India for example has over the last couple of decades built itself into a technology and software powerhouse, and has also made impressive strides in nuclear and space technology. It has successfully created alternative narratives to a narrative of ethnic and religious division.

Italy on its own part has made its mark on the world in fashion and in automobiles; so that when people think of it today they are more likely to think of its venerable cuisine and fashion houses than its still-very-real fault lines.

What the stories of these countries tell us is that we do not need to be a perfect union before we can be a great country and there is no better example of that than the United States of America – a country that thrives, not in spite of its diversity, but because of it.  

It is my respectful submission that the responsibility for a similar kind of greatness here in Nigeria lies in our hands as the country's elite. We must rise above unproductive ethnic and religious sentiment.

We must develop the emotional intelligence required to cope and adapt in a swiftly and constantly changing world. We must adopt a global mindset that seeks to learn from the experiences of other countries, far and near, so that we do not waste valuable time repeating mistakes that we should have learned to avoid.

One of those lessons is that today's wars never really end. This should be a sobering lesson to us all in Nigeria, as we contend with the forces who seek to stoke violence and bloodshed in our country. 

Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and closer home, the Central African Republic, Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo; these wars have raged for years. Some of them have in fact gone on so long that they have been tagged as 'forgotten wars'. Contemporary wars, we have learnt, are extremely easy to start, but difficult to end.

Another lesson is that in the 21st century the theatre of war is increasingly shifting to cyberspace. Terrorist organizations, purveyors of hate speech, all of these and many more who seek to destabilize the world are busy staking out territory on the Internet, and scoring significant victories and conquests for themselves. As members of the Armed Forces, with a mandate to protect Nigeria from all forms of internal and external aggression, you will increasingly be judged as much on the basis of your success online as on your successes on the conventional battlefield.

The Internet has altered or disrupted every industry we know of: Politics and Elections, Business and Commerce, Governance; and is changing the very nature of warfare.  Websites teaching on how to make and use IEDs and other explosives are numerous.

Today a great deal of the threats facing Nigeria are being nurtured and cultivated in the vast spaces of the Internet. The rumblings of secession, the dangerous quit ultimatums to ethnic groups, the radio stations and blogs that spew divisive speech and exploit our fault lines; all of these are now to be found online.

This means that the military and its officers and men must itself devote resources and talent to these new battlefields, where mindless verdicts on the continued unity and existence of Nigeria are daily being delivered.

As you make your way out of the hallowed halls of this institution, into the 'field', as you would describe it, you have huge roles to play in the way Nigeria turns out in the years and decades ahead.

Even though the days of military rule are now well behind us as a nation, the role of the military is still as critical as ever – and not just in the traditional areas of deterring threats and protecting lives and property.

The Military of the 21st century must realize that it has a role to play in supplying reinforcement to the good side in the clash of ideas that today define the world: ideas of moderation, tolerance and sensibleness versus ideas of extremism, xenophobia, and terror. The Boko Haram terrorism is a perfect example of the types of scourges that the world faces.

The battle is not just to defeat the terrorists, the greater battle is to defeat the ideology and mindset that feeds the madness and to cut off its oxygen, money and publicity.

 The great challenge and the wonderful opportunity for this generation of the Nigerian elite is to build a new Nigeria. Out of the rubble of cynicism, division and suspicions we can build a new nation.

A new nation built on trust, consensus, love for one another and love for our country is possible. A nation where the rulers do not steal the commonwealth, where every Nigerian is safe to live and work, where the State takes responsibility for the security of each and every Nigerian, where the state knows every Nigerian by name and can find and locate each one of us, a Nigeria where the Ibo or Ijaw man can live peacefully in Sokoto, and the Fulani man can live peacefully in the Niger Delta.

But building is an act of the human will.  It is a practical, routine, sometimes dirty, sometimes frustrating enterprise. This is why no great nation was ever built overnight or without the sacrifice of group compromise, the pain of not getting all you want, the feeling that your ethnic or religious persuasion could be treated better, that is the sacrifice of nation- building, give and take; a little here, a little there. No one group can have it all.

Our leadership must be courageous. Courage means willingness to be abused and insulted by our own people. The humiliation of being heckled for making concessions is the price of the privilege of leadership. The greatest leaders are those prepared to take unpopular decisions or make compromises unpopular with their constituencies but crucial for long term goals.

Yes, they may be unpopular in the short run but their greatness eternally is guaranteed. Nelson Mandela after years in prison and decades of the inhumanity and oppression of apartheid, to the shock and amazement of his black constituency preached reconciliation. An unpopular move in the short term but no contemporary political figure is as revered as he is even in death. 

The opportunity to go down in history as builders of the new Nigeria, now beckons. I trust that you will heed its call.

I pray that your road henceforth will be laden with favour and grace in Jesus name.   

Released by:

Laolu Akande

Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity

Office of the Acting President

23 June, 2017

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - OSINBAJO'S SPEECH

This was a great speech. Nigerians must have a mindset of living together in peace. 
SO

Sent from my iPhone 

On Jun 30, 2017, at 1:32 PM, Kayode J. Fakinlede <jfakinlede@gmail.com> wrote:

This speech, in my opinion ranks as the greatest ever made by a Nigerian leader in support of the continuing existence of our country. It completely deflates the aspiration of those seeking for Biafra Republic, Oduduwa Republic, Arewa Republic etc. I just knew that somewhere, somehow, a statesman will emerge from the rubbles of our self inflicted wounds that will put our agitations at ease.
To our Acting President: Thank you very mush sir; and May your tribe incease


I am yet to see a speech so powerfully put together by any one on this shores..
Listen O ye purveyors of hate speeches and violence perhaps the narrative of our mutual existence could yet be saved!! 

OFFICE OF THE ACTING PRESIDENT

PRESS RELEASE

WE CAN BUILD A NEW NIGERIA

SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, THE ACTING PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE GRADUATION CEREMONY OF SENIOR COURSE 39, THE ARMED FORCES, COMMAND AND STAFF COLLEGE, JAJI, KADUNA STATE ON FRIDAY JUNE 23, 2017 

PROTOCOL

I am especially pleased and indeed privileged to share this special day with you the staff, graduands and proud family members of the graduands of Senior Course 39.

We must give glory and thanks to the Almighty God by whose mercy and grace we are able to witness this celebration of achievement.

You have made a success of this course after 48 grueling weeks. Congratulations.  Of course we must specially commend all the spouses of our graduands here, but for whose sacrifices and personal deprivations there would have been no celebrations for many here today.

It is also gratifying to note that amongst the 187 graduating students are 10 students from sister African countries, and 5 senior members of Staff from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Defence Intelligence Agency, Nigerian Defence Academy, Nigeria Police Force and the Federal Road Safety Commission.

I must commend the governments of Cameroun, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, The Gambia and Togo who nominated their officers to attend this course. By so doing they have strengthened the brotherhood we share as Africans but more so they have shown great foresight on the issue of our common security concerns on the continent. 

The occasion of the graduation of the elite corps of our Military, armed services, intelligence and Foreign Service members is one that offers an opportunity for reflection on national issues. 

We are the identifiable public service elite of our nation, paid for with taxpayers money, and so we must be its foremost think-thank. So, permit me to address you for a short while on the subject - We can build a new Nigeria.

The last two decades in Nigeria have witnessed the quickened retreat of the Nigerian elite to their ethnic and religious camps.

I would like to emphasize the fact that this was essentially an elite phenomenon - unity and disunity are promoted by the elite to which the vast majority of the Nigerian people were only later conscripted.

In these past few years, more and more, we began to hear expressions such as Nigeria's ethnic nationalities; we began to see more identification by race and geopolitical zones, Ndigbo people, Arewa people, the Yoruba people, South-South, North-East, South-West, North-West and South-East; and other parochial description that were hitherto unknown.

The rise of ethnic chauvinism rode on the wings of several agitations. The narrative of most agitations centres around alleged marginalization and fears of dominance of one faith over the other.

In the 2015 elections, the ruling party repeatedly tried to cast the opposition as a party of Islamists determined to islamize Nigeria. The expression Janjaweed party took root. 

Most ethnic agitations are centered around getting a larger share of the national cake or more favoured placement in the food chain because they were essentially elite claims: the vast majority of the populations of the ethnic groups that win some concession or the other never really benefit.

So, the mere fact that a South-South person became President did not necessarily translate to prosperity for the tribe, neither was it the case when a President from the North-West emerged, nor one from the South-West.

Aside from a few individual beneficiaries of some appointments or the other, there is usually nothing to show for the ethnic group of those who emerge in Nigeria's numerous ethnic contests for power. Yet, the contests of the tribes are heightened by the elite, usually for personal political or commercial ends.

When you hear a person say that my tribe has been marginalized usually what he is saying is appoint me. The ethnic card is an effective bargaining tool.

A major drawback of ethnic chauvinism is the way that it is used to mask wrongdoing and promote impunity. Notice that when people are charged with looting public funds they quickly find a counter narrative. It is because I am Yoruba, Fulani or Igbo; or the Christians or Muslims are after me.

Appointments in the public service are no longer even judged on merit. The question is how many are from my own ethnic group. A terrible affliction, when you consider that what we are looking for are men and women of integrity and talent to run our economy and create a future for our children. Why is that when we want to win at football we don't ask which ethnic group the players are from? But perhaps at its most extreme and dangerous are hate-filled agitations for secession or autonomy.

In the past few weeks we have as a nation witnessed the escalation of such agitations usually couched in deliberately intemperate and provocative language. The reckless deployment of hate speech and the loud expressions of prejudice and hate, name calling of those of other ethnicities and faiths is a new and destructive evil in our public discourse. But even more divisive words, expressions, and actions calculated to create fear and uncertainty have also been freely used.   

Young people in the South-Eastern states under the aegis IPOB, issued a stay at home order as part of actions to prove support for their agitations for secession. In the Northern states young people under the aegis of the Arewa youth, issued an ultimatum to Igbos living in the Northern states to vacate before the 1st of October.
 
The problem with hate-filled and divisive speech is that they tap into some of the basest human instincts, bringing up irrational suspicions, fear, anger, and hatred and ultimately mindless violence. People who have lived together as neighbours and friends suddenly begin to see each other as mortal enemies.

The tensions that led to the killing of over 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus considered Tutsi sympathizers in the Rwandan genocide, were roused by hate media. The most notorious was the Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), which became immensely popular as a young, hip alternative to the official voice of the government. It played popular music, and encouraged the public to phone-in and participate in radio broadcasts. Amongst its listeners, RTLMC attracted the unemployed youth and Interhamwe (Canadian NGO). The station also became notorious for its covert and overt naming of Tutsi individuals who it claimed deserved to be killed.

General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, said: "Simply jamming [the] broadcasts and replacing them with messages of peace and reconciliation would have had a significant impact on the course of events." 

Fortunately the purveyors of this tragic hate media did not escape unpunished. The ICC in Arusha eventually sentenced the owners of the hate radio stations and newspapers to long prison terms.

Some of our youth groups urging secession already are deploying hate media, using radio and social media. The language on those media are inciting, provocative and insulting to the individuals who are named, and to the beliefs of others.

While we must remain irrevocably committed to freedom of expression and the tenets of a free press, we must draw the line between freedom that conduces to healthy democracy and that which threatens and endangers the entire democratic enterprise. It is an important balance that we must strike. Failure in any way will be tragic.

The truth is that our nation and national unity is worth preserving and protecting. We are the pre-eminent power in Africa today in terms of population, size of our markets, natural resources and economy.

We are a factor in the geopolitics of the world and no one can ignore a nation-state that is home to one in every four black persons. Smaller is weaker not stronger today. 

Your Excellency, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, history and experience has shown that countries can alter their destinies. Italy, India and Nigeria – to use just three examples, share one thing in common: at one point early in their existence people questioned their viability as nation-spaces; spoke of them in terms of being no more than mere geographical expressions.

Indeed not many Nigerians seem to know that the often quoted line about Nigeria being a "mere geographical expression" originally applied to Italy. It was the German statesman Klemens Von Metternich who dismissively summed up Italy as a mere geographical expression exactly a century before Nigeria came into being as a country. Churchill describing India said it was no more a nation than the equator, (which is just an imaginary geographical line.)

But what fate saddles a country with, and what that country makes of itself, we have since learned, can be two very different things. India for example has over the last couple of decades built itself into a technology and software powerhouse, and has also made impressive strides in nuclear and space technology. It has successfully created alternative narratives to a narrative of ethnic and religious division.

Italy on its own part has made its mark on the world in fashion and in automobiles; so that when people think of it today they are more likely to think of its venerable cuisine and fashion houses than its still-very-real fault lines.

What the stories of these countries tell us is that we do not need to be a perfect union before we can be a great country and there is no better example of that than the United States of America – a country that thrives, not in spite of its diversity, but because of it.  

It is my respectful submission that the responsibility for a similar kind of greatness here in Nigeria lies in our hands as the country's elite. We must rise above unproductive ethnic and religious sentiment.

We must develop the emotional intelligence required to cope and adapt in a swiftly and constantly changing world. We must adopt a global mindset that seeks to learn from the experiences of other countries, far and near, so that we do not waste valuable time repeating mistakes that we should have learned to avoid.

One of those lessons is that today's wars never really end. This should be a sobering lesson to us all in Nigeria, as we contend with the forces who seek to stoke violence and bloodshed in our country. 

Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and closer home, the Central African Republic, Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo; these wars have raged for years. Some of them have in fact gone on so long that they have been tagged as 'forgotten wars'. Contemporary wars, we have learnt, are extremely easy to start, but difficult to end.

Another lesson is that in the 21st century the theatre of war is increasingly shifting to cyberspace. Terrorist organizations, purveyors of hate speech, all of these and many more who seek to destabilize the world are busy staking out territory on the Internet, and scoring significant victories and conquests for themselves. As members of the Armed Forces, with a mandate to protect Nigeria from all forms of internal and external aggression, you will increasingly be judged as much on the basis of your success online as on your successes on the conventional battlefield.

The Internet has altered or disrupted every industry we know of: Politics and Elections, Business and Commerce, Governance; and is changing the very nature of warfare.  Websites teaching on how to make and use IEDs and other explosives are numerous.

Today a great deal of the threats facing Nigeria are being nurtured and cultivated in the vast spaces of the Internet. The rumblings of secession, the dangerous quit ultimatums to ethnic groups, the radio stations and blogs that spew divisive speech and exploit our fault lines; all of these are now to be found online.

This means that the military and its officers and men must itself devote resources and talent to these new battlefields, where mindless verdicts on the continued unity and existence of Nigeria are daily being delivered.

As you make your way out of the hallowed halls of this institution, into the 'field', as you would describe it, you have huge roles to play in the way Nigeria turns out in the years and decades ahead.

Even though the days of military rule are now well behind us as a nation, the role of the military is still as critical as ever – and not just in the traditional areas of deterring threats and protecting lives and property.

The Military of the 21st century must realize that it has a role to play in supplying reinforcement to the good side in the clash of ideas that today define the world: ideas of moderation, tolerance and sensibleness versus ideas of extremism, xenophobia, and terror. The Boko Haram terrorism is a perfect example of the types of scourges that the world faces.

The battle is not just to defeat the terrorists, the greater battle is to defeat the ideology and mindset that feeds the madness and to cut off its oxygen, money and publicity.

 The great challenge and the wonderful opportunity for this generation of the Nigerian elite is to build a new Nigeria. Out of the rubble of cynicism, division and suspicions we can build a new nation.

A new nation built on trust, consensus, love for one another and love for our country is possible. A nation where the rulers do not steal the commonwealth, where every Nigerian is safe to live and work, where the State takes responsibility for the security of each and every Nigerian, where the state knows every Nigerian by name and can find and locate each one of us, a Nigeria where the Ibo or Ijaw man can live peacefully in Sokoto, and the Fulani man can live peacefully in the Niger Delta.

But building is an act of the human will.  It is a practical, routine, sometimes dirty, sometimes frustrating enterprise. This is why no great nation was ever built overnight or without the sacrifice of group compromise, the pain of not getting all you want, the feeling that your ethnic or religious persuasion could be treated better, that is the sacrifice of nation- building, give and take; a little here, a little there. No one group can have it all.

Our leadership must be courageous. Courage means willingness to be abused and insulted by our own people. The humiliation of being heckled for making concessions is the price of the privilege of leadership. The greatest leaders are those prepared to take unpopular decisions or make compromises unpopular with their constituencies but crucial for long term goals.

Yes, they may be unpopular in the short run but their greatness eternally is guaranteed. Nelson Mandela after years in prison and decades of the inhumanity and oppression of apartheid, to the shock and amazement of his black constituency preached reconciliation. An unpopular move in the short term but no contemporary political figure is as revered as he is even in death. 

The opportunity to go down in history as builders of the new Nigeria, now beckons. I trust that you will heed its call.

I pray that your road henceforth will be laden with favour and grace in Jesus name.   

Released by:

Laolu Akande

Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity

Office of the Acting President

23 June, 2017

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON

Edited



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------
From: Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Date: 30/06/2017 20:15 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON

Did you read my earlier posting on this forum before describing the quality of your own thinking with your typical unreasonable belligerence?

Did you read my posting that stated that the Igbo were on the moral highground before the declaration of war precisely because innocent Igbo civilians who did not ask the Igbo officers to stage a coup  were being unjustly murdered?

Did you see the posting I did a few years back on how an Igbo friend showed me a pit where Igbo students of a women teachers college were raped murdered and dumped?

Why would I want to justify such retribution?  

Obi, the fact is that you let emotions get in the way of your reasoning.  We are no longer in 1966!  

Yes, why was a Yoruba officer not recruited to make sure Ironsi did not'manage'  to escape?

Did you listen to Fela 
Anikulapo's lyric 'Alujonjon ki jon'

' Gbogbo aye papa yeye reje

Aja gbe tire o dorun

(Everyone agreed to kill and devour their mothers

But the dog defaulted and hid his mother in the skies')

We were too young then to decipher the parabolic lyrics; now we know!

Anybody committing naked cold murder should be collectively condemned irrespective of their ethnicities.

We share alike the same humanity.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
Date: 30/06/2017 01:43 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (rexmarinus@hotmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Agbetuyi:

Here is  a summary of your response as I understand it (a) because Onwuatuegwu, Hope Eghagha, and Atom Kpera and a few others went to Ademulegun's House, shot him and his pregnant wife, therefore the Igbo committed genocide (b) Irrespective of the fact that Ironsi relayed the mood of the soldiers under his command, he obtained the authority of state under duress, and that renders his action illegitimate, and it means therefore that he carried out a coup, and (c) for Ojukwu to have the legitimacy of his position, he should have ceded power to Awolowo in Enugu, and that would be the only way to legitimize the move to unify the south. It is of course typical, this kind of reasoning, and I hope it does inform those reading it of the quality of thought behind it.


The same Onwuatuegwu treated Sir Kashim Ibrahim differently, and even arranged for a plane to take him back home to Maiidugri. The question should be, why did he and his troop kill Ademulegun? What in fact were the circumstances that led to the unfortunate killing of Ademulegun and wife? Accounts of the incident is that Ademulegun had reached down to take his service pistol and was shot, just as his wife threw herself, apparently by instinct to protect him. It was death that was not premediated, and I do not even so, make excuses for it. What worries me  however is that you can equate Onwuatuegwu's action to the sustained massacre of the Igbo in the North and the West, including many innocent military officers and ordinary civilians who had never heard the name "Onwuatuegwu" before in their lives. It is a sick way of thinking. When Dimka killed Murtala Muhammed, why was it not said that Gowon's Angas or Berom people had all jointly committed treason or genocide, and so all deserved to be wiped out? Two, I wish you'd read Chuks Iloegbunam's biography of General Ironsi, Ironside, and you'd note the account of Ironsi's resistance and reluctance to take office, and various futile attempts to browbeat his officers out of that set of the mind, a fact doubly confirmed to me by George Kurubo who was in that meeting, and the artist Ben Enwonwu, one of Ironsi's best friends from childhood. It is best very easy  and convenient for you to say  this of Ironsi today, but put in that very fluid situation - the chaos and mutiny, and the threat of the rebellion of a High Command during that emergency, Ironsi was pressed to service and he rose to the occasion. First, there was no parliament. Second, the situation was vicarious and the civilians themselves did not need much convincing, and so there was no durress. But finally, the point is, it was Victor Banjo who rose to make a very forceful argument for the military to take over - and Banjo was not an Igbo officer. It is clear therefore that Ironsi, contrary to your assertions all along did not effect an "Igbo coup." It is a scoundrel's lie! Part of the karma afflicting Nigeria today is that they shed the blood of an innocent man, and people like you continue to dishonor his memory. Ironsi obtained the authority of the highest council of state, which freely gave him power to re-establish the state that had spun into chaos. The documents still exists in the papers of Mr AbdulRasak, then Attorney-General. As for Ojukwu ceding power to Awo. Well, Awo did say, "if the East were... etc. etc." and Ojukwu set about fulfilling the part of their agreement when Awo came calling in Enugu, only to be betrayed. But seriously, I'm not sure you're serious with this question or what it suggests, and I'd not waste any further ink on it. Finally, here is what Nzeogwu himself said of that event: "The public is still largely unaware of the fact that a gigantic military operation over the Western Region was to swoop down on that territory on January 17. The incident that was associated with January 15 today was to take place sometime later, that is the following month. When therefore the significance of that state of emergency due to be proclaimed on January 17 was made known to us, it became inevitable that the operation of January 15 necessarily take place before the dawn of January 17" (Nzeogwu, Nigerian Tribune, July 2, 1967, qtd. in Luckham 1971, p. 41). Ifeajuna's suppressed memoir elaborates on this. Soyinka has written about it. But start from here. The eye that looks shall surely see the nose.

Obi Nwakanma






From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2017 10:04 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: Olayinka Agbetuyi
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON
 

Obi:

Let me first agree with you that whatever we might argue endlessly here it changes nothing of events in that murky history of the country.  

But there are certain indisputable facts and I will ask a few question of you;

That an officer opened fire on his superior officer AND THE NON ENLISTED PREGNANT WIFE in the comfort of their bedroom killing them in cold blood is beyond any exculpatory interpretation by anyone who holds on to the sanctity of human life. So we must place events in their correct antecedents..

According to my own study of the Law of Contract no agreement to commit an illegality constitute an enforceable contract:

The purported agreement between Orizu, the leaders of parliamentary coalitions and Ironsi was therefore not worth the paper it was written on.  It was signed under duress because Ironsi said he could not guarantee the loyalty of the Army.

Ironsi illegally hijacked the goverment of the federation and the contention that his was the first legally constituted military government in Nigeria is not correct.

It may well be true that Banjo egged on Ironsi to hijack power Ironsi could have done what Brigadier Ogundipe later did: resign and walk away from the armed forces.

There may well have been multiple coups in 1967 pray could you reveal your source for Maimalaris coup plot?

If indeed the coup of 1966 Jan was to enthrone Awolowo why did Ojukwu not steal the show from Gowon when Awo went to the East to persuade Ojukwu back into Nigeria by countering with an offer to Awo to lead the united South while he Ojukwu stepped down?  Would Awo refuse such an offer?

Can you see now why I insisted early in the discussions that necromancing Biafra would yield no fruitful dividends and that Biafranists should let sleeping dogs lie rather than open old wounds? 


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
Date: 28/06/2017 15:38 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON

I am forced once again to respond to these scurrilous and revisionist writings by both Salimonu Kadiri and and Ibukunolu Babajide on the events of Nigerian history. The frustrating part of this is the unending mythologies fed  in part by inventions, in part by a regurgitation of unreflective and establishment narrative and in part by a sheer evacuation of truth - and the fact that these alt-narratives do not flow from the need to comprehend the missteps made by the actors in that history but a necessity to justify and make excuses for their tragic impulsions. It has been the case that the hobbling of Nigeria was always the result of the willingness of the fascist arm of western Nigerian intellectual and political interests, always in conflict with its progressive and liberal half, to fashion justificatory narratives to explain and interpret and hide their hands dripping with blood.


First, on Salimonu Kadiri's rebuts of Nwala's incisive response to Obasanjo, he writes:


1.The second coup on the same day was that of Major-General Johnson Thompson Umunnakwe Aguiyi Ironsi, who all along had foreknowledge of the coup plan of the Majors through his inside informants, Major Donatus Okafor and Captain Ogbo Oji (see p. 125-126, Nigeria's Five Majors by Ben Gbulie). That was why when Major  Humphrey Chukwuka and his men were heading to the house of Ironsi in the morning of January 15, 1966, Ironsi had linked up with Major John Obienu at the 2nd Infantry Battalion in Ikeja under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hilary Njokwu to rally troops to quell and supplant the Majors. The Majors never planned ethnic coup but because of infiltrators and pacifists the execution and victims were ethnically lopsided. 


The good part: for many years the January 15 coup was described as an "Igbo coup" and that was always the justification for the July 29 coup and the  subsequent massacre of the Igbo. But since it was revealed over the long run that the January coup had actually been planned to install Awo as premier, the likes of Salimonu Kadiri have now found the truth, and no longer can claim that it was that the Ifeajuna-led was an "Igbo coup." The Majors are now "progressive" Majors, who were somehow betrayed by "infiltrators and pacifists." But of course Salimonu Kadiri must never leave the scene until he finds another Igbo plot, and this time, it has to be Ironsi. Fact is, there were indeed two coups in the offing, and Emma Ifeajuna was the "bridge" figure in all of it. The January 15 coup was basically, and perhaps most ironically a counter coup that prevented another coup already billed for January 17 code named "operation no mercy" led by Brigadier Maimalari in the South, who used the cover of the party at his home in Ikoyi that weekend of Friday 14 January to hold final operational meetings, and issue directives to his associates for the coup on Monday. Ifeajuna left that party at Maimalari's and issued the counter order to execute the counter coup which was not originally billed for that night. We must remember that Nzeogwui had only taken the boys, without weapons, on a training exercise quite apparently in preparation for the coup for a later date when he received the orders from Lagos and had to improvise. It was largely the nature of the emergency response of that coup that resulted in much of its failures, and part of it was that Major John Obienu, contrary to Kadiri's assertion here, was a no show because he could not bring in his tank battalion from Abeokuta as planned. As a matter he went after the party in Maimalari's house to sleep at his girlfriend's at Palmgrove, Lagos. General Ironsi, who himself was a target of the coup escaped, and mobilized, and quelled it. Of course, Ironsi knew about the coup. Balewa knew about the coup. Sarduana knew about the coup. Akintola knew about the coup. Okpara knew. Zik himself had warned about the coup in November 1965, before he left Nigeria, and The Morning Post in Lagos had published Zik's prescient warning in that headline, "I See Trouble" attributed to Zik about the rumblings. In fact, at his GOC's conference late in December 1965 Ironsi had issued serious warnings about all the rumblings in the Army and about "some of you boys who want to cause trouble." As GOC of the Army Ironsi knew, and if he was worth his pips, had to know everything, and had his own intelligence gathering mechanisms. And if as Kadiri suggests, Don Okafor and Ogbo Oji were his decoys in the plot, that's only to be expected. Ironsi apparently had decoys, not only in the plots by Maimalari and Ademulegun, who had not lived down the fact that Ironsi was appointed GOC, but also in a third coup also in the offing backed from Ibadan, which had Victor Banjo at the center of its plot, the groundswell of its remnants which was later to have been part of the "Third Force" that was to be activated in the war that ensued. Wole Soyinka who was thick inside it has written volubly about these plots. It is wise to read him for a fuller picture.


2. Salimonu Kadiri writes: Igbo military Officers led by Ironsi foiled the coup, the civilian regime should have continued after quelling  what Ironsi himself had called a mutiny by a dissident section of the Nigerian Army. The only legal and constitutional thing for him to do was to provide security for the Parliament to meet and elect a Prime Minister among members that controlled majority in the House. It is on record that the NNA (NPC/NNDP) that controlled majority in the House nominated Zanar Bukar Dipcharima to replace the missing Balewa while the UPGA (NCNC/AG/UMBC/NEPU) nominated Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe as their Prime Minister Candidate. The Acting President Nwafor Orizu foresaw the outcome of the parliamentary exercise and hinted the parliamentarians that he was not going to assent to their choice of a new Prime Minister. Ironsi himself to(l)d the parliamentarians that he could not guarantee the loyalty of the Army unless power was handed over to him. Thereafter, Zanar Bukar Dipcharima and Kingsley Mbadiwe were made to sign a paper transferring power to the military. The 1963, Republican Constitution had no provision authorising the  Parliament not to talk of two of its members to cede government power to a non-elected body. Thus, Igbo Military Officers or Ironsi did not foil the coup rather they perpetrated their own coup and seized the revolution of the Majors. The way Ironsi ascended to power made his coup an Igbo coup.


 In the above narrative, Kadiri relies on the statements by Shagari in his on memoirs, and a disgruntled and partisan Akinjide, and regurgitates a convenient lie. Ironsi and Nwafor Orizu become complicit plotters to transfer power to an "Igbo Army." There can be nothing further from the truth, and Nwafor Orizu, thankfully, explained himself in his own memoirs. But first, we should imagine the morning of January 15, 1966 with the major events still at play. Nothing was certain - only the novelty of a coup with soldiers seen all over the streets of Lagos in large numbers for the first time. Ironsi had just foiled the takeover of the federal capital. But the situation remained fluid and uncertain, with the standoff with Nzeogwu who seemed in firm control of Kaduna, and was apparently preparing to launch a military invasion of the south. To the politicians this was a nightmare scenario - the beginning of a civil war. Nwafor Orizu, as the acting president of the republic summons a meeting of the council of ministers, with the Army's GOC, Ironsi who briefs them about the military and emergency situation. A coup had been foiled in Lagos. The prime minister was missing. There was a possible military confrontation that might press the Northern military formation with the Southern divisions. Nobody knew whether the plotters were regrouping or not in the South and in Lagos with Ifeajuna still at large. Nothing was certain at that point. Some of the ministers had gone into hiding out of great fear, and parliament had certainly dispersed. But the rump of the old government who met with Ironsi and Nwafor Orizu who had asked them to decide on an interim leadership to secure the government until parliaments apparently could not agree to a leader. Mbadiwe who was Deputy Prime Minister under the coalition government wanted to lead; the NNA wanted Dipcharima to lead, and the politicians were fully unwilling to agree. Meanwhile, Ironsi had summoned a meeting of his own high command - and it was not only of Igbo officers except you can argue that Adebayo, Ogundipe, Banjo, Kurubo, Ejoor, Gowon, Ekpo, Wellington Bassey, Wey, etc were Igbo officers. It was Victor Banjo, in fact, in that conference who actually argued forcefully for the Army to assume emergency powers under the command of Ironsi and unify Nigeria, a course of action which was then agreed upon by the military High command. And Banjo, by the way, wrote about all these in his now published letters to Ironsi from prison after he was arrested over a different incident. How, therefore, could that be interpreted as a coup by Igbo officers? Ironsi, in his subsequent meeting with Nwafor Orizu and the ministers, merely conveyed the mood of the officers under his command. Given the fluidity of the situation, the Council of ministers, and the coalition leaders - Dipcharima and  Mbadiwe - leading their parties, not unreluctantly, signed over emergency power to Ironsi, arming him with the authority to assume the powers of government and to restore law and order within a transitional period of no more than one year. After this formal transfer of power Nwafor Orizu made his radio broadcast to Nigerians and resigned. It was on assumption of that power that Ironsi methodically stared down the plots and with guile and diplomacy got Nzeogwu to stand down in the North. But why would Kadiri defame Ironsi? It is simple: because the old story that January 15 1966 coup was an "Igbo coup" or plot to take over Nigeria has collapsed, revisionists like Kadiri must invent anther "Igbo coup" - this time by Ironsi - to justify the massacre of the Igbo. Now, it is true that the Republican constitution had no such provision to cede government to another body. But the same constitution had no provisions to deal with the situation of January 15. What it certainly had was a provision giving the President, or whoever is acting in his behalf, the power to either open parliament or dismiss it, even sine die. That was the power that Orizu exercised under that mandate, having secured the agreement of the bulk of the Council of ministers, under an agreement drawn by the Attorney-General, to cede authority freely and legally to the General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army under an emergency situation. On resigning as president, Nwafor Orizu basically brought, not only the government of the day to an end, but the republic of which he was Commander-in-chief. It made Ironsi's military government, the only legitimate military government mandated by an elected government with emergency powers in the history of Nigeria.


Kadiri writes: "Professor Nwala claimed, "Again the incursion into the Mid-West by the Biafran troops was not a quest for territorial grabbing by the Igbos. Ojukwu sent troops under the Command of Col. Banjo in response to Chief Awolowo's request for troops to help liberate Yoruba land from occupation of soldiers from the North. By the time Colo. Banjo got to Ore, the British had gotten Gowon to offer Chief Awolowo, Vice Chairmanship of the Nigerian government. Awolowo, therefore, asked Banjo not to proceed on his mission."  Professor Nwala is certainly inventing his own history to suit his own ethnic pride. On May 27, 1967, General Yakubu Gowon had sliced Nigeria into twelve States and soon after that, he invited civilians, including Obafemi Awolowo, Anthony Enahoro, Joseph Tarka and Okoi Arikpo to join the Federal Cabinet. The first Federal Executive Council meeting comprising of civilians and military took place on 12 June 1967. The war between Nigeria and Biafra began on July 6, 1967, almost a month after Awolowo had become Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Government. On 15 July 1967, Nsukka was liberated by the Federal Forces and on August 9, 1967, Midwest State was invaded by the Biafran Army, led on the surface by Lieutenant Colonel Banjo who in his broadcast to the people of the Midwest explained why he was arrested and detained by Ironsi since 17 January 1966, even though he was not among the Majors that planned the January 1966 coup. Ojukwu recalled him and strictly instructed him to get clearance from him before any future broadcast. If Biafra invasion of the Midwest had nothing to do with territorial grabbing, why did Ojukwu appoint Major Albert Nwazu Okonkwo, an Igbo, as the military administrator of Midwest to replace Lieutenant Colonel David Ejoor, an Uhrobo man? The mere fact that Awolowo was in the Federal Government long before the invasion of the Midwest by the Biafran Army contradicts the notion that Awolowo stopped further advance of Banjo troops from Ore after he had been offered a Cabinet post. The entire troops led by Banjo contained mainly of Igbo soldiers and officers. His operational control over them was minimal. The 2nd in command to Banjo in the Biafran second Battalion that he led was Lieutenant Colonel Festus Akagha. And according to the directive issued to them by Ojukwu, he was to move through Benin, Ore, Ijebu-Ode to seize Lagos. Ojukwu's 1st Battalion under the Command of Lieutenant Colonel Mike Ivenso was assigned to the Northern Sector from where he should move through Owo, Akure and seize Ibadan. The third Battalion under the Command of  Lieutenant Humphrey Chukwuka was assigned to the South, moving through Sapele, Warri to advance along the coast to launch a two-pronged attack on Lagos. Thus Banjo had no power to unilaterally stopp the advancement of Biafran troops from Ore to Lagos even if such request were to come from Awolowo to him. If it were true that Awolowo asked Ojukwu to send soldiers to help him liberate the West from Northerners, and if he no longer needed the liberators, Awolowo could not reasonably sidestepped Ojukwu who had the power to withdraw military action by turning to Banjo as Professor Nwala guessed. 


First, the Liberation Army under Brigadier Victor Banjo was not a "military invasion of the Midwest" as the Nigerian narrative came to term it. It was a Liberation campaign by an Expeditionary Force whose mission was the Liberation of the West and the unification of Southern Nigeria as the firstmoves towards creating a balance of forces. It was mismanaged by Banjo who got stymied n Benin and the Midwest, and allowed his personal ambition to override the state mission and agreements of the campaign. Wole Soyinka, who was in the thick of it all writes this: "When I made a visit to Biafra, and met Ojukwu I also met Banjo, who gave me a message for Obasanjo which said: 'Let them understand in the West that I am not leading a Biafran Army but an army of Liberation, made up not only of Biafrans but other ethnic groups. Make the governor of the Weste and other Western Leaders understand this. Urge them not to be taken in by any propaganda by the Federal Government about a Biafran plan to subjugate the rest of the nation, especially the West" (144). Soyinka, furthermore writes: "I called Obasanjo over a secret telephone. We agreed to meet unaccompanied and unarmed at a petrol station on the road between non-commercial Jericho and Mokola sections of Ibadan. I was o tell him in very bald terms that Victor [Banjo] wanted unimpeded passage to Lagos, that he wished to avoid battle in Western Nigeria -finis! This was the exact message I delivered... Banjo did not act to promote Biafran secession or aid Ojukwu take over of power in Lagos. If anything, Banjo felt that he should take over power. I have no doubt whatsoever that Banjo represented the most viable corrective. Obasanjo's response, that I would later transmit to Victor Banjo, was this. 'Well, tell him that I have taken an oath of loyalty to Lagos. There are other routes to Lagos - by water through Ukitipupa for instance. If he makes it to Lagos and takes over, well, my oath is to Lagos, and I shall stand by that. But to let him pass through my Western Command, that would be betraying my oath to loyalty. Whoever is in power in Lagos- that's the person o whom I owe my allegiance. After my fateful meeting with Obasanjo concluded, I took up residence in the hidden bungalow. It was from this bungalow that I telephoned Obasanjo's reply to Banjo in Benin, verbatim. I kept up communication with him and his increasingly impatient collaborators in the West. I would phone and exchange notes also with Banjo's sister, Mrs. Ogunseye, then lecturer, institute of Librarianship at the University of Ibadan, in an attempt to assess this warrior's likely, real intentions, to understand why he remained in Benin playing governor or kingmaker, instead of moving straight to Lagos and dislodging Yakubu Gowon's government. Banjo had organized cadres of people committed to the "Third Force" standing by ready to support Banjo once he had crossed over into Lagos. The links were widespread and were run by politicians since the West had begun its protests against Federal Military presence in the West, decrying it as an army of occupation, and demanding its removal." (145-172, You Must Set Forth Before Dawn). I think Soyinka participant's account sets the records which Salimonu wishes to revise so straight that it needs no further interpretation. I'll only add this, that the Gowon's government, illegally, following neither consultation nor referendum, broke the Nigerian federation into 12 states; that the Eastern region resisted that illegality by opting out of the federation after obtaining the mandate of the representatives of the peoples of the East through the Consultative Assembly, and having explored all means of settling the conflict orchestrated with the nation-wide massacres of the Easterners particularly the Igbo from May 1966, including securing agreements in Aburi, an accord which Gowon also illegally and unilaterally reneged upon; and having  attacked the new republic of Biafra on July 6, after it had seceded by the mandate of its people, and making rapid incursions that threatened its capital, Ojukwu and Banjo responded by sending the Liberation Army, clearly supported by a groundswell of people in the West, westward. From Soyinka's account, it was an army impatiently awaited in the West. It was not an army of conquest. However, having secured his own position in Gowon's government, Awolowo withdrew support for the Liberation Army. Banjo on his own part, after his meetings with Mr. Bell, the British Deputy High Commissioner in Benin, and with the fear of the threat about bombing Lagos from the sea, and turning Lagos into a battle zone, and his own family in Lagos into its blood sacrifice, developed cold feet, and dawdled for too long, and subverted the mission. Banjo's fierce disagreements with Henry Igboboa who insisted on moving forward rather than acceding to the order to withdraw from Ore, cost Igboba, whom Banjo locked up in prison in Benin his life. Today of course, the Salimonu Kadiris, parroting the official line, continue to talk, and swear on the fiction of a "Midwest invasion." The story is beneath the surface, always, and for Kadiri there must be an Igbo plot to conquer everybody else - eben I spite of Soyinka's accurate and on the spot witnessing.


Kadiri writesK "How did the world come to describe the conduct of the war as POGROM," Professor Nwala asked?

Besides Igbo world I am yet to get into contact with any part of the world that described the conduct of Nigerian forces during the 1967 to 1970 civil war as pogrom."


I will not waste peoples time by elaborating too much into this profoundly ignorant assertion. I will rather refer Kadiri to the reports of the events of the massacre of the Igbo first filed by Colin Legum fo the London Observer in October 1966, where he was actually the first to describe these planned and sustained killings as a "pogrom." In other words, it was Colin Legum who first described the killings and the subsequent war as a "pogrom" in spite of the denials by the Federal government.


Salimonu Kadiri writes: Despite the fact that Professor Nwala ought to know that hunger and deaths are inevitable consequences of war, he insinuated that the Federal government declared and applied hunger as a legitimate weapon of war against Biafra. Yet, it is an open fact that Ojukwu rejected the offer of Gowon to open an internationally supervised land route from Port Harcourt to send relief supplies to civilians in the Biafran enclave in 1968.


Hunger and death are consequences of war, but where they are made an official policy of war, they become war crimes. If an army starves a civilian population and declares hunger as an instrument of warfare, in spite of civilian casualties, who are then seen only as necessary collateral damage, that is a quest towards genocide, and that is a war crime. It is a vain attempt to erase Awolowo's publicly declared policy of hunger as a federal government's instrument of war, and its use to force Biafrans into defeat. That is Nwala's take, and that is the take of all rational people. The various attempts to put the blame on Ojukwu, for his refusal to allow possibly compromised food - which has already been declared a means of war at the Nigerian end - into Biafra is callous and reflects the pathological inhumanity of its authors and supporters. Meanwhile, the Igbo are no Jews, but they have often compared themselves and their experiences with the experience of Jews as a persecuted people, whose industry, drive, talent, and visibility instigates the hateful anxieties often demonstrated by the likes of Kadiri, who finds, as basis of his red-hot unease with the Igbo, the stories of perpetual Igbo plots to upstage him. Without these plots, he'd have nothing by which to get anxious about the Igbo, and for which he would have no other stories to tell. The parallels that Nwala draws only go so far as to amplify other shared experiences, in this case with post-war Germany and the use of the Marshall plan to revive German industry and economy, and that's why we draw analogies in the first place. They make no metaphysical claims.


I think the foregoing enough to put a pin in Kadiri's and other balloons. All the lies told to justify the killings and injustice against the Igbo - the "but you caused it all!" - positions are the products of something deeper than any discussions on this forum is capable of curing. Kadiri, and his cohorts of course, again, conveniently miss the point of Nwala's argument: why, Nwala asks, of all the coups planned in Nigeria, did innocent Igbo officers and civilians have to pay with their own deaths? Coups have since been plotted and executed in Nigeria even after 1966, and no ethnic group has been accused as a result, and massacred as a result of those bearing their names being at the core of it, outside the Igbo. IBK  claims that Azikiwe used the West African Pilot to fight the Yoruba. This is nothing but an egregious and self-serving lie, of course, and should not really elicit a response, except that when you tell these lies too often, they grow a head and a spirit of their own. Azikiwe's paper fought the fascist arm of the Yoruba elite, and backed the progressive, and liberal, nationalist arm, with whom he always partnered. Even when all the attempts to revise the story of the NCNC by describing it as an "Igbo party" fails in scrutiny once its story has been told, new forms of reductionist narrative are invented simply to bring Zik to some "equal level" with liliputians. And it is also because Zik happens to be Igbo, and he must therefore, be in on all the plot of the Igbo to dominate everybody. But to the very end, the West African Pilot provided the platform for pan-Nigerian/pan-African discourse, and it told the story of Nigerians. This is my challenge to IBK: to provide a sustained study, or an example that  supports his ignorant claim. But any study of the Pilot, which as a matter fact is the site that best reflects Zik's politics and status, would show that to the very end in 1967, after a 30-year run, the paper stood in defence of the rights of all Nigerians, promoted a pan-Nigerian nationalist ideology, and reflected the story and life of every part of Nigeria without discrimination. Where the Pilot stood for Nigeria, papers like the Daily Service for instance, promoted anti-Nigerian positions, and the example was during the Labour crisis of 1946, a situation that basically marked the difference between Zik's politics and the position of those who would become Awoists, whom rational, progressive, and Liberal Yoruba supporters of Zik also by the way opposed vigorously to the very end, in spite of all the current feel-good revisionism. Enough said.

Obi Nwakanma





From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ibukunolu. A. Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2017 4:03 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON
 
Dear Salimonu Kadiri,

Thank you for demolishing lies and self-seeking revisions of history here!  Generations of Nigerians will thank you for standing for the TRUTH and your prodigious research and presentation of facts to debunk lies!

How did we get to January 15, 1966?  The journey began far earlier in the evolution of the Nigerian experiment!  After the BRITISH conquered Nigeria there was a long and distinguished epic battle to take it off British hands and rule it by Nigerians - the seeds of discord were sown during those years of battle between 1914 and 1948.  That battle was intellectual and fierce and it was led majorly by the Yorubas!  It was Zik an Igbo man who in an attempt to hijack the movement introduced ethnicity as a tool for his ascendancy.  He used his West Africa Pilot newspaper to wage relentless war against the Yoruba yet his greatest allies who were loyal to him till the end like Chief TOS Benson and Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya were Yorubas.

Read this please:

WHILST GOVERNMENT SAYS "WE HAVE ALL AGREED NIGERIA 🇳🇬 "MUST" BE ONE ☝ SOMEONE ELSE says:


"Need for Igbo-Yoruba Détente
Chinweizu

By the way there is historical evidence, from a well-placed non-Nigerian source, that the Igbo-Yoruba Cold War was needlessly unleashed by Zik in 1948, and not, as Igbo mythology has it, by Awo through the Carpet crossing in 1951.

Here is the story of how Zik declared war on the Yoruba in 1948
It was in this year [1945] that a group of Yorubas, led by Chief Awolowo, Dr Oni Akerele, Chief Abiodun Akerele, Akintola Williams, Chief Rosiji and others, founded a Yoruba organization in London called Egbe Omo Oduduwa, meaning "a society of the descendants of Oduduwa." . . . Our friends from the Eastern Region and some from the Western Regions of that vast country showed their hostility to the formation of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa of the Yorubas.

      Those of us who did not hail from Nigeria were highly disturbed by the threat of our unity as West Africans under the banner of W.A.S.U., which was itself predominantly Nigerian. 

Although there had been in existence an Ibo Union for some twenty months or so before the birth of Egbe Omo Oduduwa, not much notice had been taken of it at W.A.S.U. In any case, for obvious reasons, this new association looked formidable enough to merit our attention. 

All attempts to persuade the founders to squelch the new-born association proved futile.

      Happily, this did not break up our great W.A.S.U. although it did leave bitter feelings all over. In Nigeria itself, the new Association did not take root until 1948, when another powerful group of Yoruba leaders formed one in Lagos. 

The names of the founders were indeed names to conjure with among the Yorubas in the capital—Sir Akintola Maja and many others. It was after that great event in Lagos that Chief Awolowo himself plucked up courage to inaugurate a branch at Ibadan. An editorial in Nigeria's West African Pilot of September, 8 1948, which reached us in London, warned of the battle ahead.  Among many other things, the editorial carried these ominous words: 

"Henceforth the cry must be one of battle against the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, its leaders at home and abroad, up hill and down dale, in the streets of Nigeria and in the streets of London and in the residence of its advocates." The language was familiar enough. 

This was Nnamdi Azikiwe's. Were our fears about the unity of Nigeria about to be justified? The parting knell had been tolled. It might in retrospect be said that the first salvos of the civil war had been fired by these words.

-- Joseph Appiah, Joe Appiah: The Autobiography of an African Patriot, Accra: Assempa publishers, 1996, pp. 160-161,

This testimony from a Ghanaian who, for many years, was a member and President of W.A.S.U. in London, should give Igbos pause about the version of the Igbo-Yoruba Cold War they have accepted. The key point is that the Ibo Union had been in existence before the Egbe Omo Oduduwa was founded. Yet Zik declared war on the Egbe Omo Oduduwa. 

Why?  If it was because the Egbe Omo Oduduwa was not Pan-Nigerian, then what of the pre-existing Ibo Union?  In other words, it wasn't the Yoruba who introduced tribal unions and tribalist politics into Nigeria but the Igbos. But whatever his reason, Zik was the one who declared war on the Yorubas; he was the aggressor.

With that aggression as background, the carpet crossing becomes an understandable response to Zik's declaration of war. If somebody who declared war on your people arrives to govern your homeland, what should your leaders do? Welcome him and let him govern, or drive him out by any means necessary? 

The carpet crossing accomplished just that. And Igbos, following Zik, the instigator of the response, condemn the Yorubas for defending themselves from Zik's aggression.

Zik's conduct is an example of how Igbos can act without thinking of how their action might look to those their proposed action might adversely affect. That is a weakness Igbos should be on guard against, and should work to eliminate by extra self-awareness and constant self-criticism.
For seven decades, we have paid for Zik's aggression against the Yorubas. The Cold War which Zik started made it possible for the British to install the NPC in power in 1959 when Zik refused to join with Awo to form the Federal government. He explained it away by alluding to his distrust of Awo that stemmed from the Carpet crossing affair. In other words, Zik is ultimately responsible for our disasters and oppression under the Caliphate. But the pertinent issue at this time is that we, not the Yorubas, are responsible for the Yoruba-Igbo feud. We are not the innocent victims of Yoruba tribalism and hatred. That fact should inform our attitude in seeking rapprochement with the Yorubas, especially now that we need a Yoruba-Igbo alliance to help create conditions for us to exit our imprisonment in Lugard's Nigeria."


Cheers.


IBK

Sent from my iPhone

On 27 Jun 2017, at 11:22 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Hitler's death is too well known for the writer's description of Hitlers post war trial to be taken seriously. Its better appreciated as an imaginative scenario depicting  the reason why Hitler succeeded with his nationalistic vision as he rose to power. Maynard Keynes also wrote a 1919 book critiquing the Versailles Treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace ,
understood as foreshadowing WW2, and anticipating an equitable peace at the end of WW2 represented by the reconstruction of Germany by the allies through the Marshall Plan.

thanks

toyin

thanks

On 28 June 2017 at 04:07, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Can you point out the lies Olayinka?

toyin

On 25 June 2017 at 19:18, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

As a Second World scholar I know that Adolf Hitler deliberately made sure he did not survive the war by taking his own life so that he would not be the subject of the trial spuriously alluded to in this presentation.

As to not letting the wounds of Biafra heal who is more guilty of forever bringing it up, some Igbo or the federal side? 

If it is such lies as these that are in the memoirs that is being irreverently advertised to cash in on national trauma and tragedy, which sane person would want to buy such a memoir?


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 25/06/2017 11:14 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: THE BATTLE GOES ON

Fantastic!

toyin

On 25 June 2017 at 11:58, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:


On 6/24/17, 10:53 PM, "Solomon Uwaifo" <so_uwaifo@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

    Many have read both the tepid platitudes of the Ag. President as well as the insipid pleadings by Obasanjo at the recent Biafra at 50 conference.  How many have read the beautiful and well researched reply by Professor Nwala at the same conference?

    Read on:-

    Paper presented at The Conference -
    MEMORY AND NATION BUILDING: BIAFRA 50 YEARS AFTER:
    A SOBER REFLECTION.
     By
     PROF. T. UZODIMA NWALA
     President
     Alaigbo Development Foundation (ADF).

    Introduction.
    Before I thank the organisers of this Conference and pay my tribute to the Memory of my friend, late Major-General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, in whose Foundation Center this historic event is being organised, let me quickly dismiss certain lingering pernicious fallacies that have dominated all discussion about the coup of January 15, 1966 and the Biafra War.

    First, the Chairman of the occasion, Alhaji Ahmed Joda, has alluded to the January 15, 1966 coup as an Igbo coup that, according to him, was replied by a Northern coup of July 29 1966.

    Let it be said loud and clear that that coup, namely January 15, 1966 coup, was not an Igbo coup. It was a coup led by certain Igbo and Yoruba Officers, involving the active participation of soldiers from the North. The aim, as has been stated again and again, by the leaders of the coup was to release Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who was in detention at the time and install him the Prime Minister of Nigeria.

    That coup was foiled by Igbo military officers. Igbo political leaders and activists knew nothing about the coup.

    Again the Incursion into the Mid-West by the Biafran troops was not a quest for territorial grabbing by the Igbos. Ojukwu sent troops under the Command of Col, banjo in response to Chief Awolowo's request for troops to help liberate Yoruba land from the occupation of soldiers from the North. By the time Col Banjo got to Ore, the British had gotten Gowon to offer Chief Awolowo Vice Chairmanship of the Nigerian Government. Awolowo, therefore, asked Banjo not to proceed on his mission.

    General Yakubu Gowon knows the truth of all these things. And that is why the Alaigbo Development Foundation (ADF) had written him and asked him to tell Nigerians and the whole world the truth about the January 15, 1966 coup and the Biafra incursion into the Mid-West.to stop all the lies against Ndigbo, which have been the basis of the burden they carry as a nation within the Nigerian Federation.

    Secondly, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Head of State and a frontline commander on the Federal side during the war, said that they (the Federal military leaders) conducted the war without any hate or vengeance because it was a quarrel between brothers.

    To this, one is constrained to ask a few pertinent questions:

    How did the world come to describe the conduct of the war as POGROM?
    What about the policy that hunger was a legitimate weapon of war and so was justified in its application against the Biafrans?
    What about bombing of refugee camps, market places, churches, etc?

    Again, when Chief Obasanjo said that they, the victorious side, have been more magnanimous than the victors in the American civil war, where, according to him, those who lost the war never had a chance to be President of America until several decades if not a century later, I would ask him WHAT ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA? WHAT ABOUT NELSON MANDELLA?

    Such assertions rather than heal the wounds of the war, keep the wounds aglow, rather than reconcile pour raw paper of unjustified arrogance on the wounded hearts of the Biafrans. How can you genuinely talk about reconciliation with that kind o mind-set. The truth is that for General Obasanjo, the Biafrans are defeated people. Period!

     Indeed, before we can talk about reconciliation, we must accept that grave wrongs were done to the Biafrans, Before, During and Since the end of the war.

    Tribute to General Yar'Adua.
    NOW, Mr Chairman, Ladies and \Gentlemen, let me go on to thank the organisers of this Conference - the Yar'Adua Foundation and the six Nigerian Universities partnering with the Foundation; the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa who have provided support for this Conference - Biafra: 50 Years After.

    What is more, I would like to pay tribute to the memory of my late friend, General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua. I met him for the first time during the 1994-5 National Constitutional Conference. There we struck a friendship that would have born great fruits but for his untimely death. I personally escaped being arrested with him.

    General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, became a great democrat after the war despite his aristocratic background. He genuinely believed that this wobbly Federation could be given a dependable foundation. Consequently, he set out to recruit gifted compatriots to work with him for that purpose. What a great hunter of talent Shehu was!

    I remember two memorable moments in our interaction. One afternoon, after lunch in his house, we sat down on the sofa. I asked him

    "General why is it that when you are not smoking cigar (cigarette), you are chewing kola nut?"

    He answered me. I will not tell you his answer today. Wait for my Memoire that should be ready by my next birthday.

    At another moment, also after lunch with him and late Prof. Aborisade, we sat down on the sofa. Shehu said to me "Dr Nwala, let me show you why we Northerners are reluctant to relinquish political power".

    He brought out two volumes of strategic studies which he had commissioned some intellectuals to produce in preparation for the Constitutional Conference of 1994-5. I glanced through volume 1 which deals with the indices of power in Nigeria. I read the discussion, looked at the statistics and the graph, and shook my head, and said to myself this guy is a great political actor. I also reserve the details of what I read in that volume as well as our discussion for the sake of my forthcoming memoire.

    I saw those two volumes of strategic studies at the Library of the Yar'Adua Center when I visited there about two week ago.

    What is important in this narrative is that General Yar'Adua was avery sincere leader, he always spoke to me and to anyone in his political company from the bottom of his heart. He was sincerely in search of a genuine way forward. He was a man who knew that all is not well with the Nigerian Federation and genuinely sough the correct path to its healing!

    The point of the story is to reveal a bit of the life of this great political strategist, who if he had lived after that Conference, he and the powerful circle of comrades he had built at the Conference would have helped to see to a more liberal accommodating political order in Nigeria. Shehu was the darling of a liberal democratic movement that was emerging in Nigeria before he died. He was equally hated by what many of us call the hegemonist who have consistently aborted every opportunity to create a democratic political culture. It is the later who have consistently made it difficult to achieve a genuine reconciliation in Nigeria. It is these forces that have insisted on a Federation founded on the peace of the grave yard.
    Yes, General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua along with the compatriots he had worked to put together would have constitute an authentic force for reconciliation and national integration. He was a victim of the forces of hegemony.

    Post –Biafra Reconciliation – What Lessons?

    During the trial of Adolf Hitler after Germany and her allies lost the war to the Allied Forces, the following exchange took place between Hitler and his interlocutor –

    Interlocutor to Hitler: You were responsible for the Second World War?
    Hitler: No! The Versailles Treaties was.

    I believe this Conference has been provoked by the renewed agitation for Biafra. In that case, a similar question can be posed to the Biafra Self-determination Agitators in Nigeria today as to whether they are responsible for the renewed Agitation for Biafra.

     I imagine that the Biafra Freedom Agitators, just like Adolf Hitler, would emphatically respond NO! They would rather blame the present upsurge for Self-determination and Biafra and all its fallouts on all those leaders on the victorious side who, rather than pursuing the path of genuine Reconciliation, pursued the path of punitive retributions against those who lost the war.

    Unfortunately, as it was in the case of the defeated Germany that was neither pacified nor conciliated, nor was it permanently weakened, so do we find in the case of Biafra, that despite all the retributive measures against her people, Biafra and the Biafrans, have neither been pacified, nor conciliated, nor have they been permanently weakened.

    Unlike the Treaty of Versailles that exerted bloody pound of flesh on the side that lost the First World War, the victorious side in the Second World War padded their retributive actions with the Marshall Plan. And thus unlike the intended Carthagenian peace of the Versailles Treaty of 28 June 1919, the Marshall Plan brought a relatively permanent peace to Europe that withstood the shock waves of the cold war including the Cuban Missile crises.

    In pursuing the lessons of the retributive post-war treatment of the Biafrans, I would ask the leaders on the victorious side –

    When you took all their financial deposits in the banks and paid them only £20 (twenty pounds), what did you expect the result to be – pacification, conciliation or to have them permanently weakened?

    When you allowed massacre of unarmed soldiers and leaders even when they had declared their return to Nigeria, what did you expect? I mean when you murdered Prof. Kalu Ezera or when you killed unarmed Col Onwuatuegwu in cold blood, what did you expect?

    When you killed and also buried alive thousands of innocent civilians in Asaba, was that a circus show?

    I escaped being killed at the end of the war through the mysterious intervention of my college mate, Mr Nwoguegbe from Asa in Abia State who was a member of the Nigerian battalion that overran my area on that fateful day of January 8, 1970. The solders had sent for me and when I arrived at Nkwo Mbaise their base, Nwoguegbe instantly recognised me and shouted Nkume! I responded Nwoguegbe! Despite being introduced to his commander, Captain Jibowu, the later took him to one corner, asking to be convinced why I should not be treated in accordance with the official instructions, namely to waste any such able-bodied young-man who may have been an actual or potential Biafra soldier. I was lucky. Nwoguegbe saved me, but several of my mates from my community were not. Cornellius Oguikpe, Michael Osuagwu, Efriam Chukwunoyerem, Echewodo Onwunali, all were murdered at the end of the war by the Nigerian soldiers.

    Yes, post-Biafra was not attended by any genuine efforts to seek reconciliation nor even to find out what led to the war. Rather, what we have witnessed is decades of vengeance, arrogance and conspiracy against Alaigbo and Ndigbo - Yes these are on record -

    Immediate post-war punitive massacre,
    Dismissal of some officers on the losing side, Reduction in rank of others,
    Dismissal of civil servants,
    Secret Execution of some officers (Col. Onwuatuegwu, Prof, Kalu Ezera),
    Abandoned property seizure of Igbo property,
    Punitive boundary adjustment,
    Closure of the Eastern Sea Port and Railway lines,
    Deliberate policy of encirclement of Alaigbo, Inciting Igbo outside Igbo heartland to reject their Igbo identity,
    Deliberate policy of exclusion from the governance and power equation i Nigeria,
    Deliberate policy of destroying Igbo businesses,
    Continued massacre, lynching of Igbos in many places in the North,
    Insensitivity to the plight of the IDPs of Igbo extraction who were initially the major targets of Boko Harm bombings and killings,
    No serious effort at post-war reconstruction and reconciliation.

    I strongly recommend to all those who care to understand how the Igbos view their predicament in the Federation to read the Petition of Ohanaeze ndigbo to the Human Rights Violations Investigating Committee of 1999. It is captioned
    The Violations of the Human and Civil Rights of Ndigbo in the Federation of Nigeria (1966-1999).

    President Obasanjo should speak to the nation now about why and how that initiative of his was aborted. A Truth and Reconciliation was a great idea, but just like all National Conference decisions meant to deal with the resolution of the injustices of the system. It was arrogantly dismissed and nothing happened.

    Biafra : A Collective Guilt
    Have we forgotten that Biafra was a collective guilt and that those who created the Nigerian Federation did so to satisfy their own agenda They designed a local a local agenda for the same purpose?
    Have we forgotten the cause of Biafra and the war? Have we ever come together to examine why Biafra?
    Obasanjo's Truth Commission and the Justice Oputa Commission were arrogantly dismissed and nothing happened.
    Who was the aggressor in that war?

    Aborted Efforts to Solve the Nigerian Problem

    What about several efforts to sit down and dispassionately examine the fate of the Federation and how to heal the wounds of the past. Several aborted historical opportunities for peace and stability, or a genuine democratic system include -

    Ibadan Conference of Sept/Oct 1966
    Aburi Accord.
    Abiola's election that wuld have set a precedent.
    1994-5 Constitutional Conference and the 1995 Draft Constitution, the best Constitutional Draft in the history of Nigeria.
    Conferences organised by Obasanjos regime.
    President Jonathan's 2014 Conference.
    Current Ferocious opposition to restructuring.

    Laying the Foundations for Genuine Reconciliation – The Biafra Initiative

    The Birth of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) – A child of the post-war East Central State Youth Volunteer Services Corps (ECSYVSC) whose memo to General Gowon led to the establishment of the NYSC by the Federal Government. I led the delegation, as Chairman of the ECSYVSC, that delivered the Memoradum to the Federal Government on the eve of the first post-war independence anniversary, precisely on 30th September, 1970.

    In response General Gowon had given Dr Ukpabi Asika's Government £75,000 (Seventy-five thousand pounds) in appreciation of that historical initiative of the youth of Alaigbo. The great objective of that historical initiative as conceived by us, the youth of Alaigbo, was to forge a genuine instrument of national reconciliation and national integration.

    What has happened to the NYSC? Any credit to the initiators? Several attempts have been made by the chaps in the NYSC Foundation in Abuja to interview me in order to draw inspiration from the original mind that conceived the NYSC; each time they were discouraged from a follow-up.

    It was the same way that a former Governor had advised the Federal Government to create an institution to house the Biafra scientist. The answer was no!, because doing so would give credit to the Biafrans.

    The Road to Reconciliation.
    Not Restructuring but Renegotiation of the basis of the Nigerian Federation. Nigeria is a multi-national Federation. The task is to agree on the terms for a form of political union among these nations and mini-nations.

    Unless this is done, there would never be any stable Federation uniting all these peoples who are culturally, religiously and philosophically separate nations and mini-nations.

    Prof. Uzodinma Nwala
     President
     Alaigbo Development Foundation (ADF)

    Sent from my iPad


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