Igbo governors snub Ohanaeze peace rally in Lagos …Nwodo, PG harps on unity among Ndigbo in Lagos, says Biafra not achievable

Obinna Ezugwu

Five governors of the South East Geopolitical zone and those of Delta and Rivers states billed to attend a unity rally put together by the leadership of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Lagos chapter on Thursday at the National Stadium, Surulere, failed to turn up for the event.

The governors: Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State, Willie Obiano of Anambra State, Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta, Dave Umahi of Ebonyi, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu, Rochas Okorocha of Imo and Nyesom Wike of Rivers who, according to the organisers of the event, were scheduled to make presentations at the rally meant to bring all the Igbo resident in Lagos together, especially in the light of an ongoing rift about election within the Lagos Ohanaeze rank, neither turned up nor sent any representatives.

Although no official reason was communicated as the reason for the governors absent, Hallmark leant it was due to poor planning by the organisers of the event.

Chief Anselm Njoku, the Akeweje of Lagos, who was one of the dignitaries in attendance told our correspondents that the governors’ failure to attend must have been an issue with the organisation.

“It could be the organisers, I don’t know what happened really,” he said.

Meanwhile, the President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Dr. John Nnia Nwodo who graced the occasion called on the Igbo community to strive to live in unity as failure to do so would mean that they would continue to be relegated to the background and treated as inconsequential in a state they contribute immensely to its development.

Nwodo who said his visit to Lagos was informed by the strategic importance of the state to Ohanaeze due to the sheer number of Ndigbo in the state, regretted that instead of the Igbo to unite and advance their collective aspirations, they have allowed internal wrangling to put them in a state where nobody reckons with them politically and most of the decisions that affect them taken without their consultation or input.

He lamented that the Igbo who own business in the state, such as transport companies would simply be ordered to leave where they have built up and asked to go to another area and start all over again without at least being consulted despite their contributions to the state.

“There are 36 states in Nigeria, there is no state in Nigeria. Outside the seven states in which Igbo are aborigines, Lagos State houses the highest population of the Igbo of any other state in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The size of the Igbo here is equivalent to the population of some states in Nigeria. The extent of your size here is the extent of our attention and our interest in Lagos as Ohanaeze,” he said.

“The Igbo in Lagos are not those on excursion, they are hardworking people who contribute to the development of Lagos. Igbo investment in Lagos State is perhaps more than Igbo investment in entire Igbo nation. Igbo contribution to the revenue of Lagos State is not less than 40 percent of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of the state. Our exposure in Lagos is tremendous, it is not commensurate with the political attention and recognition we get.

“If a man calls himself a rat, the cat will eat him. If the Igbo in Lagos do not organise themselves as those who contribute to Lagos, Lagos will put them by the side. When Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was in Lagos, he was the leader of council in this place. At the time, Lagos and Ibadan were Western Region, Azikiwe was almost premiere of Western Region until the celebrated carpet crossing on the floor of Western House of Assembly.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that what is happening in Lagos, we hear it. The crisis you have in Ohanaeze is giving us sleepless nights. That’s why I said it is no longer necessary for us to stay at home and talk about it, that we must come here to talk. When I was growing up my mother taught me that brotherhood is paramount; that the enmity between brothers is often superficial, not deep.

“What is is the need that I’m the person you elected to lead you as the President General of Ohanaeze, I stay in Enugu to only write letters to you when there are issues here. I decided to come in person. What I’m asking is let bygones be bygones. When we quarrel, as everyone does, we must learn to reconcile.”

The President General said he had dissolved the election of Ohanaeze leadership recently held in the state and called for new election.

Addressing some placards carrying pro Biafra agitators at the event, Nwodo insisted that Biafra was not feasible and he would sabotage anyone who plans to bring another war to Igbo land over Biafra. Narrating his experiences during the Biafra war, he noted that what the Igbo needed was restructuring which he said Ohanaeze and other leaders of the South and lately the Middle Belt are pursuing.

Nnia Nwodo

“Our people are not happy in Nigeria. When you look around here, you see them carrying placards, talking to us about Biafra. It is important that anyone who is aggrieved should lay down his grievances so that we can discuss it.

“Let no-one touch them (the agitators) because they are my children. Whether I agree with them or not, they have a right to express their opinions. When I was their age, I was in the trench of Biafra fighting. I’m not sure anyone of them have heard the sound of a gun pass through their ears. My closet friend was with me in the trench when he died. He was hit with mortar which tore up his chest and he died. 3.5 million Igbo died in the war.

“One and a half million were those killed at the war front. One million died of starvation because we were blockaded. Another one million are Igbo children whose parents had been killed, they didn’t know who their parents were, they had no one to cater for them. Others were those in the hospital but there was no medicine to treat them. Those children were packed up in the C130 aircraft than was bringing food and weapons. They were tied in wrappers; those one-year-olds; two-year-olds, when the plan takes off, some will hit their heads on the steel work and die.

“Those who get to their destination are often not up to half of those taken. Those who eventually succeeded in getting to the destination were undocumented; nobody knows who their parents were. Many of them are in Gabon today, some in Ghana and some in Ivory Coast. They are in different countries of West Africa. Not long ago, the people of Gabon sued their president and said he should not govern them because he is an Igbo man. That his father, Bongo adopted him.

“Why I’m telling this story is that any Igbo man that says another war should be brought to our land, me, Nnia Nwodo will be a saboteur. Anyone my age who is afraid of saying the truth then know he has something to hide. The youths will do their own, but the evil that befell your parents must not befell you. That’s why Ohanaeze decided that what we are supporting is the restructuring of the country so that everyone will develop his place.

“Restructuring is that the present Nigerian constitution is a military imposition. I was in the government as the Minister of Information when it was written, they appointed Justice Niki Tobi to the committee that wrote the constitution. They wrote it without any constituent assembly; there was no referendum, nobody in this country voted for that constitution. I am a lawyer and I trained in the London School of Economics and Political Science where John Kennedy went to school. Anyone who read law understand what is a constitution not being autochthonous. What it means is that it was not consented to by the people. This constitution was never voted for; it was an imposition by a military government.

“As the Minister of Information in that government, I never participated in any debate on that constitution; it never featured in the Executive Council, it featured in the Armed Forces Ruling Council which was not elected and which was predominantly Northern. So it was an imposition of the Northern clique of military leadership. And it gave the North a pyrrhic majority in the national assembly. Consecutively, this national assembly which is presiding over Nigeria today can never take a decision that does not promote the interest of the North because of the history of this constitution and because of its makeup.

“We have asked for a conference of all the peoples of Nigeria, we have started Southern Leadership Forum constituting of the South East as represented by Ohanaeze, the South West as represented by Afenifere, of the South South as represented by PANDEF. We have reached a resolution, we want restructuring. We have recently been joined by the Middle Belt of Nigeria. This morning, the Northern senators published a rejoinder to our agreement. They called us people who were raising the political tempo in Nigeria. But they did not address any of the facts that we raised.

“I’m glad that before they met, the Southern Senators had met, the Southern Governors met and both groups in one voice, supported our stand for devolution of power in Nigeria. Our young men must learn.

“What an elder sees sitting down, a child will not see standing up. When you want to fight a war, you must ask yourself, how do I fight this war? In order to get a pride of place for every Nigerian in this country, we have to ask ourselves, how do we do it? If we go back to the trenches to fight, we are doing disservice to this nation, we are doing disservice to our children.

“I’m here by the grace of God because I was a lieutenant in the Biafran army and many of my friends and classmates who served in that army died. During the war, my friend who died in the same unit with me, his father was a federal minister here, Hon DC Ugwu. My father was a regional minister in Eastern Nigeria, our privileged backgrounds did not stop us from being soldiers. You could not be grown up in Biafra and not be a soldier. I don’t want this to happen to our children anymore. Because we can jaw jaw and produce the same results that we would have wasted lives trying to produce.

“In the Nigerian constitution, there is no provision for self determination; there is no provision for referendum. You cannot expect the Northern dominated National Assembly to vote for a referendum when they do not support it. Is it not surprising that the federal government of Nigeria supports self determination in Morocco but they do not support it in Nigeria?

“In order to get it outside the Nigerian constitution, you have to go and use the African Union or the United Nations. These are the only organisations to which Nigeria has subscribed which have them in their charter. In order to to invoke it in their charter, you have to get a resolution to the UN or the AU in their respective legal bodies. In the General Assembly responsible for this, how many people do you have there? If you go to the security council, any matter affecting a previous colonial territory of Britain, they defer to the voice of Britain.

“Right now, the British High Commissioner in Nigeria has already, before hearing our voice, said they don’t want self determination. The European Union has already rejected it in Catalonia. In the UN, we led a protest there when the General Assembly met. No UN official even addressed our protest. Up till today, then didn’t recognise that you visited them.

I lodged a petition with the Secretary General about the state of affairs in Nigeria, and he sent his representative in West Africa and the Sahel to meet with me. He came with nine officials and I told him why we can no longer hold this country together under the present constitutional structure. I told him that if you come to the East, in every major city, there are army and police patrols. If they were looking at national security imperatives, like drugs or weapons we will salute them, but they are toll gates. I proceeded to the president of Nigeria with the South East governors and told him the same thing. We are being treated like a defeated people; the South East is under siege.

But with restructuring, this will end. Restructuring means that federal police will no longer be sent to the South East to extort and intimidate our people. Restructuring means that every state will control it’s resources; it means that the oil in Anambra will belong to Anambra people, it means that the oil in Rivers will belong to the people of Rivers State. I means that the salt and limestone in Abakailiki will be owned by Ebonyi people. The states will control these resources, retain 50 percent and pay 50 percent as tax. Out of that 50 percent paid as tax, 30 percent will be put into a general pull to be redistributed for the benefit of everyone, while the remaining will go to the federal government to enable it handle matters of defence, immigration, international relations, aviation and customs. That’s how we did after independence. I’m a witness because I had come of age then.

“The first oil well in Nigeria was discovered at Oloibiri in Bayelsa State. My father had the honour and pleasure to commission that oil well as minister of commerce and industry of Eastern Nigeria. So, at that time, it was an Eastern Nigeria resource; it was not a federal resource. As soon as the war ended, and they saw that oil was now a growing resource in the world, Gowon changed the constitution. We became a unitary government, no longer a federal government, but they still call us federal republic of Nigeria.”

He further pointed out that because of the unitary system, everything, including education has collapsed.

“When I went to university, our universities were reputed. I had classmates who were not Nigerians; who were expatriates. White men as well as black men. Our entrance results were published in the newspapers, but they have destroyed everything with quota system.”