(Being the Position Presented to the World Media By the Lower Niger Congress On the Issues Arising from the Global Biafra Protests)
BACKGROUND
Nigeria was a colonial-era creation of the British. The country was on January 1st 1914 artificially cobbled together by the annexation the then Protectorate of Southern Nigeria to the then Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in an exercise officially tagged “Amalgamation”.
The mind-boggling failures of this otherwise giant promise on the African Continent has been the subject of many researches and academic inquisition.
Decades of routine, massive bloodletting which punctuate these monumental failures came to global reckoning in the years 1967-1970 when Eastern Nigeria, one of the four Federating Regions that constituted Nigeria, found itself in a genocidal war. The war was levied on it by the rest of Nigeria, having proclaimed itself the Republic of Biafra in a desperate bid to preserve the remnants of its population who were being decimated in mass xenophobic killings by rampaging Northern elements who clung unto a false interpretation of a botched military putsch in January 1966 in which leading Northern politicians lost their lives.
These pogroms collapsed the Union of Nigeria and the attempt to revive the Union failed in January 1967 after an Accord reached in ABURI was jettisoned by the Federal Side.
In the war that erupted, over 3 million Easterners perished amidst the search for self-determination, in circumstances that cast a shadow of doubt on the humanity of mankind of that era. The gory pictures from the killing fields of Eastern Nigeria, particularly defined by the bony frames of thoroughly malnourished infants, with protruding stomachs signaling the terminal stages of hunger-induced kwashiorkor.
At the cessation of bomb and bullet hostilities in 1970, the victorious Federal side isolated the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria and continued the War by other means, particularly on the economic, political and other fronts.
In the words of Lamido Sanusi Lamido, the immediate past Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and now the Emir of Kano:
“The Northern Bourgeoisie and the Yoruba Bourgeoisie have conspired to keep the Igbo out of the scheme of things. They have been defeated in war, rendered paupers by monetary policy fiat, their properties declared abandoned and confiscated, kept out of strategic public sector appointments, and deprived of public services. The rest of the country forced them to remain in Nigeria and has continued to deny them equity. Our present political leaders have no sense of history. There is a new Igbo man who was not born in a 1966 and neither knows nor cares about Nzeogwu and Ojukwu. There are Igbo men on the streets who were never Biafrans. They were born Nigerians and are Nigerians, but suffer because of the actions of earlier generations.
They would soon decide that it is better to fight their own war and maybe find an honourable peace than to remain in this contemptible state in perpetuity. The Northern Bourgeoisie and the Yoruba Bourgeoisie have exacted their pound of flesh from the Igbo. For one Sardauna, one Tafawa Balewa, one Akintola and one Okotie-Eboh, hundreds of thousands have died and suffered. If this issue is not addressed immediately, no Conference will solve Nigeria’s problems.” (Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, at a Public Lecture titled, “Issues in Restructuring Corporate Nigeria” 11th September, 1999, at Arewa House Kaduna).
For the sake of brevity, the Lower Niger Congress adopts this succinct 1999 encapsulation of the Igbo misery in Nigeria, though as to be expected, the situation has gone much worse for the Igbo, with the introduction of violent sharia by 12 States of Far North since year 2000. There is no doubt that the 1999 prophesy of Lamido Sanusi Lamido is simply fulfilling itself now, simply because nobody heeded that sober call for equity.
Needless to recount here the several debilitating Constitutional shackles, consciously emplaced by the same victorious Alliance of the rest of Nigeria against the East, in what now translates to a master-servant Constitutional Order, comparable only to the apartheid era South Africa, presently anchoring Nigeria’s “Democracy.”
It is against this backdrop that one can meaningfully examine the dynamics driving both the relentless, ubiquitous demand for ‘Biafra,” and the world-wide outrage of the Easterners against the incarceration and molestation of “Biafra” agitators.
It is also against this backdrop that one can appreciate the urgency of Richard Branson’s recent reminder to the whole world of this dark, shameful chapter of human history when he republished those horrifying pictures and war-time editorial comments on his Twitter page, indicting his home country, Britain, for leading other Allies, including the United States and Russia, to visit such genocide upon a people for no reason beyond oil.
Probably prompted by the resurgence of the agitations for the resuscitation of Biafra, Richard Branson had queried aloud, why 48 years after the Biafra Genocide, the World pretends that nothing happened.
••• OPTIONS FOR THE NIGERIAN STATE AND THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY •••
Perhaps, a brief review of the circumstances of the birth of Nigeria might help distill a clearer understanding of the present difficulties and a more informed solution model.
Recently Declassified British Colonial Records and Documents in Nigeria, obtained by the Lower Niger Congress and which have been widely published in the last five years, show that the Nigerian Union was deliberately skewed against the South in favour of the North, with a clear intent to create a permanent dominion of the North over the South.
For purely commercial reasons, the more endowed Southern Nigeria was politically subjugated to the North in what the British creators of Nigeria explicitly envisaged as a permanent marriage between a poor Northern husband and a Southern Lady of means that gives Britain an indirect control of the Country.
By a cablegram message of December 1913, the then British Secretary for the Colonies, Lord Harcourt, boss to Lord Frederick Lugard, had captured the purport and import of the impending Annexation of the then Protectorate of Southern Nigeria to the then Protectorate of Northern in the following words:
“We have released Northern Nigeria from the leading strings of the Treasury. The promising and well conducted youth is now on an allowance of his own and is about to effect an alliance with a Southern Lady of Means. I have issued the special license and Sir Frederick Lugard will perform the ceremony. May the Union be fruitful and the couple constant.”
It is noteworthy that the Amalgamation announced January 1st, 1914 was celebrated by grand durbars in Zungeru and Sokoto while it was greeted by loud protests amongst the then Lagos elite.
It was in celebration of this grand British bequest to the North, that the then Premier of Northern Nigeria, Sir Ahmadu Bello declared to his lieutenants in the week of Independence in 1960 that:
“THE NEW NATION CALLED NIGERIA SHOULD BE AN ESTATE OF OUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER, UTHMAN DAN FODIO. WE MUST RUTHLESSLY PREVENT A CHANGE OF POWER. WE USE THE MINORITIES OF THE NORTH AS WILLING TOOLS AND THE SOUTH AS CONQUERED TERRITORY AND NEVER ALLOW THEM TO RULE OVER US AND NEVER ALLOW THEM TO HAVE CONTROL OVER THEIR FUTURE” ~ Parrot Newspapers, 12th October, 1960.
It is self-evident that the current Constitutional regime in Nigeria is the full implementation of this script and it is within the context of that 1960 Mission Statement and Battle Script of 1960 that one can understand the mindset of the Northern political gladiators who in 2010 proclaimed that the North would make Nigeria ungovernable should Jonathan or anyone else from the South emerge President in 2011, since according to them, “it will be tantamount to stealing our Presidency.”
With all these in focus, the Lower Niger Congress posits as follows:
(1) That the Union of Nigeria was a grossly inequitable imposition on the Peoples Southern Nigeria by the British Crown.
(2) That all efforts to transform it into a Union of agreement had been frustrated by those from the North, who proclaim they were born-to-rule the rest.
(3) That the disputations constantly rocking the foundation of Nigeria are more of a deep-lying clash of civilizations than the previously held views revolving around shallow symptomatic issues such as economic disparity and corruption.
(4) That the twin phenomena of Sharia and Feudalism, make the Union of Nigeria unworkable since the faith and social dictates of one group requires them to kill the other group who they consider “infidels” and inferiors. Since no one can compel the Muslim North to abandon Sharia and embrace Democracy and Constitutionalism nor can anyone compel the Christian South to embrace sharia and feudalism in place of Christianity and Constitutional Democracy. It has been a Union of attrition.
(5) That the attempt to “equalize” the two mortally opposed civilizations saw the elevation of mediocrity in the name of Quota System and now “Federal Character” and the result has been the wreckage the world calls Nigeria. The frustrations arising from this has more than anything else, fueled the demand by the peoples of Eastern Nigeria to get off the yoke of Nigeria, with the routine bloodletting engendered by irreconcilable religious and political differences.
(6) That the issues that led to the Biafran War remain starkly unaddressed, as recently espoused by Senator Godswill Akpabio (Former Governor of Akwa-Ibom State) who also named the perpetrators of the Biafra Genocide to include Yakubu Gowon, Theophilus Danjuma, Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari.
(7) The geopolitical alignments that drove the 2015 electoral round re-enacted a sharp imagery of the geographical formations in which the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970 was fought. However anyone else may view it it, APC, was to the Peoples of Eastern Nigeria, simply the same old North/Southwest Alliance, formed to hound off Jonathan of Eastern Nigeria (apologies to Murtala Nyako).
The voting pattern in that election, forcefully reinforced this perception, reminding us of the painful past in which Eastern Nigeria was at the receiving end of the conspiratorial Alliance of the rest of Nigeria. The heavy, undisguised partisan involvement of the Western powers on the side of that Alliance in the rowdy 2015 Elections was a sad reminder of the unconscionable international marauding in the Nigeria-Biafra War as recently pointed out by Richard Branson.
The current escalation of the quest for an exit from the failed Nigerian Union must therefore be seen by the global Community in its true context as the continuation of an almost 50 years old fight for Self-determination driven by a clash of irreconcilable civilizations and cultures, erected by Colonial fiat.
Providentially, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, offers a fresh window of engagement with these volatile issues in a manner that steers everybody away from the specter of violence, since a simple Referendum can resolve the matter instead of War and violence.
It was in pursuit of this NON-VIOLENT option that the Lower Niger Congress stepped in in April 2015 by Convening a SOLEMN ASSEMBLY OF THE PEOPLES OF THE LOWER NIGER IN PORT HARCOURT 27th April 2015 at which it was unanimously resolved that the Peoples of the Territory shall go to a Referendum to determine their political future in exercise of their Right to Self-determination.
An 1885 Map of the Lower Niger (being the contiguous aggregation of the Ethnic Nationalities of the former Eastern and Midwestern Regions of Nigeria), was adopted as the geospatial description of the Territory and preliminary works are already in progress to achieve the Referendum in the first Quarter of 2017.
In choosing to Federate in this formation, deep consultations have been ongoing for several years now and an appreciable measure of consensus reached, having regards for actual ethnic demographics in the Territory, apart from the Decreed creations of Nigeria.
Plebiscites shall be used to ratify borderline cases where such needs arise. It will be recalled that Midwestern Region first opted to stay out of the Nigeria-Biafra War until the botched swift military maneuver of Biafran Troops to Lagos dragged the Midwest into the War.
Lower Niger Congress therefore invites all stakeholders including the International Community, to accept the pursuit of this peaceful process of Referendum as the most viable answer to the long-standing Biafra Question.
It needs be restated that what the Biafra Agitators are seeking is simply Self-determination, completely legitimate under the relevant United Nations instrument to which Nigeria is signatory. The method of pursuit is by way of a Referendum. It is therefore unnecessary to criminalize the agitations nor introduce violence as Nigeria seems to be doing in its heavy-handedness against the Biafra agitators.
In the same vein, the Lower Niger Congress also calls on the Biafra agitators to embrace the Referendum Option since it leads to the destination of the freedom they seek.
The Lower Niger Congress also calls on the Nigerian authorities to immediately release all persons detained in connection with the agitations for Self-determination and instead engage them in dialogue, as is done in a democracy, especially since the President of Nigeria had at 2015 United Nations General Assembly called on the World Body to facilitate the exercise of that right by the people of Western Sahara in Morocco.
ISSUED BY THE LOWER NIGER CONGRESS THIS 5TH DAY OF NOVEMBER, 2015.
FRED AGBEYEGBE (President)
TONY NNADI (Secretary-General)
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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