I cannot cry more than the affected Igbos, and to be honest, try as hard as I might, I know I will never be able to reach the uttermost depths of the Biafra angst.
My people did not suffer a genocide at the hands of their own supposed compatriots or fellow nationals. It doesn’t bear contemplation.
What Nigeria did to the Igbos was genocide. All protocols and parameters defining genocide were duly observed. It does not matter who threw the first salvo. It matters even less that a few Igbo soldiers may have been recalcitrant hitherto.
We will never have a nation until we make due reparations to that one child Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle’s “kill everything that moves” offence so cavalierly cast to the abyss of degradation and nothingness.
No nation worth its name decorates a soldier who makes sport of the prospect of killing a little child. A non-combatant innocent who did nothing to get the lot cast for it.
That we have not so far down our history – 50 years and counting – indicted just one Nigerian soldier, even if symbolically, for war crimes as happened at Asaba is beyond a tragic disgrace.
We are a collection of listless people in a riotous village square which we have audaciously designated a nation space.
Daily we birth children into the stock degeneration we refuse to repair. We have indicted our grandchildren unborn yet for the crime our grandfathers could have chosen to not commit in the first place.
This present generation is in the best position over others to begin the process of redress of the crime Nigeria committed against a component of Herself. We are aloof enough, having survived the more principal actors in the atrocity.
Shaking hands and mouthing “No Victor, no Vanquished” did not cut it then. Even now it is nothing short of a crime to so insouciantly gloss over the evil that was the Nigerian civil war.
It would cost us less than we fear to at least as a gesture of good faith, institute a national day of saying “Never again”…the Biafra Day. Our Nigerian Memorial Day.
That day when every human who fell from either side would be held in remembrance just so we can say with some decent level of honesty that indeed they were not vanquished by the fate of having been born Nigerians, and that death was not the victor over them.
Anything short of this, and these ones would remain in the state of perdition our collective prejudice, bigotry and callousness doomed them to in those 3 years of sheer depravity.
We slew our kin over a quarrel in the homestead. While we could in retrospect, defend our deed by attributing it to the menace of darkness, it would be more unconscionable a travesty that we would splash a lie over the blood at the crime scene just so we can go on and be merry by noontime.
Victims of genocide get some reparations of sorts – from acknowledgement of their victimhood to material compensation. That is the only way to symbolise contrition and future security. Anything less is papering over a decapitation site with talcum powder.
I am in full support of the stay-at-home resolve by supporters of Biafra and the Igbo Cause slated for 30 May, 2017. I would be personally chagrined on behalf of any self-employed Igbo who would open for trade on this day. I will not patronise them for any reason, and I would implore anyone with whom this conversation I have recorded here resonates to not patronise them.
In any thinking society such would be heckled for their lack of spine and purpose. Let your denial of patronage of such spineless persons be your own voice raised in condemnation.
We smote their parents, their grandparents without let up. We pursued them home and continued the slaughter. We killed at least a million children before they even had a chance to grow. We commited the worst of iniquities against the young – we seized the bread in their mouths, and watched them starve to death.
There should be one day at least when we are reminded of our beastliness. There should be one day for the walking wounded from the carnage that was “Biafra” to turn their backs on all monuments of camaraderie with the rest of us, go indoors and mourn for that child that had to close his eyes and bite into a meal of a roasted lizard as his pulverised brain closed in on itself from starvation of water and sodium.
If we cannot mourn for the men and women of Igbo land because of the selection of memories we would rather incline to, at least mourn for the children who never had a say about killing a Sardauna or going to war. The voiceless ones of Biafra.
For the sake of these ones, do not permit the Nigerian government to molest Igbo people who choose to sit in on “Biafra Day”. Speak truth to power on this matter. The Nigerian Police should be enjoined to support peaceful gatherings in chosen locations at every town where Igbos reside across Nigeria. If we would be decent, this should be done. Our government is impervious to the term, Decency. We should not follow suit.
We cannot guarantee the security of any Igbo person who chooses to gather in a rally tomorrow. We cannot make adequate restitution to the slain Voiceless of Biafra. We are not beholden to support IPOB, MASSOB, Igbo politics or the Igbo agitation in any way. We are not obliged to acknowledge what went on during the civil war for the genocide it should be termed.
We should at least not rub the salt our Confederate army withheld from the constitution of these Voiceless of Biafra into the gaping wounds of their successors by mocking the call to rememberance.
Do not lend your voice to the Government on this one. Once again the Federal Government of Nigeria is perched on the wrong side of history. Do not join them there. Separate yourself from them.
Thank you.
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