…A Rejoinder.
By Oluchukwu Ukpabi
A few days ago, your medium had published Mr Agha Egwu’s essay with the above caption; here is my rejoinder to that piece.
Firstly, permit me to observe that MAD was fast becoming the medium of hope in so far as it concerns effective conscientization of beleaguered Africa through enlightened discourse, and courageous investigative reportage; and you must continue on this trajectory because you cannot afford to disappoint your vastly growing readership across the globe.
Reading through Agha Egwu’s suppositions, allusions, and conclusions in that essay, one comes away with a number of impressions which leave one wondering if he really meant to be taken seriously on some of the things he had said in the piece; this is because of the obvious contradictions in the essay. Mr Egwu evidently engaged in the fallacious practice of affirmation and negation on the same issues and based on the same premises.
Apparently building on the hackneyed “Igbo republicanism”, for instance, Agha Egwu asserts that “The essence of all Igbo leadership has always been open debate in the village square”, yet he goes on to demand that Ndí Igbo must respect and love “all our heroes warts and all”.
But the author should have known that the phrase “warts and all” means “including features or qualities that are not appealing or attractive”. So in calling Igbo to love and respect “our heroes warts and all”, he should mean that we should accept these “heroes” without any criticism of their faults thus negating his “essence of Igbo leadership”.
But then that leads to another demonstration of his ambivalence: for Agha Egwu, while Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe must be revered by Ndí Igbo without a mention of his fundamental errors for which we are suffering today, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu should be shredded and put down because Agha Egwu believes that, “The way we revere (him) is unhealthy….”
This nauseating attitude pervades that essay, and I will return to effectively respond to him on these shortly; however, it must be conceded that Mr Egwu had made some salient points that were deserving of affirmative attention.
Of such points is his argument that the Igbo Nation needed to get out of Nigeria at all costs; in stating this the author aligns with the wish of the overwhelming majority of millions of Igbo at home and in the diaspora. We note that Mr Agha Egwu could, perhaps justifiably, claim to have made some “influential” friends in the North of Nigeria: not long ago, he had co-authored a biographical book with one of such personalities from the North.
In recent times, there had been this beggarliness which afflicts some “Igbo elite”, and which makes them want to shove down our throats the idea that they were “made by friends from the North” and as such the Igbo Nation must forever remain in this slave camp called Nigeria; it must therefore go to Agha Egwu’s credit that he was courageous enough to align with the dire existential need of Igbo leaving Nigeria, in spite of such touted relationships with Northerners.
Agha Egwu had advanced two compelling reasons why the Igbo must leave Nigeria. The first of these reasons is the Jihadist agenda of the Fulani Caliphate, and his second reason was the deliberate and systematic strangulation of the globally acknowledged entrepreneurial spirit of the Igbo through official policies by the Fulani-controlled government of Nigeria.
The fact, however, is that in making these assertions, Agha Egwu merely adds his voice to the message which Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB have vehemently and clearly brought to the conscience of the world in the past few years at the huge price of their own blood for daring the rampaging Fulani Jihadist Caliphate propped up by Britain as their puppeteer.
Of course, this sorry situation is one that the world, especially the West must be persistently made aware of because the lack of this knowledge in the global community is the reason why some people living in truly human societies still consider the contraption something to preserve rather than a concentration camp which should be dismantled and the captives set free; a move that the world should consider an urgent humanitarian service.
As for all genuine Igbo, the need for full awareness of this dehumanizing situation is the reason why anyone preaching “one Nigeria” to them at this point will always be seen as an agent of devious subjugation and racial annihilation.
Thankfully, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB have made an overwhelming success of creating this awareness among millions of Igbo at home and in all the nations of the world, hence the present frenzy of the fully ‘fulanized’ government in Abuja to violently silence him, and the IPOB raging force of liberation.
This is one reason why men like Agha Egwu must be careful with their subtle and overt attacks on IPOB and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu because MNK and IPOB fully represent the only hope for our people’s liberation, survival and preservation. This is an irrefutable truth which Agha Egwu had hesitatingly acknowledged in his essay when he stated that,
“Only IPOB has the network and strength to achieve such a project (of effectively mobilizing for Igbo emancipation) and create jobs and businesses for millions of youthful followers. Only Nnamdi Kanu has the devotion, following and charisma that can make it happen quickly and effectively.”
The most unfortunate thing about most of those of Igbo extraction that mouth “one Nigeria”, and such hollow talks of “our beloved nation”, is that they knew so little about how much Nigeria is at once an unremitting cage, and a slaughtering slab for the Igbo, all in the pursuit of the Fulani Jihadist agenda.
Beginning from 1945, the massive slaughter of Igbo, engineered by the Jihadist agents, had continued with ever-increasing gruesomeness. The method had always been to start with subtle manipulations, and then graduate to violent take-over.
Today, emboldened by the success of their age-long moves to impose a sharia constitution in Nigeria which is actually what the so-called 1999 Nigeria constitution is, the complete seizure of all apparatus of government at the centre, and the imposition of lackeys as governors in virtually all the States of the South of Nigeria, the Fulani Jihadists have come all out to fulfil their goal, hence the orgy of blood all over Nigeria.
Not long ago, General Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s three-time head of government, and Theophilus Danjuma, erstwhile Chief of Army Staff had publicly alerted Nigerians of this bloody agenda. On his part, Danjuma had gone ahead to call on Nigerians to arm and defend themselves because the agents had already infiltrated the Nigeria security apparatus which was already colluding to enforce their plans in Nigeria.
In a later essay, I will do a more detailed overview of the history of this massive human tragedy because the world must fully know the truth on why Nigeria must unravel, and our people free.
The story of economic strangulation of the Igbo which Agha Egwu cited as the second reason why Igbo must part from Nigeria, and urgently too is even more confounding; this is so because the civilized world goes for productive and skilled manpower to bolster the growth of their nations.
This is the reason behind visa lotteries which is organized by America and some other nations; today because of this drive to attract productive human resources from everywhere possible, there are millions of Igbo professionals and academics who are magnificently contributing to their host nations in virtually all the nations of the world, but in their supposed nation the Igbo professional, academic and skilled labourers are a grossly endangered species.
War is an evil wind, however as an aspect of the dialectics of human society it had always led to more advancement, especially in the area of technology; the Biafra war of independence had all the potentials of creating an oasis of technological breakthroughs for Nigeria, and indeed Africa because of the ingenuity which was displayed by Biafra.
However, instead of harnessing this Biafrans technical development after the war, Nigeria made aggressive efforts to destroy all of that because of their hatred for the Igbo.
Senior military officers like General Samuel Ogbemudia who suggested harvesting and developing those ingenuities were hounded and shut up. Many of the brains behind those breakthroughs were either forced into exile or harassed and frustrated onto untimely death.
Dr Ezekiel Izuogu, the designer and producer of the first-ever truly the African car, and holder of the patent right to a number of other inventions was such a victim, Today Nigeria continues to suffer because of poor electricity production, but the efforts of the internationally acclaimed Professor Bath Nnaji to give Nigeria easy supply of electricity was rudely frustrated even after he had pumped millions of dollars into the project, just because he was an Igbo man.
Today all the potential ports in the Eastern corridor had either been abandoned or were being frustrated; aviation had been kept at barest services in the East just to make sure the Igbo does not raise his head. Igbo entrepreneurs and their businesses that try to brave the frustrations are directly targeted for destruction, examples of this like the experience of Chief Cletus Ibeto abound.
So yes, Agha Egwu was right: to thrive, the Igbo must get out of Nigeria; but he takes a sharp turn and destroys those fine points in his essay with his obsessive attack on Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB.
For him, the unprecedented sacrificial leadership which Nnamdi Kanu has demonstrated should not earn him the unflinching loyalty of our people which he enjoys, yet this same Agha Egwu demands that the Igbo Nation goes down on all fours to beg him to be our consultant before he could lend a finger to the liberation of a people he ought to be part of.
He would put down those who react to his inconsistencies as “silly”, but he does not see the silliness of asking those he claims to be his own to hire him as a consultant before he could contribute to their liberation; apparently, he was totally ignorant of the sacrifices of Dr Theodore Herzl, Albert Einstein, Chaim Weissmann, and a host of other Jewish professionals and genuine intellectuals whose voluntary services fostered the restoration of the Jewish nation in their ancient homeland of Israel.
The truth is, when one considers the banality of the thought-processes of some who claim to be Igbo intellectual elites, one comes to the conclusion that the coinage “otellectuals” may not be out of place after all.
Agha Egwu claims knowledge of the workings of the inner recesses of the mind of Britain, and that of our cousins in the coasts of Biafra, and what can be done to pacify them, yet till today all he could do is send “cryptic” messages and waiting to be hired as a consultant while our land and People lay besieged by a deviously voracious enemy; he really needs to work at warding off the tag “otellectual”.
I shall yet return to address Agha Egwu’s misplaced fight against bringing Zik’s legacies to the court of Mr Egwu’s “…essence of all Igbo leadership…” which by him is “open debate in the village square”. He needs to know that Zik’s lacklustre attitude towards building cohesion among the people of the Eastern Region, his lack of insight into the nature of the Nigeria contraption and what this portended for our people were the chains that had held the Igbo down in this cesspit today, and the new Igbo cannot gloss over this fact.
Edited by Robinson Afamefuna Ambrose
