Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, weekend, said it has
commenced the sensitization and mobilization of people on
the need and pattern for Biafran referendum which will soon
commence in the country.
In a statement issued in Abakaliki, MASSOB leader, Mr
Uchenna Madu, said the referendum was not only the need of
the hour but also the methodology for the actualization of the
sovereign state of Biafra in no distant time.
According to him, “the referendum will determine our future
existence as an indigenous people’ and undo the British
enslavement policies of the Ndigbo.”
The statement read in part: “The Movement for Actualization
of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, has started
mobilizing and sensitizing the people of Biafra on the need
and pattern of the Biafran Referendum that will commence
soon.
“We see it as the need of the hour, as every self
determination struggle had its methodology. The non violent
Biafra struggle and restoration urgently and earnestly
demands the long awaited referendum.
“MASSOB, Biafra Peoples National Council, BPNC, and other
pro-Biafran groups have resolved to thwart and undo this
British enslavement called marital union that will never work
again.
“We have also resolved to work in unity of strength, cohesion
and one accord pursuant to achieving a resounding
referendum exercise that will determine our future existence
as an indigenous people.
“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 violence option that MASSOB
support the Lower Niger Congress Solemn Assembly of The
Peoples of The Lower Niger in Port Harcourt on 27th April
2015 at which it was unanimously resolved that the Peoples
of the Biafran Territory shall go to a Referendum to determine
their political future in exercise of their Right to Self
determination.
“Nigeria was a colonial-era creation of the British. The
country was on January 1st 1914 artificially cobbled together
by the annexation of 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
1967-1970, 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 pograms collapsed the Union of Nigeria and the
attempt to revive the Union failed in January 1967 after an
Accord reached in Aburi, Ghana was jettisoned by the Federal
Side.
“In the war that erupted, over 3 million Biafrans perished as a
result of coalition of Arabs countries with Nigeria and British
sponsored Western back up 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 against the
people of Biafra in 1970, the acclaimed victorious Federal
side isolated the Igbos of Eastern Nigeria and continued the
War by other means, particularly on the economic, political
and other fronts.
“MASSOB draws more insight 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, MASSOB in consonant with 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 people of
Biafra, in what now translates to a master-servant
Constitutional Order, comparable only to the apartheid era of
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 people
of Biafra 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.
“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.”
Source... vanguard
