Genocidal Self-Incrimination by Danjuma

By Biko Agozino

In an interview with the Vanguard Newspaper, Danjuma confessed that he lost control after arresting the head of state, Ironsi, that he was sworn to protect and that he conspired to assassinate him in retaliation for the January coup of 1966 that even Danjuma acknowledged that Ironsi helped to end, that Ironsi arrested the suspects and jailed them to await trial. Danjuma claimed that they assassinated Ironsi and his Yoruba host, along with numerous Igbo army officers, in retaliation because it was taking too long to bring the suspects to trial and the press were clamoring for their release as national heroes. 

Danjuma did not confess that he has since also lost control of his village and that the same narrative of retaliation is being used to justify the genocide against innocent civilians all over the country. He wondered why the coup makers also killed military officers if they were only after corrupt civilians as if military officers were immune to corruption (no excuse for the assassinations) but he did not say why his retaliatory coup did not go to the prisons to get the coup suspects if their motive was retaliation. He did not spare a thought for millions of civilians killed in his so-called retaliatory coup that he confessed to in self-incrimination. 

There is evidence that more of the Igbo fleeing the initial pogrom from the North were waylaid in Gboko (home area of Danjuma) and systematically massacred as Soyinka recounts in many of his works in different genres and as documented by Obumselu in the massacre of NdiIgbo in Northern Nigeria. The genocide against the Igbo was led by Christian army officers from the Middle Belt and from the West but then blamed on the Muslim Hausa Fulani who are yet to brag about it like Jack Gowon, Theophilus Danjuma, Mathew Obasanjo, Benjamin Adekunle, Anthony Enahoro, and Jeremiah Awolowo with the rare exception of the boast attributed to Buhari that he was ready to kill the Igbo again with no regrets. 

Contrary to the claims by Danjuma, it was not an Igbo coup that killed leaders of other regions and spared Igbo ones (if they also killed Igbo leaders, that would not make it less treasonable). Officers from other parts of Nigeria participated in that coup and their plan was to free a Yoruba leader from prison and put him in power, something that Danjuma and co fulfilled. Yet, the genocide singled out the Igbo for total destruction, forcing the East to secede even though they were the ones persuading other regions not to secede earlier. What have the Igbo done to Danjuma to deserve such unrepentant genocidal hatred when everyone knows that genocide is never justifiable? Other coups have been done by officers from other regions (including the region of Danjuma) and yet no one has tried to subject the people from such regions to the final solution. Why the Igbophobia?

The questions that The Vanguard journalists should have asked the self-confessed genocidist Danjuma are what was the retaliatory cause of the riots against the Igbo during the colonial rule in 1945 in Jos when the war-time scarcity imposed by the British was blamed on Igbo traders and on the NCNC-supported general strike by labour led by Michael Imoudu? How about the Kano massacre of the Igbo still during colonial rule in 1956 following perceived insults to Northern leaders by politicians from Western Nigeria arising from the motion for immediate independence and the amendment of independence when practicable, was that also retaliation against the Igbo for what? 

The use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war' and the indiscriminate defoliation with abundant supply of weapons by the UK Labour Party government and the indiscriminate bombing with jets supplied by the Soviet Union and flown by Egyptian pilots against Biafran civilians, were they also retaliation, for what? How about the extra-judicial killings of innocent youth who have only ever called for a referendum on the future of the country and for the democratic right to stay home and mourn their dead by flying a Black Nationalist flag (that is actually more beautiful than the lame green-white-green imposed by imperialism) in honor of their dead ancestors, how about their proscription as terrorists while 'foreign' cattle herders who have massacred civilians all over the country remain legit? Where are the responses of the Nigerian pseudo-intellectuals to the admission of fascist genocide by Danjuma and co?

As Achebe, Ekwe-Ekwe, Jacobs, Adichie, Emecheta, Uzoigwe, Nzimiro, Soyinka and a few others documented, the genocide against the Igbo was premeditated by ethnic warlords who feared that the Igbo would dominate the country in open and fair struggles for scarce resources and it was orchestrated by the British who sowed the fear of Igbo domination due to the fact that the Igbo led the struggle for the restoration of Independence in Nigeria as Shagari admitted in a 1945 poem urging the North to join the struggle to show Waka to Boko. The Igbo have since demonstrated that they are not interested in dominating anyone but only in pursuing their livelihood through their own efforts despite systematic efforts to deindustrialize their home region, quit notices from other regions, and their exclusion from top political positions. Unlike Danjuma and his fellow self-confessed genocidists, the Igbo are not looking for retaliation but they will welcome reparative justice any day as the Justice Oputa Panel on human rights violations recommended. Other Nigerians will not lose anything when the government finally admits that a great wrong was done to the Igbo and atonements are made.

Recently, Obasanjo was reported as surrendering in his efforts to conquer the Igbo when he allegedly admitted that the Igbo cannot be conquered because they are democratic and not constrained by feudal institutions in their tireless efforts to uplift themselves and their communities against all odds. Colonial anthropologists advised Obasanjo to subjugate the Igbo by imposing traditional leaders on them after the war to make them more submissive like people from other regions, a thing that the colonial authorities had attempted before being defeated by the Women's War of 1929, leaving the East with no House of Traditional Rulers unlike the North and the West.

Obasanjo got it wrong because the other sections of the country never had a single leader compared to the Igbo who supposedly have only individualism. There have always been majority and minority politicians in every region of Nigeria (Aminu Kano in the North West, Waziri in the North East; Tarka and Lar in the North Central; Akintola, Agbekoya, Fela, Soyinka, and Falae in the South West; Boro and Ita in the South South; and Chike Obi, SG Ikoku, CC Onoh, Arthur Nwankwo and even Ojukwu in the East) in line with democratic rights to freedom of association. 

The Igbo have consistently voted their conscience for presidential candidates from other regions even against Igbo candidates in the cases of Shagari, Obasanjo, Yaradua, Jonathan and Atiku (they also elected a Fulani man as the Mayor of Enugu and appointed a minority Eyo Ita as head of government business in Enugu while Chimaroke Nnamani included a Yoruba man in his cabinet from 1999-2007 in Enugu). 

Apart from the Plateau State support for Azikiwe in the second republic and the initial victory of Zik in the Western region, no other region can boast of a similar detribalized record in supporting presidential candidates and yet the Igbo are still suspected of being a threat to Nigeria (the appointment of Okonkwo Kano, Ojukwu's uncle, to the Northern Legislative Council, the alliances that Zik formed across the country, and the election of Igbo candidates to the Federal House of Representatives from Lagos - that attracted threats of drowning in the lagoon if the Igbo did not vote a certain way preferred by a traditional ruler - notwithstanding). 

It is the genocidist generals who have dominated the misrule of Nigeria who should apologize to Nigerians for scapegoating the Igbo while giving self-confessed terrorists oil blocks, hundreds of billions, and political appointments to placate them. The result is that when the rain falls, it will not fall on Igbo rooftops only. Danjuma has since lost control of his village after leading the genocide against the Igbo. 

The solution to the genocidist states that imperialism foisted across Africa is the dissolution of the colonial boundaries to make way for the United Republic of African States or the Peoples Republic of Africa for which the people have voted with their feet as they transgress the imaginary lines drawn at the Berlin conference in search of their livelihood. The neocolonial states in Africa beg to be restructured in Pan African directions to prevent any group of genocidal trigger-happy killers trained by imperialism to attempt another genocide in any part of Africa without being stopped by the people who will be busy rebuilding Africa in leaps and bounds. Do Not Agonize, Organize!

Why Obasanjo May Be Heading To Hell

By Biko Agozino

General Olusegun Obasanjo who misruled Nigeria for eleven years recently went to Ibadan to curse corrupt and inept rulers of Nigeria, including himself, when he stated: ‘Maybe we are all going to hell’. He may have intended the ‘we’ to refer to all Nigerians but if I understand him correctly, he was referring to those of them with full responsibility for the misgovernmentality that has bedeviled the country before and after independence. No sane person will include blessed and hard-working Nigerians, high achieving individual Nigerians who excel internationally against all the odds and the victimized impoverished Nigerians who suffer a life of hell on earth due to the wicked misrule or incompetence of General Olusegun Obasanjo and his class allies among those who are condemned to hell fire by his own mouth. And some Nigerians have already said Amen to Obasanjo’s self-curse.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, saw things differently as early as the 1930s when he wrote a ‘Beatitude to the Youth’ of Africa in which he said alliteratively that ‘Blessed Are the Youth’ but in which he also concluded by echoing that ‘Cursed are the Old Africa’ for obstructing the emergence of the Renascent Africa and the new Africa. Then again years before he died, Azikiwe renewed this clear distinction of his by stating that ‘History will vindicate the just’ in a statement that concluded by re-emphasizing that ‘God shall punish the wicked’.

In the curse against himself and people like him, Obasanjo actually revealed the open secret why he suspects that Nigerian misrulers are jinxed. He stated in that rambling self-righteous monologue that he went to visit Mwalimu Julius Nyerere because Nyerere recognized Biafra and Nyerere gave him a simple riddle that he is yet to unravel. According to him, Nyerere told him that his ministers in Tanzania will claim that they were not corrupt and yet their infant children had numerous choice properties in Europe and North America. Why would Nyerere say that to an ethnic war-lord like Obasanjo?

Perhaps Obasanjo was arrogantly campaigning for support for the ongoing genocide against fellow Africans and had the cheek to go and attempt to bribe the revered Nyerere to end his recognition of Biafra. Instead of ending the recognition, Nyerere went ahead and named major streets in Tanzania after Biafra in protest against that monumental injustice of the genocidal killing of more than three million Africans under the command of Obasanjo and his hell-bent misrulers who cruelly declared that ‘all is fair in warfare’. Those iconic street names remain today in Tanzania while Obasanjo and his cursed fellow misgovernors abolished the historic name of the Bight of Biafra as if that will wipe away the evidence of their genocidal crimes against humanity. Today, simply flying the flag of Biafra in commemoration of the innocent dead in Nigeria (as is done in enlightened countries that use the opportunity to create flourishing tourist industries) will invite extra judicial killings that go on unabated.

If you are superstitious, you may point to the Igbo genocide as the cause of the curse that Obasanjo said was upon him and his class of ‘irresponsible’ marauders. The Bible commands that ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ and I understand that the Koran teaches that ‘If you kill one of God’s children, you kill all of God’s children.’ What part of that commandment do self-accursed misrulers like Obasanjo and his ilk not understand? They did not just kill one or two or three of God’s children which is bad enough – they killed three million plus. And yet more than forty years later, they have not offered any apology and they have not offered any reparations. As Nigerians always say, God is not asleep, and so it is no surprise that Nigerian misrulers are a condemned bunch, from their own horse’s mouth. They are all going to burn in hell for their evil deeds, according to Obasanjo. Why not? Except that God is a loving and forgiving God, quite unlike the unrepentant tyrants who are only paranoid about their deserved place in the afterlife. Repent!

It is not only Nigerian tyrants that appear to be cursed due to what Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe relentlessly condemns as the foundational genocide of post-colonial Africa – the Igbo genocide. All the countries that facilitated that genocide have apparently also been cursed: The Soviet Union has vanished from the world map and its successor, Russia, continues to battle insurgents in some of its regions; the UK is about to be dismembered given the impending vote for independence by oil-rich Scotland which will probably be followed by Wales and by Northern Ireland all of which already have their devolved governments; and Egypt which provided the air force pilots that bombed Igbo women in market places during the war now appears to welcome the chickens back to its own roost as the same officers trained by Mubarak when he was the commander of the air force college during the Biafra war now devour their own people in the thousands. What goes around comes around also in Northern Nigeria where the pogrom against the Igbo started and in the Middle Belt where most the killings took place when train-loads of escapees were waylaid and slaughtered. But the native doctor who concocts diarrhea cannot hide his own buttocks in the sky according to an Igbo proverb because when the rain falls, it won’t fall on one man’s housetop, sang Bob Marley.

General Gowon who presided over that genocide has gone around the country asking people to pray for Nigeria. I wonder what kind of prayers Nigerians pray for their country. It is likely to be the same self-glorious prayer that they say on their televangelist call-ins when they always ask god to destroy their enemies. Rarely do Nigerians admit wrong-doing and ask for forgiveness of their sins. 

When Chinua Achebe tried to heal the sore-ridden conscience of the nation in There Was a Country, the unrepentant blood-thirsty tyrants that were still alive and their phantom ‘intellectual’ lackeys pretended to be offended by the objective truth and went on boasting that the genocide against the Igbo was justifiable. Gowon’s initial ignorant comment was that he ‘did not know if Achebe will be getting a penny from that book’, a baffling response from someone who holds a doctoral degree from a top UK university.

Of course, no genocide is ever justifiable and condemning genocide is not about getting pennies. Thus General Gowon who reacted emotionally to There Was A Country without reading a single page of the damning book, has recently started singing a different tune. Perhaps for the first time, he now admits that lots of innocent fellow Nigerians were killed and their properties destroyed due to the abuse of power during the war and that there is a need for justice to be done to our fellow citizens. Belatedly, Ohaneze Ndigbo has set up a reparations committee to seek the reparations that were demanded in the recommendations of the official Justice Oputa Panel report which President Obasanjo attempted to suppress but was unofficially published online.

It is tempting to agree with the superstition that Nigerians, nay Africans and people of African descent globally are cursed. I have heard highly educated Africans explore this hypothesis that everywhere black people are in power, nothing seems to work because, as a pejorative saying among Diaspora people of African descent puts it, black people can’t run snow. Some of the people who hold this mistaken belief yearn for the re-subjection of black people to the terror of oppressive white rule or direct colonialism as the panacea for the perceived ineptitude or wickedness of black misrulers. But history is not a mystery.

Personally, I do not agree that Nigeria is cursed, for as Ola Rotimi would put it, The Gods Are Not to Blame. There are historical and structural reasons why people of African descent are suffering the incompetent leadership that we are burdened with today.  As Obi Igwe put it in one of his gospel songs, what we need are leaders (Ndi ndu, also literally, forces of life) and not rulers (Ndi ochichi, also literally, forces of darkness). There are some concrete steps we can take to reverse the ineptitude at the leadership level and uplift our people from avoidable penury in the midst of plenty:

First, I call for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be declared as a public holiday in memory of the millions who were genocidized in Biafra. During that day, every year, let all Nigerians embark on a general fasting and all the money saved on food and drinks should be donated to the Igbo reparations fund while parents will use the opportunity of the national demonstration of penance to teach future generations that what was done to the Igbo must not be allowed to happen again in Africa. This could be done also by using the day of mourning to promote history literacy through the communal reading of the history of the genocide.

Secondly, the Federal Government of Nigeria should allocate 100 billion naira every year for at least 40 years to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate (FIRM) as a token recognition of the inhumane crimes committed against our people by our own government. No group of Nigerians would lose anything when the government eventually recognizes that killing three million of our people was completely wrong and pays reparations. The amount suggested here annually is chicken feed compared to what one of these hell-bent misrulers steal with impunity relentlessly.

The Federal Government of Nigeria and Ohaneze Ndigbo should demand for the foreign countries that supported the genocide to contribute to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate because when this evil is recognized and forgiveness is requested through the token payment of reparations, the knock-on effects in the national conscience will yield a greater consideration for human life, create massive wealth that the cosmopolitan Igbo will spread across the country and across Africa for the benefit of all, and help to produce conscientious leaders who will help Nigerians and Africans to reach their full potentials.

Finally, Nigerians should follow the example of Nyerere, Nkrumah and Du Bois and recognize that evil against any African anywhere is not an internal affair of any country or state. Rather, we should fast forward the unification of Africa into the People’s Republic of Africa in a way similar to democracies of scale that are more viable because unity is strength. When Africa is finally united in a continental government, no single group of Africans will ever be able to wake up one morning, slap their buttocks, and embark on ethnic cleansing in Africa because the rest of us will rise to put an end to any attempted genocide in Africa by internal or external forces.