IPOB LEADER MAZI NNAMDI KANU
RECALLED HIS
ORDEAL DURING
THE MURDEROUS ATTACK IN HIS COMPOUND
BY NIGERIA SOLDIER
> Long Reads
At the height of the war in 1969, 12,000
people a day starved to death in Biafra. More than 50 years later and the
violent persecution of the Biafran people by the Nigerian state continues
unabated. Nnamdi Kanu on his nation's battle for independence
It was 14 September 2017. I woke up with a
start. It was about 4pm. I was still recuperating, and I was sleeping that
afternoon in my room, and someone was shaking me and calling my name. I
blinked. I might have started involuntarily. I was in my old home in Umuahia.
My parents and other members of my family were there, brothers, nephews,
nieces, cousins. We had friends and supporters outside and inside. I had felt
safe, secure.
Then I heard the gunfire and I understood
what the man standing over me was trying to tell me. I had to get up. I had to
get out now. Soldiers had come. They were attacking the compound, shooting,
killing my friends and family.
But I refused to go. I suppose for a minute
or so I refused to believe what they were telling me: that the soldiers had
come to kill me; I would be shot in the head, dumped among my dead companions
in a shallow grave on the side of some road. They would say I had resisted arrest.
That we had opened fire on the soldiers. That we were to blame. But we had no
guns in the house. We only had our voices. And my men had been telling the
soldiers they had no right to enter.
My name is Nnamdi Kanu. I am the leader of
the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). All my life my colleagues and I have
been working for Biafran self-determination, the right for the people of Biafra
to choose their own destiny, to be free from persecution. You may remember the
Biafran war, 50 years ago. In May 1967 Biafra was left with no choice but to
secede from Nigeria only to face a vastly superior invasion army and a blockade
of food supplies supported by governments as diverse as the UK and the Soviet
Union.
You may remember those photographs of
starving children, their bellies distended, crying with hunger, crying without
tears because their tear ducts had dried up. Dying mothers, Biafran youth dead
on the roads around Port Harcourt. How many Biafrans were killed because of
this deliberate policy of starvation has been argued ever since. But it is in
the millions. We believe five million. Other estimates are anything between one
and eight million. But a handful of adults and children would have been too
many, never mind millions.
It was a terrible and inglorious beginning to
post-colonial African history. But that was 50 years ago. Now, today in 2019
the violent, brutal persecution of the Biafran people by the Nigerian state and
their supporters continues unabated. I will give you facts and figures. I will
tell you about the murders, the beatings, farmers driven from their land, young
men unarmed except with the flag of our country, shot dead in the streets by
those ostensibly sent to ‘protect’ us. I will tell you all these things.
But first… My men began to drag me from the
bedroom. I protested. I didn’t want to leave my home. I wanted to confront the
soldiers and ask them what they had come for. In just less than a month I had a
court hearing. I was determined to be there. My story would be told. The world
would know how the Nigerian Security Forces tried to keep me imprisoned without
trial on trumped-up charges. How they refused to bring me to court when a judge
demanded it. How they ignored the bail that had been posted. How there was
still some faint ghost of independence among Nigeria’s judiciary. I would stay
for that.
I was being bundled down the stairs and out
into the compound at the back, away from the soldiers who had forced their way
into the front of the house. My men pushed and pulled me towards the high
perimeter wall
Overhead I could hear helicopter gunships,
their propellers whirring with that sick, lazy beat they have when they hover.
More gunfire. Shouting. Soldiers shouting. My men shouting. I realised the
soldiers were not here to arrest me – they could have done that at any time.
These were crack troops; they’d called in the air force. They were not here to
negotiate my surrender.
I was being bundled down the stairs and out
into the compound at the back, away from the soldiers who had forced their way
into the front of the house. My men pushed and pulled me towards the high
perimeter wall which ran the full circumference of the compound. Ten feet high.
Somehow, they man-handled me to the top of this and I fell to the ground the
other side.
A sharp, sharp pain literally took my breath
away. My limbs flailed. My mouth opened but I couldn’t take in air. I had
fallen on my left rib cage. I gasped, convinced that I had punctured my lung in
the fall. I heard footsteps and people talking, more gunfire. And always the
sound of helicopter blades ripping up the air above me. Then I blanked out.
More than 28 of my fellow IPOB members were
killed that day. They had tried to defend my home, my family, without guns,
without clubs, only with their bodies and their words. The soldiers even shot
and killed the family dog. Initially the Nigerian army denied the assault, but
footage and photographs show the attack as it happened and its aftermath.
I wish this had been an unusual day in
Biafraland. Violence, harassment and persecution by the Nigerian state and
their unofficial militia are constant these days. Biafrans have been persecuted
and murdered since before I was born: from the killings of hundreds of Igbo
people in Jos in 1945 to the attempted extermination of Biafrans during the war
of 1967-70 and modern-day pogroms such as the on-going military attacks on
Biafra by the Nigerian Army known as “Operation Python Dance”. Then there is
the systematic cleansing of whole areas by Fulani herdsmen from the north. Biafrans
have been butchered for reasons that range from religious intolerance, economic
incompetence and xenophobic warmongering on the part of a Nigerian state that
can hardly keep itself together.
The case of the so-called Muslim Fulani
herdsmen from the north of Nigeria, who have already been recognised as
terrorists by the international community, is a perfect example of this ongoing
persecution. Government policies intended to take land from Biafra and give it
to Fulani from the north are driven by a strong undertone of radical political
Islam, their objective literally to change the landscape by creating a homeland
for the Fulani in the south in order to dominate Nigeria’s political space
indefinitely. The People of Biafra and the south of Nigeria are predominantly
Christian and Jewish. The Fulani and other people of the north are Muslim. I
don’t wish to stoke religious tensions – I am a man of faith and I respect the
faith of others – but driving out Christian farmers to settle Muslim herdsmen
on their land is not only economic insanity, it is ethnic cleansing.
According to the most recent Global Index on
Terror, the first and fourth most deadly Islamic Terrorist organisations in the
world operate in Nigeria. Boko Haram is first while the Fulani Herdsmen
represent the fourth. More than 1,700 deaths were attributed to the Fulani in
the first nine months of 2018. Little is done to stem the flow of violence from
either group. The Nigerian army avoids confrontation with Boko Haram and the
Fulani enjoy the tacit support of the Nigerian government. Meanwhile, the army
is busy attacking peaceful Biafrans under the smoke screen of ‘military
manoeuvres’.
What astonishes me, though, is the almost
total silence from the world’s media, politicians and the international
community surrounding this horrible persecution. The use of Fulani herdsmen to
drive farmers from their land, with hundreds of men and women killed in
peaceful farming communities in Plateau State and Adamawa and Enugu, documented
by the Global Index on Terror and confirmed by Human Rights Watch, ought to be
worthy enough of reporting. But we must add the killing and brutal beating by
the Nigerian army and police of anyone who supports the Indigenous People of
Biafra or calls for Biafran self-determination.
In 2017 Amnesty International recorded
hundreds of killings of Biafrans by the Nigerian state. These killings cannot
be disputed. The numbers since have not been collated but will be equal. Bodies
are buried in shallow graves, thrown in the bush or left on the street. Since
2017 state oppression has included: the beating of young men attending a
relative’s funeral in Onitcha in 2019; in August 2018 the arrest and
imprisonment in Owerri of 100 women protesting against violence carried out by
the security forces and specifically the attack on my home; in 2017 and 2018
brutal beatings given by Nigerian soldiers and police to anyone wearing or
carrying the Biafran flag, including a disabled man in Onitsha; the
indiscriminate burning down of houses by Nigerian Police in Abia State in
October 2019, because their inhabitants support Biafran self-determination.
The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) that I
lead, has one principal purpose: we call for the recognition of the Biafran
people’s right to self-determination. We pursue the right to self-determination
for Biafrans without the use of force. We uphold human rights. We reject
violence. Our successes are measured by peaceful protest, such as the
stay-at-home day we have organised on 30 May each year to commemorate the
Biafran declaration of independence in 1967.
And yet, despite the violence meted out to us
on such occasions, we are called ‘terrorists’ and proscribed by the Nigerian
government. No one else in the world has agreed with this move to ban our movement.
In a letter to the president of Nigeria in
March 2019, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights declared
Nigeria’s proscription of IPOB as a terrorist group and attacks against its
members as prima facie violation of the African Charter on Human and People’s
Rights. The outlawing of IPOB has given the Nigerian government an excuse to
send in the army and provided impetus for Islamist militias to drive us from
our homes.
Biafra has always been wealthier, better
endowed with natural resources and more creative with them than the north of
Nigeria. When Nigeria was created in 1914 the stated purpose by then Governor
of Britain’s West African colonies, Sir Frederick Lugard, was to marry the rich
South to the Poor North and even up the economics of both. It never worked. It
only forced together unhappy and angry bedfellows.
Almost from the moment Nigeria’s independence
was declared, the Biafran people wanted out, which led to the bloody war of
1967-70. Now Nigeria’s government, dominated for so many years by politicians
and top brass from the north, has set itself to oppose with full military force
peaceful calls for Biafran self-determinat
ion. No doubt they hope to stave off the
collapse of Nigeria, which commentators from all regions have recognised in
recent months.
I came back to my home country in October
2015 to try to help bring an end to the violence and persecution by peaceful
means. From London, where I had been living, I had set up Radio Biafra to offer
a platform for debate over the right to self-determination of the Biafran
people. Because of my activism and vocal criticism of the Nigerian government,
I was arrested, demeaned, degraded and treated atrociously and held without
trial in an undisclosed location for 18 months.
I was accused of treason and belonging to an
illegal organisation. I was denied the bail that had been granted me. And when
I was finally released on bail, less than a month before my court hearing, the
Nigerian army was sent to kill me as part of its ongoing activities against
Biafrans known as Operation Python Dance. So I wouldn’t have a judge decide on
my case in a free and open hearing. I wouldn’t be able to expose the attempts
by the Department of State Security to silence me. I wouldn’t have the chance
to turn the spotlight of the media on to Nigeria itself.
After that terrible day in September 2017, I
woke up in a safe house. I was in great pain. My left side was swollen, and
every breath was agonising. I had internal bleeding, a doctor told me, and I
was advised to rest before I could go anywhere. Then I remembered my parents,
my family members who had stayed in the house, young nephews and nieces. I was
told they had all congregated in my mother’s room when the soldiers broke in.
The room was peppered with machine gun fire.
At the time I knew nothing more. Later on I
discovered how, miraculously, no one was killed or badly hurt and the Nigerian
army let them be once they knew I was not in the house. But the attack took its
toll on my parents. My mother suffered heart complications as a result of the
trauma and stress of the Nigerian army’s invasion of my house. She became very
ill and died earlier this year. It would not be an overstatement to say that
the primary cause of my mother's death was Operation Python Dance 2. I have
lost a mother. My father, a strong man, a chief among Biafrans, has lost his
life’s companion. Sadly, we have watched his own health decline since the
attack on our home and my mother’s death.
I mourn my mother. I mourn all my IPOB family
member who had given their lives to protect mine. All those who have been
killed since, protesting the actions of the Nigerian security forces in
Biafraland. They were brave, good people. They should not have been forced to
make that sacrifice, but I will honour them for it until my dying day.
Eventually we were able to rent a boat on the
coast. We left from a small town in Abia, Azumiri, an unobtrusive place where
the Nigerian authorities might not have thought to look. We planned to go to
the Republic of Benin, just west of Nigeria. For 14 days we travelled in
dangerous seas in a small boat with an outboard motor. The Atlantic off that
coast is heavy, stormy, treacherous. On more than one occasion waves threatened
to swamp our little craft. I was still gravely injured and in need of constant
medical attention. At one point we put ashore to find ice to keep the
medication I needed chilled. It was a dangerous time. I stayed hidden in a room
while my companions went foraging for supplies.
From Benin I travelled by road to Senegal, a
distance of nearly 2,000 kilometres. Once in Senegal I was able to make
arrangements to travel to Israel. None of these journeys was easy. I was still
in pain and the threat from Nigerian agents abroad never went away. When we
stopped to rest on the road, I couldn’t go out. My world was shrunk to a room
with a window, and sometimes not even that. I might as well have been in
prison.
Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, all the
countries I had to pass through rely economically on Nigeria, their governments
corrupt enough to arrest me and send me back. I had to stay silent, unknown. I
couldn’t even tell my wife or family where I was, just in case they became
targets. It was agonising to realise that they didn’t know if I was dead or
alive. Israel was a haven for me, but it took over a year to get there, and
only then did I feel confident enough to let my fellow IPOB family members and
immediate family know I was safe.
The men who came to my family home in
September 2017, came to kill me. I have no doubt of this. If they wanted to
arrest me or question me, they would have sent the police or agents of the DSS.
Why send soldiers trained to kill, if not to kill? I had wanted my day in court
in 2017, but the military response tells me that the rule of law in Nigeria has
collapsed. Government agents act with impunity, and I include among them the
Fulani terrorists who are doing the Nigerian government’s dirty work, not one
of whom has been brought to justice for the murders they’ve carried out.
It is a sign that Nigeria itself is
imploding. The old order which has clung to power for decades can only survive
at the end of a gun. But even now, if a Nigerian government was willing to talk
honestly and openly about our demands and to consider a referendum on self-determination
for the Biafran people, in a neutral space provided by the United Nations, I
would be there at the table.
Look around Africa today. There are some
countries with a functioning democracy, where the rule of law is respected, and
free and fair elections allowed. But not Nigeria. Our struggle for
self-determination is the struggle of Africa's post-colonisation from Algeria
to the Cape. If we can achieve this, perhaps we can lead other African
countries to bring democracy and respect for law and human rights into the
lives of African peoples.
See video below
Compiled by Independent Premium
Rebroadcast: Odogwu Nwa Biafra: For TBRV NEWS
Nothing Destroys A Country Quicker than
Injustice
Written by Elochukwu Nicholas Ohagi
For Family Writers Press International
At times I try a travel into the minds of
those Nigeria soldiers the government do send against the IPOB members. I know
their mindset wouldn't be the same. IPOB family members that were attacked by
these soldiers comprises of both men and women, old and young. The soldiers
opened fire on them all, not minding who and who is there. Tear as was thrown
on those old people.
What would have been running in the minds of
these soldiers? Some of them, if not most will definitely be Moslems from the
North. They will be so happy they were sent against infidels. Yes infidels.
That's how Nigerians up North regards Biafrans down East. They will shoot at
everything that moves. Also there must be Igbo efulefus among them, who
believes in a one Nigeria that its President regards those from his side as
5%ers.
Same soldiers that run away in front of Boko
Haram terrorists, will dash in to shot people gathering in an open hall for a
meeting. For them they will keep killing them without them doing anything.
I am a person guided by history. I read minds
and project things through an intuition made possible by history. Some years
back, 1967/70 to be precise, the fathers of those Nigeria government are
killing today confronted Nigeria government and Nigeria lost more soldiers than
Biafra lost in that war. It took the targeting of schools, hospitals, churches,
farmlands and blockade for Nigeria to defeat those courageous and determined
people. But today, Nigeria soldiers invade peaceful people killing them like
they are killing worthless animals in games.
There are those rulers in South East whom in
their heart became so happy on hearing the news of the shooting, torture and
arrest of IPOB members in Ebonyi state. Serves them right is what so many of
them will be saying. Their bought over supporters will be happy. But one thing
is certain and sure. What ever goes around must surely come around. When that
rain will fall, it will touch every roof.
We can never forget that Fulani herdsmen has
killed in Enugwu, Imo, Abia, Anambra, and even in Ebonyi. No one called
soldiers on them. They weren't arrested, tortured or imprisoned. Rather they
have been rewarded with 100Billion Naira. It is easy for South East Governors
to allow the shooting of IPOB members that gathered for a meeting in their own
communities, than for them to confront Fulani herdsmen terrorists terrorizing
them. They blow hot when it concerns their brothers that committed no offense.
Some how peaceful gathering is a crime, but raping and killing Ndi Igbo in
their own communities is not a crime.
The South East leaders hopes much in the
power wielded by Nigeria government. They believed strongly in the brutality of
the Nigeria soldiers. They hope in the protection this brutality on innocent
people can gift them. But I can see doomsday coming. Anger is rising. Rising
than before. There is something people fail to understand, especially African
leaders. They so much believe in brutality. They believe mowing down people in
large quantity can instil fear into people and end an agitation. But have they
ever wondered why Biafra agitation is still on? An ideology can't be killed or
be held down in the dark grave of brutality. In 1967/70 you killed more than
3.5 million people. From that day till now you are still killing. We have woken
up to more than 50 bodies of MASOB members in Ezu River. Tortured and killed by
Nigeria security. In 2017, 28 youths were gunned down in Afaraukwu Ibeku right
inside the place of a king. Others were forced to drink and swim mud waters
along Aba Umuahia road. What of those killed in Asaba, Port Harcourt, Onitsha
Head bridge and Nkpor? Yet they are still demanding for Biafra. Even those in
jail without trial are not giving up. Can't you see that something is wrong
with those with the mindset of brutality? Like I said earlier, anger is growing
high and higher. Everyday people are removing the cloak of Nigeria and
embracing Biafra. You can't continue forcing Nigeria on people. Soldiers asking
or forcing people to present Nigeria identity won't make people to remain
Nigerians.
I see a peaceful people going all out to
defend themselves. I see today's Igbo leaders going on self exile. I see their
supporters running away. I see total breakdown of law and order. I see many
nations of the world disappointing Nigeria and demanding for dialogue. I see
the people insisting on referendum. I see them reject restructuring.
I see HausaFulani and Yoruba becoming one
lovely country ever after.
Injustice destroys a country quicker than any
other thing you can think of.
Picture: IPOB members being tortured by
Nigeria Military.
Elochukwu Ohagi is a Philosopher, Teacher and
Activist.
