Two groups in South West Nigeria, the Oodua Nationalist Coalition, ONAC, and the Oodua Liberation Movement, OLM, have issued a statement condemning the threat issued against Igbos by a coalition of Northern youth groups.
“Northern youths who ordered Igbos to quit the North are intolerant and lack basic respect for the fundamentals of democracy,” the Oodua groups said in a joint statement, e-mailed to The Trent on Wednesday, June 7, 2017.
In the joint statement signed by the groups’ officials, Mr Gbenga Awosode, Sunday Akinnuoye, and Mallam Suleiman Musa Akintunde said the position of the mainly Hausa-Fulani youths run contrary to the norms of democracy and human rights.
“Let it be known that we are hand-in-hand with the Igbo’s demand for self determination,” the statement said. “We support their protest. We will never allow what happened in 1966 to repeat itself. Enough is enough.”
“If the Hausa Fulani youths can ask Igbo to leave the North, their next target will be Yoruba, their historic enemy,” the group said.
The organisations also said that Nigeria remained an institution put together to repress the “culture and spirituality of nationalities’ saying that what keeps Nigeria together is greed, avarice over oil resources of the Niger-Delta people which a parasitic elite wish to exploit to parochial advantage.”
The statement also said that the order by the Hausa-Fulani youths was part of the plot to destabilise Nigeria in the full realisation that their kinsman is not presently at the helms of affairs due to ill health.
“Nigerians should be alert knowing that this this threat is coming few days after rumours of a coup became widespread,” the statement continued.
“But in reality, having Yoruba sovereignty is far more important than the Yoruba producing the president of Nigeria for ever.”The group said if the oil resources had been in the territory of the Hausa-Fulani North, Nigeria would have disintegrated.
“Nigeria is the chief most corrupt country. The country runs a constitution that has no input from the people. Politics is by exclusion. Greed, cold-blooded murder, unemployment, blind stealing, malicious state policies, misery and opulence of a malicious few are the major characteristic of Nigeria since 1960. When people ask they want to go they are asked to shut up,” the statement said.
“What we have seen is the increasing Talibanisation of Northern Nigeria by people who have no respect for the norms of democracy.
“The statement asking Igbo people to quit Northern Nigeria is misplaced, an assault on democracy and an extension of political terrorism”, the group said in the statement.ONAC and OLM said the demand for self determination by the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, (IPOD) and the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, (MASSOB) are recognized by the United Nations, (UN).
The Pan Yoruba groups stated, “IPOB urged the Igbo South East to stay at home. The people complied. For us this is the best form of peaceful protest any civilized nation could offer. This is far better than the situation in the North East where some people have taken bombing and armed uprising against the state. It is disheartening that these Northern youths lack basic knowledge about the workings of democracy and the fundamental principles accepted globally.”
The groups said the Northern youths were not speaking on behalf of the over 250 ethnic minorities in the North, adding that the group merely represent the “violent Fulani minority in the North”.
Leave The North By October 1 – Arewa Groups Warn Igbos
A coalition of prominent groups in Northern Nigeria on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 issued an ultimatum to Igbos living in the north to return home by October 1, 2017 or else they will face a situation similar to the pre-civil war pogroms visited on their kin in the 1960s.
The order was contained in an error-ridden statement, obtained by The Trent, issued after a meeting in Kaduna State. The groups, Arewa Citizens Action for Change, Arewa Youth Consultative Forum, Arewa Youth Development Foundation, Arewa Students Forum, and the Northern Emancipation Network, asked the Igbo residing in the region to “start making plans to leave.”
The chilling statement condemned the renewed call for the independent republic of Biafra and also expressed disdain for the Igbos and their culture saying that “the Igbo people of the South-East, not repentant of the carnage it wrought on the nation in 1966, is today boldly reliving those sinister intentions connoted by the Biafran agitation that led to the very first bloody insurrection in Nigeria’s history”.
In 1966, the Igbos were the victims of the largest genocide in Nigeria’s history with over 100,000 of them killed in Northern Nigeria by northern mobs. This pogrom led to the declaration of the Republic of Biafra which led to the Nigerian civil war in which over 3 million Igbos died.
