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Coalition of northern groups urge Nigerian govt to allow South-East have Biafra

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The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has urged the Federal Government to accept the reality that the only remaining option to avert a civil war and bloodshed is for the Igbos to be allowed to have Biafra.

In a letter to the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Aminu Ado Bayero, the CNG said as a critical stakeholder in the affairs of the northern society, it sees the happenings in the South-East as a warning from history.

The letter, signed by the group’s Chairman, Board of Trustees, Coalition of Northern Groups, Nastura A. Shariff, read, “It is instructive to recount that the Igbo have benefited more than any other tribe in terms of economic monopoly and are the most accommodated and tolerated of all the ethnic groups in Nigeria, despite their notoriety for decency and etiquette globally.

“They have persisted in spiteful and vile threat on the disregard to every rule of vile threats on the whole nation as a catalyst for the kind of violence that the country faced in 1966 following the first-ever military insurrection by their kith.

“Setting the protocol for the unfolding agenda, the 1966 coupists decapitated the Prime Minister and the political leadership of the Northern and Western regions, leaving the zenith of Igbo leadership at the federal level and the Eastern region intact.

“Since that time, the Igbo have continued to intermittently taunt and rebel against the Nigerian State, demanding to secede and form an independent country called Biafra, which was among the key elements that culminated in the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970.

“Decades after, Nigeria is again witnessing the resurgence of separatist agitations, especially by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its ilk, as strategies employed to achieve the results that the coupists of the First Republic failed to realize.

“The scene began with the regrouping of the Igbo to launch a brazen, though relatively decent campaign for Biafra under the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB).

“This was eventually hijacked by another rogue group called the IPOB, led by Nnamdi Kanu whose violent campaign went beyond public lectures to the spread of xenophobic, hateful war messages, targeting the Nigerian state and other non-Igbo ethnic groups.

Read also: EYE FOR AN EYE: Nnamdi Kanu vows to avenge killing of any Biafran

“Kanu and IPOB’s activities grew exponentially, ranging from regions out of the South East ordering people of other particularly northerners, to open declaration of amassing of arms to fight Nigeria”.

Furthermore, the letter read, “Thus the targeting of the North and its people for attacks and irreverent treatment by IPOB and the Eastern Security Network, emboldened by the active support of all Igbo leaders, aimed at sparking off retaliation in the North with subsequent attacks to be perpetrated against Northerners in the South-East, thus making it likely to insist on dividing the country.

“The fact that the strength of the Igbo agitation rests on the youth who are mainly below the ages of 50, with diseased mindsets induced by their forefathers and encouraged by their political, cultural and religious leaders to take up arms against the Nigerian state and northerners, confirms that the nation’s unity is negotiable.

“It is therefore unreasonable for those older Nigerians who are mostly above 70 to insist that the unity of Nigeria is sacrosanct whereas the people executing the dangerous Southeast secession agenda are almost entirely below 50.

“To take urgent steps to check the mass movement of people from the proposed Biafra land into the vast interior of the North as well as the permanent nature of that migration. To set up machinery for the final evacuation of all Biafra indigenes from the North to their new country and the safe relocation of all northerners from the South East.

“Finally Sir, we submit that the level of anger elicited by the activities of the IPOB and its sponsors at home and in the Diaspora has reached the inevitable point where the Igbo must be separated from us by invoking the relevant statutes on self-determination entrenched in various international conventions and treaties to which Nigeria is a signatory.

“And for the avoidance of doubt, the North should no longer be expected to be restrained from paying back any further act of aggressive provocation on northerners living as minorities in any part of southern Nigeria.”

The group maintained that no one needs to be reminded that a destabilised Nigeria also comes with negative consequences for peace and security in the West African subregion as well as Europe, US and the rest of the global community.

Read the letter here

By Victor Uzoho…

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