Igbo people and 29 May 1966 - Genocide, survival, remembrance.

  

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

[Hope] is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. “ Valclav Havel, playwright, poet, former president, Czechoslovakia, former president, Czech Republic.

 Good men and women are even better when they challenge safe zones of human thinking “ Ubaldo Rafiki to Herb Hirsch.

Tuesday 29 May 2012, marked the 46th anniversary of the start of the Igbo genocide. Beginning at mid-morning on 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, the composite aggregation of the Nigeria state “ military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, alimajiri, journalists, politicians, other public figures “ planned and carried out the Igbo genocide.

This is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It is also Africa’s most expansive and devastating genocide of the 20th century and the inaugurator of contemporary Africa’s age of pestilence. 

A total of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were murdered during those harrowing 44 months.

For the Igbo, prior to 29 May 1966, three important holidays were high up on their annual calendar: the Igbo National Day, the iri ji, or the New Yam Festival, and 1 October. The latter was the day of celebration for the restoration of independence for peoples in Nigeria after 60 years of the British conquest and occupation. Or, so were the thoughts predicated on this date’s designation.

Igbo or Nigeria?

The Igbo were one of the very few constituent nations in what was Nigeria, again prior to 29 May 1966, who understood, fully, the immense liberatory possibilities ushered in by 1 October and the interlocking challenges of the vast reconstructionary work required for state and societal transformation in the aftermath of the British occupation. 

The Igbo had the most robust economy in the country in their east regional homeland, supplied the country with its leading writers, artists and scholars, supplied the country’s top universities with its vice-chancellors (presidents) and leading professors and scientists, supplied the country with its first indigenous university (the prestigious university at Nsukka), supplied the country with its leading and most spirited pan-Africanists, supplied the country with its top diplomats, supplied the country’s leading high schools with its head teachers and administrators, supplied the country with its top bureaucrats, supplied the country with its leading businesspeople, supplied the country with an educated, top-rated professional officers-corps for its military and police forces, supplied the country with its leading sportspersons, essentially and effectively worked the country’s rail, postal, telegraphic, power, shipping, and aviation services to quality standards not seen since in Nigeria.

And they were surely aware of the vicissitudes engendered by this historic age precisely because the Igbo nation played the vanguardist role in the freeing of Nigeria from Britain, beginning from the mid-1930s. The commentator, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, could not have been more emphatic in summarising the thrust of the Igbo mission during the period:

The Igbo nation has attributes most other Nigerian nationalities can only dream of and are what most other nations are not. The Igbo made Nigeria better. Any wonder then that the Igbo can do without Nigeria; but Nigeria and her myriad nationalities cannot do without the Igbo? Take the Igbo out of the Nigeria equation and Nigeria will be gasping for air.

Genocide is the name

The Igbo’s break with Nigeria occurred catastrophically on 29 May 1966. On this day, starting from mid-morning, leaders of the Hausa-Fulani north region (feudal overlords, muslim clergy, alimajiri, military, police, businesspeople, academics, students, civic servants, other public officials and patrons), who were long opposed to the liberation of Nigeria (there were no comparable clusters of political, cultural, ideational, religious, national or racial groupings anywhere else in the Southern World, during the epoch, which had a similar, unenviable disposition of hostility to emancipation from the European occupation of their lands as the Hausa-Fulani leadership), launched waves of premeditated genocidal attacks on Igbo migrant populations resident in the north. 

These attacks were later expanded to Igboland itself, Biafra, during the second phase which began on 6 July 1967, boosted particularly by the robust participation in the slaughter by the Yoruba, Urhobo, and Edo nations of west Nigeria as well as others elsewhere in the country.

 The Yoruba support for the genocide, for instance, bears all the hallmark of a squelching cadence of opportunism. The Yoruba appeared to have lost, quite spectacularly, the 1930s-1960s Igbo-Yoruba competitive preparatory drive to develop the high-level human-power and ancillary resources required to run the prospective post-conquest state after the British departure. 

They therefore viewed the outbreak of the mid-1966 Igbo mass killings in the north region and elsewhere as welcome season to avenge their loss during the great socio-cultural rivalry of those previous three decades, clutching unto any bomb or missile available to lob remorselessly in besieged Igboland, into an Igbo home, Igbo school, Igbo shrine, Igbo church, Igbo hospital, Igbo office, Igbo market, Igbo farmland, Igbo factory/industrial enterprise, Igbo children’s playground, Igbo town hall, Igbo refugee centre.

 Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most fiendish of the genocidist commanders of the time had no qualms, whatsoever, in boasting about the goal of this horrendous mission when he told a 1968 press conference, attended by journalists including those from the international media: We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move.

 Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, Adekunle and his extended trail of genocidist hordes, starting from the sabon gari-killing fields launch pads that were Igbo homes and churches and offices and businesses in north Nigeria to the centre of Igbo territory, 400 miles to the south, did murder 3.1 million Igbo people “ a haunting tally which indeed includes those slaughtered during the Adekunleist everything that moves-targeting, duly promised in the infamous press briefing. As for the outcome of the things that do not move -assault category, the genocidists were hardly off target.

Their gratuitous destruction of the famed Igbo economic infrastructure, one of the most advanced in Africa of the era, is indescribably barbaric.

Olusegun Obasanjo, a fellow Yoruba commander who later took over the notorious Adekunle-led brigade and who would be a cantankerous human rights violator and very corrupt and inept post-genocide Nigeria head of regime for 11 years, expanded even further the barbarism of his predecessor particularly in his murder of hundreds of thousands of Igbo villagers and the expansive destruction of scores of Igbo villages in the Aba-Umuahia-Owere-Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt panhandle. 

On 5 June 1969, Obasanjo ordered Gbadomosi King, another Yoruba national, a pilot in the genocidist air force, to shoot down an International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 relief-bearing aircraft to the encircled and bombarded Igbo. 

As instructed, Gbadomosi King duly destroyed the aircraft with the loss of its 3-person. Amazingly, Obasanjo gives a blow-by-blow account of this outrage in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command, and  expresses a perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of the crime as he gloatingly recalls: The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando [officially-designated name of the Obasanjo genocidist unit] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned, and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division. 

Additionally, Obasanjo unreservedly admits, in his records, that his prosecuting genocidist regime (on the ground) had to rely on its key British government ally (see more below) to sort out the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane. 

It is this same Olusegun Obasanjo that the London Financial Times recently proclaimed the godfather of modern Nigeria without, of course, the irony intended.

If the Financial Times is correct, then Olusegun Obasanjo’s must be one of the most troubling terms of paternity that the world must have to deal with and those who call themselves Nigerians do have the scariest scourge of inheritance to live with. 

As the Financial Times is so enamoured of Olusegun Obasanjo, it is now incumbent on this publication to perhaps upgrade its client to some global status by naming two other countries from each of the following regions of the world to where Olusegun Obasanjo should also be installed godfather: Africa, Asia, Australasia, Central America/the Caribbean, Europe, North America, South America.

Nigeria’s genocidal campaign against the Igbo people was followed, subsequently, post-January 1970, by the genocidists implementation of the most dehumanising raft of socioeconomic package of deprivation in occupied Igboland, not seen anywhere else in Africa. The brigandage of terror includes the following 10 distinct features:

1. Seizure and looting of the multibillion-(US)dollar capital assets across Biafra including particularly those at Igwe Ocha conurbations and elsewhere and in Nigeria

2. Comprehensive sequestration of Igbo liquid assets in Biafra and Nigeria (as of January 1970), bar the £20.00 (twenty pounds sterling) doled out only to the male surviving head of an Igbo family

3. Exponential expropriation of the rich Igbo oil resources from the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions

4. Blanket policy of non-development of Igboland

5. Aggressive degradation of socioeconomic life of Igboland

6. Ignoring ever-expanding soil erosion/landslides and other pressing ecological emergencies particularly in northwest Igboland

7. Continuing reinforcement of the overall state of siege of Igboland

8. Nineteen cases of premeditated pogroms against the Igbo, particularly in north Nigeria, between 1980 and 2012: 1980 ... 1982 ... 1985 ... 1991 ... 1993 ... 1994 ... 1999 ... 2000 ... 2001 ... 2002 ... 2004 ... 2005 ... 2006 ... 2007 ... 2008 ... 2009 ... 2010 ... 2011 ... 2012

9. Ninety per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents since 1999 are Igbo people, according to the December 2011 research by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law “ an Onicha-based human rights organization.

10. At least eighty per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group’s attacks across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria since Christmas Day 2011 to date are Igbo.

 These latter measures, especially numbers 1-7 which inaugurated phase-III of the Igbo genocide on 13 January 1970, constitute one of the five acts of genocide explicitly defined in article 2 of the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life designed to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. 

We must not fail to add, finally, that these measures were drafted and implemented largely by Yoruba economists and lawyers led by Obafemi Awolowo and included, ironically, Sam Aluko who, along with all members of his family, enjoyed the generosity of a political asylum in Igboland when his life was in serious danger during the vicious intra-Yoruba political violence of the early 1960s.

The Harold Wilson-led British government of the day underwrote this devastating stretch of genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically “ from its early conceptualisation, liaising continuously with the Gowon-Mohammed-Danjuma genocidist cells of the Nigeria military at varying stages between January and May 1966, to the savage, spiralling aerial, naval and ground onslaughts on encircled Igbo population centres (the shooting everything -raging inferno) especially between March 1968 and January 1970. 

London’s strategic goal in supporting the genocide was to punish the Igbo for daring to spearhead the termination of the British occupation of Nigeria. 

Prime Minister Wilson was adamant that he would accept the death of  half a million Igbo if that was what it took the Nigeria genocidists to accomplish their ghastly mission.

This Wilson’s declaration on the Igbo genocide was in fact more gruesome than those made by some of the most vociferous Nigerian genocidist commanders and propagandists operating on the ground during the slaughtering.  

Such was the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s and head of government of one of the countries that actually drafted and a signatory of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide “barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide. 

As the final tally of its murder of the Igbo demonstrates, Harold Wilson probably had the perverse satisfaction that his Nigerian allies did perform far in excess of his grim target...

Ozoemena

Alas, Harold Wilson had apparently set the tone and benchmark of dispensability against which African life would be valued in Africa itself (particularly by the continent’s genocidist troopers, theorists “ for example, the infamous Awolowoists and neo-Awolowoists “ and allied officials) and across the world in the wake of the Igbo genocide. 

Forty-two years on, 12 million more Africans would be slaughtered in the ever-expanding killing fields of the continent:Rwanda (1994), Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s), Darfur “ west of the Sudan “ (since 2004), Abyei “ south of the Sudan “ (ongoing), Nuba “ south of the Sudan “ (ongoing), and in other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Cote-dIvoire, Chad, South Sudan, Burundi, Mali.

Not to the European World, though, does the Wilson malevolent logic apply.

On the contrary. For the European World, following the Jewish genocide of the 1930s-1940s, the purposeful resolve struck for the future course of societal direction and progress, rightly so, is ozoemena “never again. 

Never again, European World leaders affirmed, would any peoples of European descent anywhere and at anytime on earth be murdered so malefically and callously for any reason(s) whatsoever. 

In 1992, I published a satirical commentary entitled Is Bosnia-Herzegovina in Africa? in which I meditated on the ongoing robust intervention by the leaders of the European World of the age (Bush, Major, Mitterrand, Kohl) to halt the gestating multipronged genocide in the then Yugoslavia. 

For days, I was overwhelmed by this laudable intervention to uphold a key fundamental right of human beings “the right to life. The irony of this move was of course not lost on anyone. 

Since May 1966 some political leaderships of the same European World have, in complicity with their African clients in the field, waged or abetted campaigns of genocide against African peoples. 

Pertinently, the unfolding genocide in the Balkans that had elicited this intervention was very similar to what the Igbo and some other Africans had been subjected to during the course of the previous 30 years.

 I could not stop imagining what effect a similar intervention would have had on Biafra, the Congos, Liberia and elsewhere in Africa. 

If the peoples in Bosnia-Herzegovina were in fact Africans, I wondered, would there have been this high-powered intervention to stop genocide? Could Harold Wilson have waged a genocidal campaign against a European World people, for instance, during the course of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, similar to his campaign against the Igbo? If not, why not?

In the spirit of ozoemena, the Europeans successfully blocked the simmering genocide in the Balkans. Again, in the spirit of ozoemena, the Europeans worked assiduously to break up the immanently fractured states in the region (Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) which they knew could not guarantee the rights and aspirations of constituent nations and peoples “ a recipe for the perpetration of genocide. 

Since then, in the spirit of ozoemena, 22 new sovereign states, including Kosovo, have emerged in Europe. This is a figure that is four states less than one-half of the total number of so-called sovereign states in Africa, the latters much larger territorial size and population notwithstanding. 

On this score, is it not ironical that in the same week in February 2008 that US President George Bush ecstatically recognised Kosova rights to exercise their sovereign rights to declare themselves independent from Serbia, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was busy pressurising Africans in Kenya to forego their own sovereign rights “ demonstrated, in this case, by electing a government of their choice in December 2007.

So, as far as the European World is concerned, in the spirit of ozoemena, a European nation or people is deemed superior to the state. A people does not even have to feel threatened in the existing state where it is found to lose this status as the Scots in Britain currently demonstrate. 

This position is indeed correct for all nations and peoples, not just Europeans. African nations and peoples are also superior to the state. The nation, the people, is enduring; the state is transient. 

Peoples vs the state

That the state is inferior to its peoples, irrespective of race, continent, region, religion/belief system, is irrefutable. 

As a result, and graciously for that matter, Prime Minister John Major of Britain, back in 1992, did not utter some obscenity during the period,  his predecessor 25 years before, of willing to accept the death of one half million Serb or Albanian or Croat to keep Yugoslavia intact; neither did Major dabble into some nonsense of the inviolability or indivisibility of the Yugoslav state, an artificial assemblage concocted at the same time in 1918 as the equally inchoate Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union.

Pointedly, these two oft-repeated vulgarities, just quoted, were a favourite of Harold Wilson’s on Nigeria in the 1960s as well as by Nigerian genocidists whose state, cobbled together by Britain in 1914, also shares the same non-organic kinship as the central/east European examples. 

It is now evident that this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the worst in 20th century Africa would probably not have occurred without British active involvement. As a result, Britain, crucially, has played a key role in the emergence of the ongoing age of pestilence ravaging Africa. 

The continuing presentation of the British policy to Africa since the May 1966 outbreak of the Igbo genocide in both academia and media, particularly in the Western World, as that of some benign foreign state proffering aid/development programme(s) is at best evasive but at worst staggeringly denialist and thus fraudulent. 

It should also be recalled that in the two Igbo pogroms organised and perpetrated by Hausa-Fulani leaderships in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953), both during years of the British occupation and, with hindsight, dress rehearsals for the 1966-1970 genocide, the occupation did not prosecute those responsible for these crimes. 

It is indeed inconceivable that a contemporary British government would continue to delay any much longer the historic task of offering its unreserved public apology to the Igbo, one of humanity’s most hardworking and peaceful peoples, for Britain’s central role in the execution of this genocide and pay reparations to the survivors.

This 29th day of  May

Undoubtedly, 29 May 1966 is the most tragic day in the annals of Igbo history. It is the day that the Igbo were subjected to an overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen and women. 

The atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by the very state that the Igbo had played such a crucial role to liberate from the British conquest and occupation. 

This state, now violently taken over by murderous anti-African sociopolitical forces, had pointedly violated its most sacred tenet of responsibility to its Igbo citizens “provision of security. 

Instead of providing security to these citizens, the Nigeria state murdered 3.1 million of them. The anthem for the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly in Hausa on Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration, creating a continental precedent whose local equivalents Hutu and a string of Sudanese genocidist broadcasters would viciously reproduce during their own devastating crimes against humanity in southcentral and northcentral Africa 28 years and 37 years later, respectively, is unambiguously clear on the principal objective of this crime of genocide:

  

Mu je mu kashe nyamiri

Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su

Mu chi mata su da yan mata su

Mu kwashe kaya su 

translation: 

Lets go kill the damned Igbo

Kill off their men and boys

Rape their wives and daughters

Cart off their property

Yet this 29th day of May 1966 is also the Igbo Day of Affirmation. The Igbo people resolved on this day, the day that marked the beginning of the genocide, to survive the catastrophe when only few in the world thought that they would accomplish such an improbable feat. 

29th day of May 1966 is the day the Igbo people ceased to be Nigerians forever “right there on the grounds of those death camps in the sabon gari residential districts and offices and rail stations and coach stations and airports and churches and schools and markets and hospitals across north Nigeria. 

They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria, a genocide state, from accomplishing its dreadful mission.

The heuristic symbolism defined hitherto by 1 October shattered in the wake of this historic Igbo declaration. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship is the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder one of its constituent peoples.

The Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they cast adrift. 

Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state few prospects for the future as illustrated most cogently and graphically today “46 years to the day. 

Despite the four murderous years of siege, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past four decades of indescribable hopelessness. 

Surely, Nigeria could not recover from committing this heinous crime, this crime against humanity.

This 29th day of May is therefore a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginably brutish forces “local and external. 

It is the new Igbo National Holiday. It is a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo household anywhere in the world for the 3.1 million murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective Igbo rededication to achieve the urgent goal of the restoration of Igbo sovereignty.

An Evening Chat with IBB

But our generations, we are the ones who will say no, if you have a Muslim Governor, we must have a Christian as the Deputy Governor . 

If you have a bush man as the governor, you must have a man from the city as the deputy governor. 

And this is caused by all of us sitting down here, I mean the elites. 

The ordinary man doesn’t know it. By IBB.

Folks:

The above statement from IBB is what intelligent and gentle people like me I have been saying that was the root cause of the NATIONS War.

What IBB was telling these Ngbati Press interviewing him is very simple

He just told the Ngbati, Ngbati Press that, It was the tribalist, vicious, Ngbati, Ngbati Elites, the Academias, Civil Servants, Technocrats and their Ngbati Press that read meaning into the overwhelm defeat of Awo, Action Group Party in 1965 by Honorable Chief Ladoke Akintola as a defeat by the Gambaris, Malams and Gworo people through rigging to impose Moslem Hausa/Fulani Oligarch in Oduduwa Ngbati land.

They were joined by their reckless, indiscipline and lawless Ngbati students from UI, UNIFE, UNILAG, YABATECH, Adeyemi College of Education & School of Agric. 

I just simplified the Oyibo for people to know what IBB is saying during that Press Interview. 

OBJ, Professor Olunloyo, Akinjide, Akinloye, Akinfosile and Omoboriowo even said that the Ultra-Conservative, Tribalist & Vicious Ngbati, Ngbati Elites, the Academias, Civil Servants and Technocrats careless write ups that caused the war.

Late Professor Sam Aluko whom I don’t agree with but I agreed with him on this also said that the Ngbati, Ngbati people are the most DANGEROUS, VICIOUS, WICKED, TRIBALIST, HATEFUL and good for nothing tribe in Nigeria.

He even praised the Igbos as people who stick together to fight Nigeria when their people are attacked. He went to say that the Ngbati, Ngbati people can never do that because they suffer severe Cancer of Owamberosis. I said all they do is just write Ogbunigwe Grammars like yeye people they are. 

In what that surprised every Nigerians, even my good self to date was when he called World Press to publicly make the statements below.

My first son in America is a Compound Fool

My first son in America is a Compound Thief

My first son in America is a Compound TOTO Buyer

My first son in America is a Compound Alcoholic & Igboo Smoker.

My first son in America is a Compound Tribalist & Igbo Hater.

My first son in America is a Compound & Complete Toto & Nyash

My first son in America is a very controversial & troublesome child.

My first son in America, Education & qualifications was a complete waste of money.

My first son in America is a Compound wife Beater, like Panel Beaters beat damage vehicles.  

Folks, I don’t know about you but I had my differences with my dad when I don’t agree with him about his likeness for AWO but he never went to the public to say all these about me.

When a father say all these about a first son in Igbo land, you know that ARU EMENE [Abomination & Taboo have occurred].

This Ashawo Toto Boy, called Bolekaja Aluko have committed many abominations that made a father to call the World Press to give a Press Interview which was carried by BBC, CNN & all Nigeria TV, Radio Stations and Newspapers.

Is anybody still in doubt that this Ashawo TOTO Buy & vice Criminal called Mobolaji Aluko needs more Detoxification and Exorcism than anybody to talk about someone else needing it.  

And with this, I rest my case.

Chukwuma "Vicious Animal" Agwunobi

Please read the interview below with enough open mind, we are with you all the way.

IBB Interview: Why we left Gen Sani Abacha

Gen. Ibrahim Babangid interview by Vanguard Newspaper’s Wole Mosadomi

Former Military President, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida clocked 71yrs last Friday.  The celebration was low keyed as he chose to celebrate it with members of his immediate family with prayers in his hill top mansion, Minna, Niger State. However, on the eve of the birthday, the General who is still radiating as ever before spoke with Journalists on some personal and national issues.

How do you feel as you celebrate your 71st birthday?

All I can tell you is that I am aging gracefully and it is also an opportunity to try at all costs to think about the best way we could go forward so that we could channelize this virtue of ours towards achieving a greater country all things being equal.

Recently there were accusations and counter accusations in some quarters that the criminal activities of the Boko Haram sect could have been nipped in the bud if national and northern leaders like you have not been overtly or covertly involved?

Well, I think it is a democratic society isn’t it? Those who said northern leaders are involved in the activities of the outlawed organization or that some of us are involved, they know what to do and they should do what they ought to do so as to help all of us.
So I would ask them to do what needs to be done but I can understand because it is a Babangida and I have talked about that and I have said it not once not twice and even not thrice.

In fact again I said it, so forget it, somebody said it. Well I am quite comfortable that I said what needs to be said. I said that in a recent Press statement, so what else it is

How do you normally feel when you are accused of being involved in anything bad in the country?

Normally, I don’t consider it as a problem. To be very honest with you because in the last twenty three years or twenty two years , since I left office it is the same sing song either by the media or by the columnists and so on .

If somebody looks at me and say yes, during his time he likes corruption, now the question is, in the name of God, aren’t you capable of doing something for the last twenty two years  or you just fold your arms and wait until somebody does same thing? Look, there had been a lot of governments after I have left and governments are there for the welfare of the people. Or you mean you did not have people who are capable for correcting the wrong which somebody did or you just talk about it and you are satisfied.

When we talked, we offered solutions. When my Boss, OBJ {Chief Olusegun Obasanjo} and I talked we offered a solution, we offered a proposition. Is it not laziness for somebody to sit down and say when they were there what did they do. OKay, fine we were there but things were happening, we should not be deprived the right to make a contribution. We have Presidents who authorized Bombings of some countries.

They are not castigated because they organized this and that, but I do understand that this is Nigeria. May be in the 90’s, some of us should have come in the next fifty years. Some mindful people who would sit down and discern the situation. We look at things differently.

But I come to accept that for every subject you raised in this country you have as many as one hundred and sixty millions opinions. And if you are hypothetical people will still not leave you alone.

Supposing you are the President of this country at the moment what would you have done differently from what President Goodluck Jonathan is doing now that is in control as regards the issues of internal insurgency by the Boko Haram sect?

I think you should understand that President Jonathan, Babangida, Shagari, Obasanjo, Buhari, or anybody that we ran a new or developing country.

What we are going through now, other countries went through that, but through perseverance, hard work and ability to dialogue, these countries had gone and past over their problems. So, I think I am sensible enough to know that because you are a developing country, as long as we are ready to learn from our mistakes, we will get there.

I am talking about developing countries, we make mistakes. We went through a civil war and I don’t believe we will likely go again into a civil war despite the drums that has been beaten. But I am not sure and neither am I sure that you the younger generations would like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed when we went to war and we are not likely going to war again.

Don’t you think the prevailing insecurity engendered by the Boko Haram sect in some parts of the country is already pushing the country beyond the limit?

I have done what we ought to do because we support the President in his efforts to bring about lasting solution to the insecurity situation which we find ourselves because we don’t have any other country to run to. So, we must support any effort that will bring about lasting peace. So, we will continue to support him in that regard. Babangida’s Presidency expired about twenty two years ago.

Are you still considering going to Court with Chief Edwin Clark as stated in the Press statement released to the media by your Spokesman, Mr. Kazeem Afegbua, with regards to some perceived direct attacks on you by the first republic Minister on the recurring decimal of the Boko Haram bloodletting against some innocent citizens and the inabilities of yourself and other northern leaders to bring the sect under firm control?

Chief Edwin Clark is my friend and if you people like write it. He is my friend; I have known him for the last 30-35 years. There is a mutual respect between me and him. So, I wouldn’t get drawn into a face off with him because I do respect him and he would not deny me as his friend. So, that is settled.

If truly you are friends, why did the two of you decide to expose your differences to the world through the media?

If I would be honest with you, I think you heightened it and when I say you, I mean the media. You were supposed to look at what is sensible and write the sensible thing and throw away the nonsense.

Don’t you think that the insecurity situation in the country is capable of affecting negatively a smooth transition from civilian to civilian rule come year 2015?

Not at all, because when I was growing up I was involved in so many things in this country which bordered on what I will call stability of this country, from about 1963 and 1964, we were facing so many things like riots, Tiv riots, Isaac Adaka Boro insurgency and you name it including Operation Wet e. These are all because we are a developing country, so we went through what we had to go through but in a different dimension. I participated in virtually every operations from 1964, until I left office.

If we had to go through that and I believe it is a passing phase in the life of this great country. I once told some students in a Unity School that I did not have the pleasure or the Luxury of going to a School where virtually everybody is there.

But your generation, you virtually have a friend in virtually everywhere. So, one looks up that one day, you would come together for the sake of this country. From, my own observation and reading, what you guys write, I want to say that you have not done enough study, you have not done enough investigation to find out the causes of all these problems, not only Boko Haram but even communal clashes, boundaries between one tribe or the other could be in Akwa Ibom state, could be in some other places, including the problems between some Fulanis and some Gwaris and so on and so forth. Somebody should be able to tell us or to do a research of all these conflicts in parts of the country.

We want you to look back that during these years that God has been preserving your life even in difficult periods, about a particular incident that is still alive in your memory as unforgettable?

To be very honest with you, when in 1966 or about July of that year when we went through the first crisis, there was a feeling that the leadership at that time, that one part of the country that may be one part of the country does not want the other part of the country and so the best thing was and the best was to discontinue.

But you know the most important lesson which I learnt as a young Officer was the fact that the relationship we had established   with my colleagues when we were in the Military Academy or Nigerian Military Training College. But circumstances separated us; I was on this side of the war, while some of my colleagues were on the other side of the war. Honestly, what impressed me most was that when we met each other, we were not enemies; we still remembered our younger days when we were Cadets.

It was okay, political misunderstanding brought us into this war, but you did not have a feeling that somebody have had to kill nor injured his friend. Hardly do you find a country that goes through the civil war and still remain the same and this has been about forty two years ago. The credit goes to Nigerians.

But as a leader you have to go through certain things in life, sometimes traumatic, sometimes good. But somebody should be sitting down and assessing you how do you   react to situations or how do you feel about that. But I think on the sum total, God has been most kind to me.

What we had gone through in life is the challenge of leadership and we should not allow it to break this country because during bright period once anybody comes to Nigeria all he need is to pick up one of the newspapers and one would swear that in the next one week there would be war in this country. But there was no war, which means that the challenges were there but we have passed it

Recently you and your former Boss, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo decided to go to the media to advice the incumbent President, what you ought to tell him in private, was it that you had been advising him as elder statesmen and your advice or warning on how to resolve the present security challenges bedeviling the country were not heeded?

The answer to that is no. We are in very good terms with President Goodluck Jonathan. We talked to him,  but it is the same Nigerians that we once led and knew very well including one of your colleagues here that said I had never talked about the Boko Haram and that I had never addressed the issue because such people had never heard me.

I had been accused of not talking and what we said is that the President should take an opportunity of the  Ramadan period in conjunction with every other leader both current and former leaders to do something about this country in the spirit of Ramadan we should live in peace in the spirit of the season of fasting and prayers .

And we thought it is only appropriate that what we are doing is appealing to people on behalf of the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

People like you would say that formerly I was quarreling with OBJ and now we are talking together. But we knew who we are and there are certain things we shared in common. And if there is any man in the history of this country today that does not want the country to be disunited, it is OBJ; I also shared the same view.

So, we have something that is bigger than all the tantrums in the newspapers and the rest of them. So, if we have a common thing which is for the common good of the country, why not.

We had been talking and we want to disabuse your minds that we did not sit idle and not doing anything about the insecurity situation in the country.

Your Son, Mohammed Babangida has declared his intention to vie for the number one seat in Niger state.

No, let me correct you, he hasn’t because I read what he said. He said he is very grateful for the people of the state who considered him worthy of holding a new political office, period. He did not say he wants to be a Governor. I am very critical about this because it affects me and when big headlines stated what you have just said, I called his attention to it and his response was that I should go and read what he said. And he was quoted well.

In other words Sir, is your son, not nursing political ambition?

Well, political ambition for Mohammed , no he says if people  consider him  worthy  that he could consider it an honour done to him, but it could be chairman, Local Government, it could be  councellor and it could even be a Party Secretary {prolonged laughter } If you hear  him very well, a political ambition is not in,  I am grateful  that you considered me worthy .

Whether he would do it is a different ball game. But if at the end of the day my Son says he is nursing a political ambition against the next general elections, I think I would avail myself the advice that a father should give to his Son. He is a grown up man, I would lay everything on the table for him and I would have an opinion.

Can you critically assess the nascent democracy in the country as to whether they are performing very well or not?

I hate to talk about this, but I can always give you an example.  Well,   you   operate a democracy and I did not, I was a dictator, I removed a Governor for N300, 000 but no one can remove them now for N3 billion.

Why did you leave General Sani Abacha behind when you were stepping aside as a Military President?

If you remember very well, we had an interim government, that government had a life .We drew up a Constitution for that government. That government came into force in November 1993. And it was supposed to expire in February of 1994.

We needed to make sure that government was ably supported   by the Military so that they would be able to conduct an election in February of 1i994. And we can only do that, knowing the environment in which we operated, one we respect authority.

We thought then, quite rightly too that Ernest Shonekan should be supported by a strong Military so that the threat of toppling him did not arise. And they provided the stability for 82 days. That was the whole idea. And the late Abacha of course was the Chief of Defence Staff and the Minister of Defense.

And we felt if anything happened, the public can be rest assured that there was somebody still there with a lot of strength and experience who would still be able to pilot when it was necessary. But whatever happened subsequently, it was a different thing altogether. You know it as much as I do. It was not the fault of the Military.

What do you think can be done to continue to entrench   the territorial interest of the country in the light of the unfolding daunting challenges?

I think this boils down to pile up a lot of arguments. I will use our administration, what we tried to do to conquer that that thing you just talked about.  I mean the territorial interests of some people it was able to boil down to one thing. At various levels of leadership and we said that the process of selecting a leader at local government level, states level, states’ houses of assembly , national assembly , presidents and so on.

I think if you look at that, we tried to keep that system so that the ordinary man would check you if you want to become an elected leader because the society knows that there is something that makes you that famous face. May be the media would now have some things to say about potential presidents every time and they will bring it out if they are sure of their facts and he has to defend it . Where he could not, then he has to fall back himself.

I think we did not succeed yet at the time we were trying this idea. And the problem is always there because government is always seen to be an industry that everybody who wants to make it in life finds his ways there.

But for the ordinary Nigerian,if you know a town called Baga somewhere in Borno state. If you ever go to Baga, today you will find Nigerians from other parts of the country living there in peace, going about their businesses and that has been going on even before independence.

But our generations, we are the ones who will say no, if you have a Muslim Governor, we must have a Christian as the Deputy Governor. If you have a bush man as the governor, you must have a man from the city as the deputy governor. And this is caused by all of us sitting down here, I mean the elites. The ordinary man doesn’t know it.

In 1959,when we got to politics  the late Tarka  brought Ibrahim Imaam from Borno state to a Constituency in Tiv land in the present day Benue state . He placed him there and the Kanuri man was elected into the House of Representatives. If you go to Onitsha, a lot of people that come from there are Nupes from Niger state.

If you also go to Enugu state Umoru Altine was from Sokoto state. What did they called it in those days, chairman of the Enugu Council , he lives there, he works with them, he speaks the language and there was no problem as such. But we, all of us sitting down here have devised a  trick that if we cannot make it, we then must find a reason for  getting it

And if you know that you will be a Governor only for eight years, what is your problem about causing confusion. If you want to be, bid your time, do what is right so that the people will see you as a responsible leader.

What is the best way to keep this fragile entity called Nigeria the most populous black nation in the world together for the overall god of her peoples?

We need to be tolerant of one another; number two is maybe we don’t seem to utilize our experiences to shape our future. We have to come to terms with our years of dancing like going back and coming forward. If we are able to get things right without any anterior motives I think I still believe in this country and its unity.

Are we ripe for creation of the   state Police because of the fears being entertained in certain quarters?

When you say ripe, what do you mean? These fears manifested themselves in the 50s and part of the 60s when you had Yan Dokas or whatever you called it.

I think my take is that a fear that we established in 1950s why is it still hunting us because we are lazy and we have not cared to ask ourselves why these fears have persisted and this is what to do to eliminate those fears in our system.

I think this is the way I just looked at it . In other words, left to me, the whole purpose of government is for the security of the citizens like the security lives and property. And anything you will do to make sure these are guaranteed I t is in order in accordance with our constitution.

I don’t want to believe that because of 1959 elections, the Police or the Yan Dokas were used to beat up or harassed the people who were opposed to the government of the day. We are not in that sort of situation now. Yes it happened before, why should it happen now. People should try to move forward.

When we were in office we came out with the concept.  For example, the National Guards and that was the first thing that was criticized and we had to drop it. But people are coming back to talk about it.

It grieves me that because something happened in 1959, why Nigerians thing should can still think it can happen in 2012. A lot of things like the constitutional amendments have been put in place and I am not sure a governor would use the state police to intimidate the people who are opposed to them because the people can go to court and seek redress.

However I think the fears being expressed is unfounded to be very honest with you. The Federal Police takes responsibilities of all the federal laws of the country .The Police in the state, they have to operate within the law and I hope you know that.

So you are buttressing the federal efforts and some people seems to forget something  that if you have a state police in a local environment   like in Bida in  Niger state, the state police are likely to be very conversant with the local environment because they virtually know each other persons . So, the detection of crimes is not going to be a problem

Sometime ago there were presence of the Policemen specifically about two weeks ago and it did not take time to fish out the terrorists gang in Bida because the people knew where they were hiding. I have advocated for it in the past and I still believe it can be made to work.