Biafra Wants Self-Autonomy Not War, IPOB Tells BuhariBiafra group, Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, has informed President Muhammadu Buhari that Biafrans are not itching for war with Nigerian Government but wants to be granted independence as a sovereign nation.
IPOB leadership in press statement signed by their spokesmen, Barr. Emma Mmezu and Dr. Clifford Iroanya respectively, made it clear that if a referendum is conducted, Buhari will see that Biafrans do not want to be part of Nigeria any longer.
To drive home this point, the organisation pointed out nations of the world that parted ways because of incompatibility such as the old Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other nations.
The organisation prayed Buhari that he should not use size to determine a nation because there nations in the world that are not as large as Biafra yet they are sovereign nations like Israel and Togo among other nations.
Spurred into action by a statement credited to Buhari recently which he made to youth corpers in Daura, Katsina State, his state, that he fought for Nigerian unity in the 60s, therefore depicting the indivisibility of Nigeria, the organisation points out that Buhari did not arm himself with the true facts about Nigeria before making the offensive and odious statement which was reported by some media organisations.
What rankled the organisation most is that Buhari told the Nigerian youth that those fighting for Biafra had better forget it. To IPOB, this is sacrilegious.
“Retired Major-General Muhammadu Buhari was one of the group of Northern Nigerian soldiers that assassinated Major-General J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, a Biafran, on July 29 1966 and he was the same person that committed treason on 31st December 1983 when he violently overthrew a democratically elected Nigerian Government headed by Alhaji Aliyu Usman Shehu Shagari. After the assassination of Aguiyi-Ironsi in 1966, Muhammadu Buhari, in conjunction with some Northern soldiers, massacred two million Biafrans at Owerri in 1968. In return for his acts of savagery on Biafrans, Buhari was recently rewarded with the presidency of Nigeria even though he did not have the educational requirements to contest for that position. It was on the platform of the president of the colonial creation named Nigeria that Buhari delivered a speech to a group of graduates who were on a one-year compulsory National Service.
“In that speech to the graduates and according to September 14, 2016 editions of Punch and Thisday newspapers, Buhari was reported as saying thus: “Tell your colleagues who want Biafra to forget about it. As a military commander, I walked from Degem, a border town between the North and the East, to the border between Cameroun and Nigeria. I walked on my foot for most of the 30 months that we fought the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, in which at least two million Nigerians were killed.“ He was also reported as saying that: ”We were made by our leaders to go and fight Biafra not because of money or oil, because oil was not a critical factor then, but because of one Nigeria” and that “we must be together to build this country. It is big enough for us and potentially big enough in terms of resources.“
