MILITARY OCCUPATION OF IGBOLAND WILL ONLY SNOWBALL THE BIAFRAN STRUGGLE AND RESTORATION by Ralph Tathagata.

Ralph Tathagata.

It is against man's biological and psychosocial nature to tolerate slavery, marginalization, and oppression forever. His spiritual nature also abhors it and will always resist it by any means possible. The subservient nature of certain groups of humans may prove otherwise - essentially, slavery is inimical to human nature and therefore stunts the growth of the evolutionary process.

Those who do not understand why young people are willing to lay down their lives because of Biafra should go back to their DNA classes. The resolute attitude of young Biafrans towards freedom may not go down well with many particularly the enemies of freedom and the career criminals who profit from this despicable horror, this colonial miscreation called Nigeria. Deploying armoured cars, occupying and shooting down harmless and peaceful protesters even in their bedrooms will only harden their will. Laying siege to Nnamdi Kanu's ancestral home will not accomplish anything either. The courage the world witnesses in several demonstrations of IPOB members is not a show of bodily and physical strength. It is an intrinsic part of the cumulative cultural and mental transformation of their being. It runs in the Biafran DNA.

Historical examples are handy about the Igbo readiness to lay down their lives for freedom rather than wallow in bondage. Igbo Landing remains a historic site in Georgia, U.S.A. to this day. In 1803, a group of resolute Igbo captives hijacked their slave ship in defiance to slavery in the United States. Rather than submit to the indignity of slavery, they sank the ship and drowned in the company of their white overseers. The British met their match in the Igbo, not in military might but in intelligence during and after the invasion of Arochukwu in 1902. Aba Women Riot of 1929 remains a notable instance of Igbo resistance to a cutthroat colonial taxation; while the Biafran revolt and declaration of self-rule in 1967 remains the most courageous in modern Black Africa.

Simply put, Nigeria and Britain did not conquer the Biafran DNA 47 years ago. They might have smashed their flesh and body to smithereens and reduced every physical structure to rubble but they did not wipe out the spirit behind their quest for freedom. Because the spirit of every revolution is far beyond the revolution. Even if Kanu is liquidated today, God forbid, the call for Biafra shall never cease.

That's why we still talk about Biafran Revolution after Dim Emeka Ojukwu was gone. That's why we still talk about American Revolution. That's why we still talk about the French Revolution. That's why young people still march on the streets of the United States and chant #BlackLivesMatter!# long after Malcolm and King Jr. were gone. That's why we still talk about Steve Biko and Black Consciousness in South Africa.

This now brings me to the psychosocial makeup of those (military and civilian) who are willing tools in the hands of criminal oppressors and captors. I don't care whether they're called Python Dancers or Buharists. The best way to profile this particular breed of puppets is to assert that they live comfortably below the threshold of evolution. It doesn't matter their academic and economic statuses. They may be Presidents, Governors, Professors, Supreme Court Judges, notable intellectuals, Journalists, traditional rulers etc. - but their capacity to cross the bestial threshold has been incapacitated by greed and ignorance. They rate pretty low through their utterances and actions on the evolutionary scale and therefore frustrate the neat evolutionary division between humans and their brutish cousins.

To authenticate the axiom that the Army treats you better dead than alive, the experiences of Nigerians in the hands brainless and robotic soldiers since 1970 have been nothing short of dehumanization, torture and systemic psychological and physiological impoverishment. To make matters worse, having captured the economic nucleus (oil) of the state and destroyed the cerebral backbone (education) of the masses, the intellectual comprehension, and analysis of the human condition by many educated Nigerians is now largely dictated by their stomachs rather than their heads.

In a nutshell, it's quite instructive to casually probe why Nigeria has been at war with itself after the Biafran genocide. Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, and Sani Abacha among other executioners of British war on Biafra have presided over the affairs of Nigeria after the war. During the regimes of these juntas, internal massacres and genocides perpetrated by brainless soldiers and the feral Hausa-Fulani jihadists were and still are recurring decimals in the land. In other words, it could be said that there has been a causal connection between the Biafran genocide and incessant spilling of innocent blood by Nigerian Army in the last 47 years. Nigeria has simply become a genocide laboratory for its own citizens.

Odi and Zaki Biam are slaughterous instances of intrastate genocides perpetrated by Obasanjo, one of the cold-blooded executioners of the Biafran genocide. From Gowon to Murtala Mohammed, to Obasanjo, to Buhari, to Babangida, to Abacha, to Obasanjo again and to Buhari again - the last 47 years have witnessed the most macabre recycling of necrophiles as Presidents who glory in slaughtering their own citizens right on their soil. Do we need to travel a distance in search of the reason why Nigeria has known nothing but needless deaths not just in human beings but in everything that makes life worth living?

Many of the young critics of Kanu and the Biafran struggle are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They work as official and unofficial PAs, lickspittles, online footmen and offline hoodlums to these octogenarian junks and relics in government who brought Nigeria to her current sorry state. For them, groveling in supplication for bread before men who have repeatedly raped the country for over 50 years is more dignifying than fighting for total freedom. But life is a choice. You're either in the camp of the oppressor or that of the oppressed. You either work in the interest of the captor or that of the captive. There is no middle-ground whatsoever. So everyone is free to work out their freedom or mortgage it and that of their unborn generation for a plate of nkwobi.

However, no amount of military intimidation and government blackmail via its nest of mercenary netizens will stop the struggle for the total emancipation of Biafra. Those whom the CEOs of Nigeria have brought over to strategically spin falsehood on social media in order to instill fear in the minds of young Biafrans are the worst enemies of freedom and posterity. Moreover, the sponsored PR propaganda of the Nigerian press appears belated to the Biafran quest to end Fulani anachronistic feudalism and internal colonization. Those who demonize Kanu and IPOB members who have never raised a finger to hurt a fly but pamper the Hausa-Fulani killer machine, notorious for the endless slaughtering of innocent and helpless children, women, and men, need to be psychoanalyzed by God himself.

No amount of doublespeak, either, will negate the fact that Nigeria was a British experiment in expansionist greed and colonial arrogance; it did not work for our parents and will never, ever work for us. It has always worked for a criminal handful of southerners who shamelessly participate in the Hausa-Fulani political and economic state capture. They mouth "One Nigeria" just to perpetuate their economic exploitation and devastation of the south. Where were these clangorous irredentists of "One Nigeria" when Obasanjo ceded Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroun? Everyone is free to keep nursing the delusional notion that these crop of criminals who have Nigeria in their pockets will ever relinquish their economic and political power and privilege without a people revolution.

Is Biafra the only marginalized group in Nigeria? No. But Biafra cannot afford to wait for other groups who apparently bask in their glorified statuses as free-slaves.

Let the Python dance its macabre dance to the death of "One Nigeria". It's all déjà vu after all. The Biafran drum of liberation shall never cease till victory is attained.

Meet Ralph Tathagata.

Vacancy by Pius Adesanmi.

Wole Soyinka's work as a teacher of his nation and people in the last seven decades can be summed up in one word: transcendence. His entire envisioning of Nigeria – for which he has suffered persecution, deprivation, abuse, insults and other unspeakable forms of punishment – is reducible to transcendence.

The tragedy of Nigeria is that there has never been a critical mass huge enough to embrace the intellectual and civic responsibilities of transcendence.

Justice, Soyinka says, is the first condition of humanity. Sadly, this is not his most famous ‘quotable quote’ among his compatriots. What many Nigerians learn by rote is that other quote from his book, The Man Died. The two quotes, as indeed the entirety of Soyinka’s work and vision, are rooted in a transcendent view of society and her future.

When Soyinka says justice is the first condition of humanity, he does not pause to enter qualifications, caveats, conditions, equivocation, and hesitation. It is a transcendent vision of justice, fairness, and society which foregrounds humanity beyond base instincts fed by ethnicity, religion, and politics.

In other words, when Wole Soyinka says justice is the first condition of humanity, there is no pause to determine your race, religion, ethnicity, and politics before the statement is deemed applicable to you. There is no equivocation because there is a very long history of hate, animus, and irreconcilable opposition between his own ethnic group and yours. There is no hesitation because you belong to Christianity or Islam, two faiths he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about. There is no qualification because of your political leanings or affiliation.

Justice is the first condition of your humanity. That is a transcendent envisioning of society that generations of his compatriots have not been able to rise up and embrace, bogged down as they are by invidious base instincts.

If you look at Wole Soyinka’s essayistic exertions since the beginning of the 2000s, you will notice an upshot in his preoccupation with terrorism, political sharianism, and other ideologies of hate and murder sallying forth from the warrens of radical Islamism. We have no greater intellectual and ideological opponent of these murderous ideologies and the philosophies they propagate than Soyinka.

Yet, the moment Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram, was extra-judicially murdered, followed by a heavy-handed military mop up in civilian warrens of Maiduguri, Soyinka, the transcendent envisioner of society, did not mince words. You cannot kill extra judicially. You cannot use the military for civilian mop ups in civilian spaces.

What Soyinka thought of Mohammed Yusuf, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism did not matter. His voice was not going to be associated with countenancing a society in which the outrage of the moment – Boko Haram, Islamic terror, - would become a valid excuse for the delegitimation of his transcendent vision of society – justice is the first condition of humanity.

The bane of transcendence in Nigeria is that too many people who imagine themselves grand envisioners of project nationhood are better off as companions of FFK, Fayose, Nnamdi Kanu, Asari Dokubo, Tompolo, Arewa Youths in championing transient and limited ethnic and political agendas.

If every outrage is tolerable and defensible because you support the President in power (everything you would not have countenanced under Jonathan suddenly has legitimacy for you now), if every violation is rationalizable for you because you have empathy for the political party in power, if the military in civil spaces is sweet music to your ears because of a long history of animosity between the three big ethnicities in Nigeria and just because your own ethnicity is not at the receiving end of such violations today, if every outrage is tolerable because you and the victim of the outrage are not of the same faith, you have no business in the business of trying to envision the future of Nigerian society.

Try any of the lesser occupations I will outline below. There are vacancies and positions to be filled yonder. You may have better use of your temperament and talents there.

FFK is again freelancing as a Yoruba irredentist because he has lost out of eating at the centre. Go and join him and Adeyinka Grandson and leave the business of envisioning Nigeria to those who believe in certain transcendent givens irrespective of ethnicity, religion or politics. Go and join Arewa youths or Asari and Tompolo. Go and join Nnamdi Kanu and his lieutenants. If what blocks your path to transcendence is religion and not ethnicity, go and volunteer in your Mosque as a muezzin and leave the business of envisioning Nigeria to those who have transcendent work to do. Go and join your Pastor and Daddy in the Lord’s protocol team. Go and join the social media vanguard of APC or PDP. Join the Buhari Support Organization or revive Jonathan’s TAN.

I find it truly amazing that folks would live in societies built on centuries of transcendent envisioning and sanction what is going on in Nigeria from the safety of transcendence. From Paris to Brussels to Manchester to Barcelona to Nice to London to American cities, I have lost count of how many lives civilization has lost to radical Islamist terrorism. Yet, after every ISIS-inspired attack, civilization kicks in. Political and civil leaders fill the airwaves with the need to maintain certain values, a certain vision of society.

All these cities have known neighbourhoods dominated by radical Mosques, deranged Sheikhs, and heavy civilian Muslim populations. I have never heard of calls for military operations in the radicalized neighbourhoods of Paris or London. It is still up to enhanced intelligence gathering and good old law enforcement.

Enhanced police sections are created and trained for the purpose. Never tanks rolling around in a show of force because some people are willing to turn the hate mongering coming from a particular mosque or the crazed preachings of one particular Mollah into an excuse to justify the overturning of the fundamental pillars of their society.

The worst you will get is Twitter rants from Donald Trump. If he could, he would have sent seals and marines and tanks to Dearborn, Michigan on January 20, 2017.

People will live in these kinds of places and spaces and mount high-wire opinions justifying the military in the streets of Umuahia. I don’t get it.

Justice is the first condition of humanity.

That is transcendent. Don’t add qualifications to it because of the religion, ethnicity, and party politics of your neighbour.