Femi Fani-Kayode, a former aviation minister and leading opposition figure in Nigeria, has condemned the threat by prominent Northern groups to Igbos living in the region.
Chief Fani-Kayode took to micro-blogging website, Twitter on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 to react to the pre-genocide threat issued by a coalition of Arewa Groups ordering that Igbos leave the North before October 1, 2017.
The prominent thought leader maintained that kicking the Igbos out of the North would not help matters in the country but rather complicate the fragile state of the nation.
“Threatening the Igbo and kicking them out of the north won’t help.This time round the Middle Belt and the whole south will stand with them,” the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, chieftain wrote.
“We want peace by restructuring and not violence. Unleashing genocide against the Igbo or anyone else in north will have grave consequences,” he added.
Threatening the Igbo and kicking them out of the north won't help.This time round the Middle Belt and the whole south will stand with them.
— Femi Fani-Kayode (@realFFK) June 6, 2017
We want peace by restructuring and not violence. Unleashing genocide against the Igbo or anyone else in north will have grave consequences.
— Femi Fani-Kayode (@realFFK) June 6, 2017
Leave The North By October 1 – Arewa Groups Warn Igbos
A group 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.
