A South-East socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, on Saturday, June 24, 2017, has said that the quit notice issued to Igbos by a group of Northern youth amounts to treason as it is an obvious violation of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Nnia Nwodo, the president general of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, told members of the press in Enugu during the inaugurating the planning and strategy committee of Ndigbo, that the quit notice issued by the Arewa youth amounted to the declaration of a new state of Nigeria because without the Igbos, there can be no Nigeria.
Ohanaeze said it was worried that none of those who issued the October 1st quit order has been arrested despite directives from the Kaduna State governor.
The group also “doubts seriously if there won’t be conflagrations in the Northern part of the country at the expiration of the deadline if the quit order was not complied with”.
“Quite recently we have witnessed very provoking and unpatriotic remarks from Arewa youths. Their remarks have grown from whispers to a national quit notice to Igbos to leave northern Nigeria,” Chief Nwodo said.
“While we applaud the immediate and unequivocal condemnation of their utterances by the governor of Kaduna State, northern governors forum, the Middle Belt Forum and the rather mild and unequivocal condemnation from the Arewa Consultative Forum, the defiance of the Arewa youths by threatening and daring the police to arrest them, the clear incapacitation of the police and unwillingness to arrest them, their renewed aggression following the issuance of another statement involving an association of wider youth organisations in the north and the support offered to them by splinter elements of the northern elders forum point to a swell of reasonable support from a section of northern Nigeria.
“What remains worrisome is the incapacity of the police to make needful arrests in this situation, pointing to double standards from our security forces. A desire and public proclamation for a state of Biafra cannot be too different from a quit notice, which amounts to a declaration for a new state of Nigeria without the Igbo,” Ohanaeze said.
Leave The North By October 1 – Arewa Groups Warn Igbos
A coalition 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.
The northern groups’ threat to Igbos is now widely referred to as the Kaduna Declaration and has been widely condemned by public officials and political groups. However, it has also received wide support from northern elements like Professor Ango Abdullahi.
