The passenger wrote on Facebook:
Everyday I keep being reminded of the "Tao of Anyhowness" written by Victor. I have just been sitting on a plane for 3 hours whilst a "special task force" from the presidency has been searching every single item in the cargo hold individually.
This was done without a care for people's time, sensitivities or even their luggage.
Hiding behind the mask of the presidency is not what we are looking for and neither is it the change we sought, it's just more of the same.
All I can wish for these so called officials who didn't even have the decency, courtesy or home training to apologize is an infestation of locusts, lice and maggots in their nether region!!
OKAY
ReplyDeleteHe lost my respect with his last statement, i mean u are complaining of being disrespected yet in turn disrespect? Rubbish!
ReplyDeletenothing much happened naw
ReplyDeleteAunty linda....
Sh*t happens.
ReplyDeletenothing much happened naw
ReplyDeleteAunty linda....
nothing much happened naw
ReplyDeleteAunty linda....
Honestly I really don't get wat this piece is all about esp d lice and. Maggots may b if he just told is bot his plight in plain English language we would av understood d plane being searched was done on security intell dude didn't even tell us wat country dis wen done
ReplyDeleteHonestly I really don't get wat this piece is all about esp d lice and. Maggots may b if he just told is bot his plight in plain English language we would av understood d plane being searched was done on security intell dude didn't even tell us wat country dis wen done
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeletePARENTAL ADVISORY
***adult content***
Oga dey have every rite to search u bag, if don't want ur bags search, get a private jet....
Everyday I walk in d streets police men search my phone looking for fraudulent substances to extort money from a young man going about his legitimate everyday business, who did I cry to? Nobody...
And d last time I checked ur mobile phone shud be d most private thing to anyone....
So don't just pit on ur f**king suit forming fighter for d unjust....
Fight for everyone on d streets too, become a human right lawyer...
Lol well said
ReplyDeleteU wouldn't blame them,
ReplyDelete#IT will ONLY get BETTER
#it MUST end IN praise
a.k.a EDWIN CHINEDU AZUBUKO said...
ReplyDelete.
One of the many reasons i hate this country i swear.... #NowPlaying dodorima: tc peruzzi....
.
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***CURRENTLY IN JUPITER***
Lol. He's so pained
ReplyDeleteSorry Dear
ReplyDeleteLooking for where to get quality and affordable beddings? Order@ 5671CDBE, Whatsapp 08189677467 .Delivery available nationwide.
Very wrong.
ReplyDeleteNa wa oooo
ReplyDeleteHmmm
ReplyDeletenawa o
ReplyDeleteToo bad
ReplyDeleteGood son of Dr. Pascal Dozie. Home training and proper upbringing is everything!
ReplyDeleteThe state in Africa demonstrates a glaring inability to fulfil its basic role. It does not provide security and welfare nor does it enable the growth and expression of society’s transformative capacities. It is virtually at war with its peoples, having murdered 15 million in Biafra, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Darfur and southern Sudan, the Congos and elsewhere on the continent between 1966 and 2007. The typical African state, 51 years after the so-called restoration of independence, is essentially a genocide-state. Christopher Okigbo’s incisive scholarship, to the poet’s eternal credit, not only anticipated these developments, but it rigorously interrogated their tragic consequences. This is evident across Okigbo’s works, especially Silence, Limits, Distances, ‘Laments of the Masks’, ‘Laments of the Deer’, and Path of Thunder. Okigbo’s decisive intervention at this historic site of mapping out the tenets of Africa’s renaissance scholarship is his focus on both redeeming the European occupation’s assault on the spiritual embodiment of African existence, in the wake of the conquest, and confronting a ruthless genocide state-in-the-making in Nigeria of the first half of the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteOkigbo must have wrestled intensely with that crucial question posed by the Umuofia interlocutor in Things Fall Apart when the Igbo engaged a representative of the British occupation regime in a brief exchange of ideas on the pressing existentialist subject of the day: ‘“If we leave our God and follow your god,” asked another man, “who will protect us from the anger of our neglected God and ancestors?”’ Okigbo surely considered the answer to this question and other girding features related to it as a momentous task that required a rigorous and expansive scholarship of contemplation.
For Okigbo, the spiritual is a crucial sphere of resistance and restoration because the ultimate objective of the occupation’s assault is aimed at funnelling a catastrophic fault-line in the soul of the people – to complicate their determined process of recovery on the morrow of the restoration of independence. Evidently, Okigbo responds to this emergency by weaving a multi-layered and panoramic canvass of often-complex fabric of overarching architecture of ideas that meditate on the variegated ensemble, which constitutes the spiritual landscape of the people. This is the creative background from which the ‘poet of destiny’, about whom the distinguished critic Emmanuel Obiechina has discussed so authoritatively, emerges. In the 1960-1966 Nigeria context, Okigbo’s extraordinary interrogative scholarship of resistance pitches its tent squarely on behalf of those who would confront blatantly-rigged election results and imposed parties and leaderships, rigged census returns, arbitrary arrests and detentions, rabid and rampant authoritarianism and, most tragically of all, the Nigerian state-organised genocide against the Igbo people. 3.5 million Igbo people were murdered during the genocide between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.
Bane
Forty-one years on, it is the case that it is the African genocide-state that is the bane of African social existence. It is what constitutes the firestorm of the emergency that threatens the very survival of the African. It is not the ‘debt’, ‘poverty’, HIV/Aids/other diseases and the myriad of socioeconomics indices often reeled
off in many a commentary. Africa must resolve the contentious issues that fuel the conflictual existence of its peoples before achieving urgently needed socioeconomic transformation. This is a political question. The widespread feeling of alienation by most constituent peoples in the typical African state is palpable enough. Africans urgently need a principled, unfettered, and unsentimental debate on its genocide-state, with its ultra-centralising and utterly unviable ethos. Forty-one years on, it should be clear to all and sundry that genocide is obviously not a viable option to resolve Africa’s outstanding problems.
ReplyDeleteIn 1966, soon after the world commemorated the 21st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and made the customary solemn declaration of ‘Never, Never Again’, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, military officers, politicians and other public figures in Nigeria defiled that season of reflection, commiseration and hope. They planned and executed the first phase of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide in post-conquest Africa. This genocide became the clearing site for the haunting killing fields that would snake across the African geographical landscape in the subsequent 40 years. A total of 100,000 Igbo were massacred across north Nigeria and elsewhere in the country, with the active support of the central government in Lagos headed by Yakubu Gowon during the months of May-October 1966. Most were killed in their houses, offices, businesses, schools, colleges and hospitals, as well as those who were attacked at railway stations and on trains, bus stations and buses, airports and in cars, lorries and on foot as they sought to escape the genocide for their homeland in east Nigeria. Thousands of others sustained horrific injuries, several of whom were maimed for life. No known safe passages for the Igbo (victims or would-be victims) for flight or escape to their homeland from north Nigeria or elsewhere in the country were planned by any of the prosecuting forces involved in the genocide throughout the course of this tragedy.
Just as their German counterparts, the perpetrators of the Igbo genocide would claim to be ‘very cultured’ people: for instance, they read the Koran, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, Shakespeare, and other great world literature. Just as their Hausa-Fulani counterparts, the west regional Nigeria-based Awolowoist contingent that joined the genocide prosecuting squad on 6 July 1966 (civilian and military alike) would have regarded themselves
is there job to investigate olaniyidavid71@yahoo.com
ReplyDeleteas ‘very cultured’ – they surely read the Bible, as well as Shakespeare, Milton, Burke, Paine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Achebe, Okigbo, Soyinka. They listened to Dairo, Beethoven, Olaiya, Handel, Benson, Mozart, J. S. Bach, Okonta, Ellington, Onyia, Lawson, Ukwu, Osadebe, Mensah, Armstrong, Basie … Just as in Germany, the Nigerian planners of genocide demonstrated clearly that genocidist ‘theorists’ and colonels and generals were often calm, well-educated, cold-blooded practitioners, who were more likely to be dressed in agbada, babariga, 2-piece suits, dashing military uniform, aso oke or lace, rather than raggedly-attired, barely-educated ‘miscreants’, to quote a word often used in the Nigerian media. They were neither alimajiri nor the dishevelled so-called ‘area boys’ or street boys that abound in Lagos, Ibadan and several other Nigerian towns and cities.
ReplyDeleteEven though they had strenuously opposed the liberation of Nigeria from the British conquest and occupation, which the Igbo had spearheaded and sustained since the 1940s, the Hausa-Fulani had been assured and rigged into the supreme political power by the supposedly outgoing-British occupying state in 1960. The British intention was quite clear: they handed over power to the anti-restoration of independence socio-cultural grouping in the country that it felt confident would safeguard its vast economic and strategic interests in post-conquest Nigeria in perpetuity. As a result, the main thrust of Hausa-Fulani politics always operated on the premise that the Igbo constituted the principal ‘obstacle’ to the perpetuation of Hausa-Fulani sociopolitical hegemony in Nigeria. Hence, the plan and execution of the genocide.
Consequences of Africa and World Indifference
There was an extensive coverage of the Igbo genocide in the international media throughout the course of its occurrence. The UN, under its then secretary-general, U Thant, never condemned this atrocity unequivocally. U Thant consistently maintained that it was a ‘Nigerian internal affair,’ a cue seized upon with relish by the Organisation of African Unity, the African regional organisation affiliated to the UN, which continued to trumpet this shameful line throughout the slaughter. No efforts were made by the UN to stop the killings or bring the perpetrators to justice. On the contrary, U Thant repeatedly thwarted several Igbo initiatives, as well as those of others, to table the subject of the carnage formally for discussion at the UN, especially its security council. U Thant’s intention throughout this tragedy was to protect the interests of the Nigerian state, even at a time when its leadership had come to power through a violent coup d’état. As for the welfare of the 2 million survivors of these initial massacres who fled to their Igbo homeland, neither the UN nor the Gowon junta played any supportive role in the massive rehabilitation programme that the Igbo themselves embarked upon to integrate the returnees in society between October 1966 and June 1967.
Apparently emboldened by the scant criticism from the UN (and indeed from most of the countries of the world) for its 1966 murderous escapades, the Nigerian state expanded the territorial range of its genocidal campaign on the Igbo by attacking Biafra, Igboland, in 1967. Essentially, this inaugurated the second phase of the genocide which would go on till January 1970. Three million Igbo or a quarter of the nation’s total population were slaughtered during the period. It is precisely because the perpetrators of the Igbo genocide appeared to have been let off the hook for their crimes, by the rest of Africa and the wider world, that Africa did not have to wait very long before the politics of the Nigerian genocide-state metamorphosed violently beyond the Nigerian frontiers. Leaders elsewhere on the continent waged their own versions of the liquidation of ‘opponents’ as ruthlessly and horrifically as they could, à la Nigeria, because they expected no sanctions from either their African colleagues or from the rest of the international community. Soon, the killing fields from Igboland expanded almost inexorably across the continent as the following haunting milestones of slaughter during the epoch illustrate: Uganda, Zaïre/Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan. Twelve million were killed in these 13 countries. Added to the three million Igbo dead, Africa has had the gruesome tally of 15 million people murdered by its genocide-states in the past 41 years.
ReplyDeleteVulnerability and Depravity
ReplyDeletePatrick Wilmot has argued that the sociopolitical leadership in north Nigeria has ‘no tradition for managing social change. The only answer to dissent or rebellion is the massacre.’ Yet, to offer some rational explanation for a reason or reasons for a specific act of massacre of the Igbo carried out by this leadership is fraught with difficulties. For instance, when in November 2002 it ordered the murder of hundreds of Igbo immigrants in the north over the staging, in Nigeria, of the Miss World beauty competition (organised, not by any Igbo business interests, but by a London-based business conglomerate), it would have been most intriguing for any observer to discern the ‘Igbo connection’ that elicited this monstrous act. Similarly, an observer would be hard pressed to locate the ‘Igbo connection’ to astronomy as yet another gruesome example of an ordered Igbo pogrom in the north illustrates. In January 2001, hundreds of Igbo residents in the north city of Maiduguri were murdered by rampaging youths soon after a lunar eclipse was in progress. The émigrés’ homes and business properties worth million of dollars were looted or destroyed during the carnage. In February 2006, forty years after 1966, the fundamentals remain tragically the same: the north’s leadership ordered the murder of scores of Igbo immigrants across north cities, towns and villages over cartoons published in Danish newspapers, 5000 miles away, purportedly critical of the muslim religion. No Igbo artists were the authors of these cartoons, as the world knows; no Igbo newspapers or newsmagazines reproduced these cartoons; the Igbo, who are Africans, are not in any way related to the Danes, who are a European people. Some of those Igbo murdered in their homes, schools, businesses or places of worship, were probably never aware of the existence of these cartoons, let alone the controversy surrounding the drawings before they met their untimely deaths. Yet, the north leadership’s choice of the Igbo for ‘retaliation’ over the cartoons, instead of ‘venting their anger’ on the Dane (who are visibly resident in capital Abuja where they have their embassy) or in fact on any of the nationals from the other European Union member states in Nigeria, underscores the point of the haunting historical vulnerability of this immigrant population. It was of course the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, which pointedly began with attacks on these émigrés, that demonstrated the latter’s vulnerability most profoundly, and the depravity of the north leadership organisers, most chillingly. For the north leadership, which has since 1945 regarded the Igbo émigrés in its region as a ‘targeted population’ or ‘hostage population’ to attack at will in furtherance of its myriad sociopolitical positions and objectives, ‘dissent’ or ‘rebellion’ or indeed any other factors need not be necessarily associated or referenced to the Igbo directly for it to execute its deadly mission on the latter.
One of the tragic features of the Igbo genocide, as we indicated earlier, was the lack of concerted effort from the rest of the world
including governments and peoples in Africa, to stop the Nigerian state’s meticulously organised murders, rapes, lootings and destruction of Igbo lives and property that went on from May 1966 to January 1970. The world could have stopped this genocide, should have stopped this genocide, if it had really endeavoured to do so. What Africa needs urgently from the rest of the world, particularly from the West, is simply to withdraw their support for the continuing existence of the African genocide-state. This state’s ontological mission is to kill – and it surely accomplishes this most viciously as the Igbo genocide testifies. This state will lead Africa nowhere but to perdition. The Igbo genocide casts a distinct, enveloping shadow over contemporary Africa’s quest to formulate a way forward out of the debilitating quagmire of the genocide state. Without British complicity in the Igbo genocide, it was highly unlikely that that genocide would have been embarked upon in its initial phase by the operatives of the Nigerian state with such unrelenting stretch and consequences between May and October 1966. This great conference, being held presently in Boston, the United States, 5000 miles away, would probably have been held in a totally altered context. Without the massive arms support that Nigeria received from Britain especially, it was highly improbable that Nigeria would have been in the military position to pursue its second phase of the Igbo genocide – namely, the invasion of Igboland, Biafra – which resulted in the death of three million people between July 1967 and January 1970. The British government, despite continuously nationwide popular opposition, supported the genocide against the Igbo. Such was the intensity of the British support that even as the slaughtering worsened, Prime Minister Harold Wilson was certainly unperturbed when he informed C. Clyde Ferguson (the US state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, Wilson, ‘would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took’ Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. A senior British foreign office official, who echoed Wilson’s disposition to the slaughter, was no less chilling in his own characterisation of Britain’s strategic goal. Describing the British response to the concerted international humanitarian efforts then to dispatch urgently-needed relief material to the Igbo aimed at breaking the Nigerian comprehensive blockade of Biafra, a crucial plank of Lagos’s ‘starvation of the Igbo’-extermination strategy, this official noted that his government’s position was designed to ‘show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting the little buggers starve out.’ Pointedly, both views of these very senior British government officials were hardly at variance with those expressed, during the period, by Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most notorious genocidist military officers of the Nigerian mission, who insisted:
ReplyDeleteI think they have their reasons for doing that. TIMILEYIN BLESSING
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move.
Britain
It should be stressed that Nigeria did not have an arms manufacturing capacity then to embark on the latter phase of its mission without external support. Forty-one years on, Nigeria still does not have such an internal military capability. It still relies heavily on Britain, currently the world’s leading arms exporter to Africa, for its supplies. One immediate move that Britain, which earned the handsome sum of US$1.8 billion in 2004 selling arms to Africa, the West, and the rest of the world can make to support the ongoing efforts by peoples in Nigeria to rid themselves of the genocide-state is to ban all arms sales to Nigeria – and, by extension, to the rest of Africa. This must be comprehensive and not fudged. Nigeria, and the other African genocide-states, requires the political and diplomatic support from abroad and the deadly array of arms ever streaming into its arsenal from Britain and elsewhere to exist and terrorise the people(s) in its territory. This is part of the cardinal and enduring lessons of the Igbo genocide. An arms ban on such key states as Nigeria, the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, would radically advance the current hectic quest on the ground by peoples across Africa to construct democratic and extensively decentralised new state forms that guarantee and safeguard human rights, equality and freedom for individuals and peoples – alternatives to the extant genocide-state. Africans know very well that there are alternatives to the genocide-state. They have both the vision and the capacity to create these alternatives. Britain must now effectuate some measure of closure to its sordid anti-Igbo programme of 1966-1970. Indeed, it has no greater opportunity presently to permanently erase those ‘scars of Africa’ from its ‘conscience’, to quote the sentiment that former Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed repeatedly in many an occasion since 2001. Britain should now unreservedly apologise to the Igbo for its involvement in the genocide of 1966-1970 that cost the lives of 3.5 million Igbo and pay reparations to the survivors.
Governments in contemporary Britain appear to be steadily emerging from that mineshaft of infamy into which the Harold Wilson regime had sunk the country when it played a crucial role in organising and sustaining the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide. British governments, along side other members of the European Union, and the United States, have recently intervened robustly in the Balkans and elsewhere in the world to halt ongoing genocides or pre-empt those being planned. This is highly commendable. That essence of a shared humanity, which deserted the British government with such disastrous consequences in Igboland 41 years ago, appears to be crystallising as the core sensibility that shapes British relationship with the rest of the world – particularly beyond the West. In a move that lends further credibility to this observation, Richard Gozney, the chief British representative in Nigeria, recently condemned, without any reservations, the November-December 2005 Nigerian army and police killing of scores of young, unarmed, peaceful Igbo demonstrators, campaigning for the restoration of Biafran independence in several Igbo towns and cities. These murders and several others carried out earlier on in 2005, and in recent years, are a grim reminder to the world that Nigeria has not yet abandoned its endemic mission to murder the Igbo since the devastating genocide of 1966-1970. Of the 20,000 people murdered by the state and its varied agencies in Nigeria between 1999 and 2007, i.e., the years of the Obasanjo presidency, approximately 18,000 are Igbo. Gozney’s intervention, made in Umuahia, the heart of the Igbo country and scene of a spate of gruesome massacres by the Nigerian military 41 years ago, is therefore of historic significance. If Gozney’s predecessor at that post in Nigeria (in 1966) and the government in London at the time had adopted such a forthright and unambiguous condemnation of mass murder by the Nigerian state, instead of orchestrating and sustaining it, the Igbo people, Africa and the rest of the world would almost surely have been spared this sordid history. Britain must now realise that that Lugardian contraption called Nigeria, which indisputably has served London’s economic and strategic interests so profoundly since inception in 1900, does not and cannot advance the well-being of the Igbo and other nations of the south of the country, especially in the Niger Delta. Nigeria murders the Igbo; it indeed murders them most
ReplyDeletebrutally as we have so far shown in this paper. Presently, the Igbo and other oppressed nations in the south of the country have embarked on imaginative strategies aimed at the peaceful dissolution of Nigeria. This is surely an outcome that will create the condition for advanced socioeconomic progress in this part of southeast west Africa for the first time in nearly a century.
ReplyDeleteBritain must not stand in the way of this historic African initiative, its interests in Nigeria notwithstanding. Britain must now develop new sites of enterprise elsewhere in the world to generate the incredible level of financial returns that its Nigeria project annually accrues to its treasury in London. It is no longer tenable for these gargantuan returns to be appropriated in a genocide-state that has throughout its history sought to annihilate one of its constituent nations and devastatingly impoverishes the rest of the country. Britain, who, with its allies in the Balkans and elsewhere, has admirably been hunting down fugitive genocidist generals and their civilian counterparts to face trial for crimes against humanity at The Hague International Criminal Court, should now surrender to this same court surviving British officials (military, civil servants, politicians, academics, etc., etc) who were involved in the planning and/or the execution of the Igbo genocide. At The Hague court, these Britons must be joined by their surviving genocidist counterparts in Nigeria who include Generals Obasanjo, Rotimi, Akinrinade, Adebayo, Abubakar, Babangida, Buhari, Gowon, Haruna and Danjuma, Brigadiers Adekunle and Are, Captain King, and Messrs Enaharo, Ayida and Aminu, and tried for crimes against humanity. Most of these Nigerian officials have, in the wake of the genocide, run Nigeria as the degraded fiefdom that is shockingly recognisable by the rest of the world.
Britain should insist that any of its citizens and each and every member of the Nigerian regime who was centrally involved in the murder of 3.1 million Igbo people 40 years ago, and who, in effect, triggered off the chain of mass killings of 12 million other Africans elsewhere in the continent, must be made to account for their action at the International Criminal Court. Not to do so would be to send the wrong signal to Africa – by rewarding genocidist operatives who have the blood of Africans on their hands, and who have, in tandem, pillaged the Nigerian economy whose resources alone could easily have transformed the entire Africa. On the extent of the pillage in question, Nuhu Ribadu, the chair of the Obasanjo regime’s so-called economic and financial crime
Mr man would you have preferred a bomb went off on ur plane. The probably got intelligence from smwhere and in such circumstances you need to keep what you are doing private. What if there was a terrorist on ur flight, must they announce is, so the terrorist takes another alternative. Just be thankful and move on.
ReplyDeleteHmmm..."change" has come
ReplyDeleteOh! Its high time Nigerian official's and govt learn to respect d citizens bcos democracy is alll abt respecting other people. Too bad dat dis happened.
ReplyDeleteThat's so unfair.... all of them will suffer.
ReplyDeleteEven if they were acting on a presidential directive, they ought to exhibit professionalism.
ReplyDelete#ILLITERATES
There Must Have Been A Security and Safety issue better To Be Late THan To Be The Late
ReplyDeleteOur country gets more stupid by the day. And the officials we have in this country are worse than goats. Recently the road safety stopped a cab guy carrying an asthmatic patient to the hospital on the grounds of "the passenger has no sit belt on" like seriously? Who does that? When the lady slumped was when they all started panicking. How do you expect a person under asthmatic attack to use a seat belt? Do you want to choke the person to death? When we tried to talk to the idiot "boss" on duty the man was saying rubbish. If that woman had died after she slumped what would have been their achievement? They would have simply passed it as other cases. Officials in this country need to be educated thoroughly.
ReplyDelete*LIB JUDGE*
Respect. The more we respect ourselves and policemen the better for all. Your language condemns your mission
DeleteStupid fella.
ReplyDeleteIf there was a bomb on board that plane, you'd be glad they found it right? Human beings.
Sorry Sir,let me appologize on there behalf cos majority of d govt official lack good manners.
ReplyDeleteWe are in the era when those that usually talk are no longer talking
ReplyDeleteAs long as you a Nigerian -- You deserve no apology out there if u were right ... You are always wrong no matter how loud or quiet you are. But, just that been loud can even get ur butt kicked .. LOL .. Just quiet and observe but loud if u get yankee P ..
ReplyDelete