The Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB,
yesterday said that with the population of
over 70 million people and a total area of over
29,400 square miles, Biafra was big enough to
be a sovereign nation.
IPOB said there are nations that are
significantly smaller than the area both in size
and in population, adding that Biafra is
almost as big as Gambia and Sierra Leone put
together, and is bigger than Togo or Rwanda
and Burundi combined, and is four times the
size of the Republic of Israel.
Apparently reacting to President Muhammadu
Buhari’s recent call on Nigerian youth corps
members to tell their brothers to forget about
Biafra because according to him, Nigeria is
big enough to accommodate all and sundry,
IPOB’s spokespersons, Emma Nmezu and Dr.
Clifford Iroanya contended that they do not
need Buhari to lecture them on the resources
in Biafra land because they are already aware
of them.
Apparently reacting to President Muhammadu
Buhari’s recent call on Nigerian youth corps
members to tell their brothers to forget about
Biafra because according to him, Nigeria is
big enough to accommodate all and sundry,
IPOB’s spokespersons, Emma Nmezu and Dr.
Clifford Iroanya contended that they do not
need Buhari to lecture them on the resources
in Biafra land because they are already aware
of them.
According to the statement, “For us in Biafra,
we cherish and give the greatest priority to
human resource, unlike Nigeria which operates
a rentier economy with heavy dependence on
Biafran oil and gas resources, adding, the
excuse that Nigeria is big enough and
therefore Biafrans are bound by the sheer size
of Nigeria to be part of it, is not logical”.
The statement added: “It was because of the
control of oil in Biafraland that Britain in
1968 alone supplied hundreds of armoured
personnel carriers, APCs, 10,000 machine
guns, 20 million rounds of ammunition, 3,000
bayonets, 10,000 rifles with grenade
launchers, 15,000 pounds of explosives,
21,000 mortar bombs, 42,500 Howtizer
rounds, 5,000 submachine guns and deployed
other weapons of mass destruction in one year
alone, to the killing fields in Biafraland.
“Without this one-sided military support from
the British to Nigeria while at the same time
denying Biafra access to weapons, even
Buhari himself knows that there was no way
in a billion years Nigeria could have defeated
Biafra in a war and we want to make it
abundantly clear that the assertion by Buhari
that Biafrans must stay together with the rest
of Nigeria is not enforceable under any known
law on this planet earth”.
“The right to self-determination is not
synonymous with war or violence. Buhari
should therefore, not juxtapose self-
determination with war because the two are
not interchangeable.
The least he can do is to
use the instrument of Referendum to test the
resolve of Biafrans in their quest for the
restoration of the nation of Biafra. We will
also like to remind Buhari that the sovereignty
of a nation is not premised on size”. Vanguard
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