Nigeria not yet a nation, says Uwazuruike

The Leader of Biafra Independent Movement (BIM) Chief Raph Uwazuruike has said that ethnicity and tribalism still dictate the affairs of Nigeria indicating that the country is not yet a nation.

Uwazuruike, who delivered an address titled: ‘Anti-graft war: Why Ethnic Sentiments Will Always Frustrate Government’s Efforts,’ to mark the end of 2015 BIM security meeting at Mgbago, Umueri in Anambra East Local Council yesterday, decried the level of corruption ‘in high places of government’ and regretted that “Nigeria is the only country in the world where leadership offered political leaders the best opportunity to steal public funds and go scot-free”.

According to Uwazuruike, Nigerian politicians are mere pretenders who are ready to die for one Nigeria because of the opportunity the country offers them to steal from public coffers and “not because Nigeria holds any bright future for their children and children’s children.”

While predicting that Nigeria will continue to have problems because of persistent failure of her leaders to tell the masses the truth and because none of the leaders sees himself as a Nigerian first, he said: “Nigerians see themselves as Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo, Kataf, Tivs, Ijaws. That is why the Yoruba sentiment will always protect their own sons who looted Nigerian treasury. That is also why the Arewa sentiment will do the same for any Hausa/Fulani leader who starched away public money; and that is why the Igbo sentiment viewed a call to probe any of their own kinsmen who stole Nigerian money as a witch-hunt.”

In a statement issued by the national deputy director of Information for BIM, Mazi Chris Mocha, Uwazuruike said Nigerian leaders “are pretending that all is well with Nigeria when indeed the country is burning” and emphasised that, in Biafra, everything about corruption would be eliminated.

According to him, “Nigerian leaders have always pretended to have a nation, when actually they have been fumbling and wobbling since independence in 1960, and recall that before independence we had Sabongeri quarters in the North where non-northerners, mostly people from Eastern Nigeria lived. Also in the West, one could easily see people of northern region in isolated spots, insisting that forcing such angry and desperate people who felt being cheated to live together as one people is trying to mix water and oil.

“That was why we had the pogrom and the wickedness with which it was carried out.

“That was also reason why we had the July 29, 1966 coup with the hatred behind its ugly execution and that was why we had the Biafra – Nigeria civil war with the bitterness with which the war was fought”.

He lamented that Eastern Nigerians had been the most tragic victims of religious crises in Nigeria and there is no end in sight just as “they had been as our people had been massacred in pogrom, felled in a coup, decimated in a war even as our women had been raped by lepers in the northern region of Nigeria”.