IPOB to Buhari: Mohammadu Buhari should go to any Biafra Land and deliver the speech that igbos should stop the agitation of Biafra.

Members of the In­digenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) have invited President Mu­hammadu Buhari to Igbo­land to deliver a lecture to Ndigbo on why he opposes the Biafra Republic and wants a united Nigeria.

They also want the Pres­ident to use the opportuni­ty to explain why businesses owned by Ndigbo are alleg­edly being frustrated by his administration.

In a statement entitled: “The Muhammadu Buhari’s Speech to Youth Corps Members – Setting the Re­cords Straight,” IPOB, through its spokespersons, Emma Nmezu and Dr. Clif­ford Chukwuemeka Iroan­ya, also appealed to the pres­ident to use the opportunity to explain why he aban­doned the zone in terms of appointments and pro­jects’ execution.

Iroanya said that IPOB will use the lecture to ex­plain to the President the imperatives of a Biafra state and why the ongoing agitations won’t die.

The group said the invi­tation to the President was prompted by misgivings by those who should know bet­ter the need for an independ­ent Biafra state.

The group said that war-mongering and regurgitation of the stories of Biafra geno­cide will not shake its resolve and determination for the res­toration of the God-given na­tion to Igbo.

Iroanya said: “The earlier Buhari understands that noth­ing on this earth can stop the restoration of the nation of Bi­afra, the better for him and his sympathisers.

“We reiterate that the res­toration of the nation of Bia­fra is divine and beyond the whims and caprices of any government,” he said.

IPOB accused Buhari of vi­olently overthrowing the dem­ocratically elected government of Alhaji Aliyu Usman She­hu Shagari on December 31, 1983.

Buhari had on September 14, 2016 advised corps mem­bers, who visited him in Daura during the Sallah celebration, to “tell your colleagues who want Biafra to forget about it. As a military commander, I walked from Degem, a bor­der town between the North and the East, to the border be­tween Cameroun and Nige­ria. I walked on my foot for most of the 30 months that we fought the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, in which at least two mil­lion Nigerians were killed”.

IPOB said that what Buhari told his audience was not new because “one of the require­ments of a soldier is endur­ance trekking. Therefore, that he may have trekked from one location to the other should not be used to scare Biafrans from exerting their rights to self-determination.

“After all, General Rat­ko Mladic walked all the way from Serbia to Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina to com­mit war crimes in the name of preserving Yugoslavia unity, yet in the end he lost.”

IPOB alleged that it was the struggle for 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 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 is no way in a bil­lion years Nigeria could have defeated Biafra in the war.

“Buhari must understand that a nation develops organ­ically and is predicated on the commonality of shared value systems. A nation is markedly different from a country even our colonial masters know this. That is why Scotland, which is a nation can seek independ­ence from Britain which is a country. The same way that Biafra, a nation is seeking her independence from Nigeria. Buhari must know that Nige­ria may claim to be a coun­try but definitely not a nation.

“Muhammadu Buhari should also understand that unity cannot be force-fitted or enforced by one region on other regions within a geo­graphical expression. This is why David Cameron, imme­diate past British Prime Min­ister, did not deploy troops to Glasgow or Edinburgh with rules of engagement (ROE) to kill innocent Scottish people in the quest to preserve “One Britain”, IPOB said.

IPOB continued that Bu­hari’s argument that Nigeria is big enough for everyone to be a part of, is not logical, adding that the “Soviet Un­ion was big and a super pow­er but it broke up. Yugoslavia went their separate ways with the active support of Britain. Those familiar with the his­tory of British politics will know that it was Paddy Ash­down MP, the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party that sought and gained the back­ing of the British Government of the day to support the in­dependence of the Muslim enclave of Bosnia Herzego­vina away from Yugoslavia”, the IPOB stated.