-An enemy to truth.
Re: _My life of duty_ _and allegiance_ (An autobiography).
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-- A Rejoinder to General Gowon's lies, fabrications and blackmail.
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UNITING THE SUDETENLANDS:
6 Million Jews in 72 Months vs. 5 Million Igbo in 30 Months.
Till today, General Yakubu Gowon is unmindful that Nigeria is facing a continuing exterminatory siege threatening the very survival of her indigenous ethnic nationalities as viable civilizational units, because of the genocidal foundations he laid in propagation of the interests of domestic imperialism since 1803 against his own Middle Belt peoples, and since Amalgamation against the rest of Nigeria. Hence, he continues to celebrate his victories over truth, honour and progress, sitting on the blood of millions of innocent men, women and children that he and his followers consciously put to the sword in promotion of that monstrous aspiration, and in righteous contempt of the grieving millions suffering from the pursuit of the demonic objective. Nigerians now live in fear and uncertainty as everyone except those like Gowon is a target. Great men like Obadiah Mailafia knew that the Middle Belt and the Igbo in particular needed to close ranks, because they are bound together more than ordinarily imagined, but General Gowon and his likes think otherwise, looking the other way as their peoples gaze upon an uncertain future, unsure of salvation.
_My life of duty_ _and allegiance_ has one objective: how to make an evil look good, and like such other scriptures it has failed miserably.
Genocide in Germany was started by claims of only wanting to re-unite the Sudetenlands of German minorities with the rest of Germany, beginning with Czechoslovakia. Result: an estimated 6 million Jews were killed in 72 months, aside 80 million others that perished by the related ambitions. In Gowon's duty and allegiance he claimed he wanted to re-unite his own "Southern lands," meaning the Northern-occupied West and Mid-West, plus the East and its "Eastern minorities," with "the rest of Nigeria," meaning "the North." Result: he killed an estimated 3 to 5 million mostly Igbo civilians in 30 months, plus an additional 2 or so million individuals who may have suffered and died in some ethnic-cleansing orgies code-named Abandoned Property that he orchestrated mainly between 1970 when the genocide was supposed to have ended and 1975 when he was ousted from power. Remember: Gowon praises himself, and his circles also praise him greatly for his "kindness" and "humanism," because there ought not have been any Igbo survivor in the first place, given the bitterness and ferocity with which he conducted the pogroms and the war. If Gowon could kill as many in 30 months, imagine what he might have done in an equivalent 72 months.
There is no parallel with the American civil war for, whereas Lincoln fought to abolish feudal slavery and advance civilization, Gowon fought to entrench feudal slavery, in service of violent, primitive ambitious circles who wouldn't forgive the January 15 putschists for temporarily halting their march to paradise. So, there is no axiomatic conterminity at all between the US and Nigerian "civil wars." One was truly a civil war with a good and civilized intent, another was a genocide with an evil and primitive intent.
Between 1984 and 1987, especially 2015 to 2023, Gowon's hirelings, inheritors and continuators of those criminalities, may have killed more than 20 million Nigerians (the Hausa Tsantsa Development Association of Hajia Kalthum Alumbe Jitami claims more than 7 million Hausa, the Igbo several other millions, the Niger Delta and Middle Belt, no estimates yet), through all manner of state-sponsored or connived terrorisms, kidnappings, "unknown gunmen," novel designs of starvation and hunger, poverty-induced diseases and deaths, mysterious disappearances, etc.
Even St. Augustine knew that the "justness" of a war ultimately depended on the weaponry; so, if not for weapons and the Nazi party had won their war of choice they would have been celebrated all over the world as military-political geniuses who "re-united" Germany; the Holocaust, gas chambers, starvation, broken agreements, would be suppressed into oblivion, and there would have been no Geneva Conventions and Universal Declarations, let alone Nuremberg Trials.
In both crimes the justifications were the same: uniting the "sudeten" lands. The weapons were almost the same: over there the Jews were starved to skeletons and death, over here Gowon starved the Igbo to skeletons and death; over there, gas chambers were used, but the technology being unavailable to Gowon, he employed economic and ports blockade, mass shootings and bombings of schools, markets, hospitals, churches, villages and village-squares, live-burials, drowning ordeals that emptied fleeing families into the Benue and Niger Rivers and creeks amidst weeping and pleading members, and several "post"-war final touches such as extra-judicial executions, reprisals, disappearances, and so on, all, "without Gowon's knowledge."
There was a non-aggression German-Soviet treaty initialed by Ribbentrop and Molotov in August 1939, but Germany with good reasons ignored it to wage genocide on the Soviet and other peoples; there was also a non-use of force Accord in Aburi, initialed by the highest plenipotentiaries, which General Gowon would also find good reasons to ignore and wage genocide on the Igbo.
Most Germans had long dissociated themselves from the genocidal "unity" and "civilization," paying sundry reparations, but many beneficiaries of Gowon's genocide are yet to see anything wrong in the Igbo being annihilated the way they were. On the contrary, General Gowon remains their hero, having dealt with their obstacle to whatever ends.
General Gowon and all those who imposed death and destruction on the East, a terrible misfortune now spreading all over Nigeria, are able to escape the fate of genocide leaders all over the world, because in say Germany the crimes hurt and severely threatened the world powers, whereas in Nigeria the powers gained by Africans killing Africans in a first black-on-black genocide.
Every Igbo and many Easterners lost family members, children, parents, relatives, friends, neighbours. Some age sets were totally wiped out in schools, villages and markets, almost all of them not as the "bad Ojukwu soldiers" facing the "kind Gowon army," but in a scorched earth starvation, shooting and bombing campaign against totally innocent civilians. Gowon planted a venomous national policy in which the only good Igbo man till today is either a dead one or another that endorses the genocide or praises the elimination of his own people. Unfortunately, the Igbo or other Easterners measuring up to that high standard continue to reduce in supply, except among those who imagined the Igbo to be their problem and joined in killing them. In Gowon's ideal country the Igbo and other Easterners are denied everything, so are the Hausa, so are others except as a perfunctory gesture, because of an original Igbo sin that was supposed to have saved Gowon's people from eternal condemnation as "footstools," and others as conquered territory.
Characteristically, he got his unconcealed diatribes against the Igbo, Obasanjo, Babangida and whoever else was interested in not doing it his way, published at a time that Nigerians are undergoing the worst in human sufferance, exploring if there could be a rational way out of the entrapment, and looking upon men and women of humane dispositions to suggest a civilized way out, which ideas General Gowon has none.
GOWON AND HIS PET IGBO COUP PROJECT
Since 1970, many had been seeking the means by which the fragile country could be rebuilt on just and egalitarian terms, so to persuade the unjustly victimized, marginalized and restive youths to subscribe into this progressive vision, but General Gowon, his fellow travellers like Buhari, and other killers, oppressors and blackmailers of the Igbo and other Nigerians, would not let this happen. With their premeditated cruel policies, and their ceaseless emotional and physical violence, they continually spread salt unto the injuries they inflicted, and manage as much as they please to keep animosity alive.
In 21 preliminary and 857 main pages of sugar-coated bilious narrative, Gowon pursued a single objective: to build a case for his betrayal and murder of his benefactor, General Ironsi, and for a Northern "military revenge," the pogroms and genocide, the death of Igbo and other Easterners, and for his endless mobilization of bias and hatred against the Igbo, because of an Igbo coup that killed only his beloved Northerners, while leaving the Igbo unharmed. There was not a single Igbo man that Gowon spared or didn't find a way to implicate in the January 15 coup d'etat, and if there be any Igbo that did him a favour (e.g. Oti/p. 605), it was never altruistic, but only in return for one he had earlier extended to him. But, very mysteriously, almost all the evidence for his Igbo coup pointed at Ghana, some Yoruba, then the Igbo, and no one else.
The debate on the coup was substantially exhausted when Major Adewale Ademoyega demystified an ill-executed revolutionary putsch, mainly conceived by two high-ranking non-Igbo officers, involving predominantly Igbo Major officer ranks and several other Nigerian NCOs, intended to overthrow the reactionary and violent government of the Balewa/Ahmadu Bello/Akintola alliance, to end the atrocities in the West and Middle Belt threatening Nigerian disintegration, and establish a progressive government to be headed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. The only strand left in people's understanding is whether it was likely for some idealistic revolutionaries to have organized a coup d'etat to instal someone in office without the foreknowledge and consent of the intended beneficiary, in this case already serving a prison term for a first attempt, and whether it was likely for Igbo and other NCNC leaders to have conspired a coup d'etat to reward Chief Obafemi Awolowo for his role in the events of 1952. Ademoyega was pointed and unambiguous (abridged):
"Of the Lieutenant-Colonels only two were known to be political and revolutionary and were willing to take part in any effort to revolutionise Nigeria. These were Lieutenant-Colonels Banjo and Fajuyi . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Fajuyi who commanded the Course had sympathy for our course and was willing to contribute ideas towards the execution of our plan. It shall stand eternally to his credit that although the coup took place while he was away on leave, he rose for the revolution and stood firmly by its principles even until he breathed his last. Contrary to the load of wicked propaganda . . . there was no decision . . . to single out any particular ethnic group for elimination or destruction. Our intentions were honourable, our views were national and our goals were idealistic." - _Why we_ _struck_, pp. 51, 59, 60.
Lt-Cols. Fajuyi and possibly also Major Bolaji Johnson, plus Banjo, despite the Leave of the first and "absence" of the last, evidently still took active part in the coup - they were observed to be where they were not supposed to be: "Captain Danjuma returned to Apapa to find that many more officers including such people as Major Bolaji Johnson and Lt-Col. Adekunle Fajuyi who were not actually billeted in Apapa were now there, all trying to find out exactly what was happening," while Gowon witnessed the sudden arrest of Banjo as he drew a gun at Ironsi: "Colonel Banjo was being manhandled and taken away . . . he was a threat to the GOC. But how? It later emerged that he was alleged to have pulled a gun on his former GOC." - Lindsay Barrett, _Danjuma: The_ _making of a general_, pp. 40-44; and Gowon, _My life_ _of duty_, pp. 190-191.
Ademoyega revealed that from intelligence gotten from federal minister H.O. Davies, in addition to ongoing crimes, the Balewa-Bello-Akintola trio was also planning to completely destroy ("wallop") the West and East, starting on the 3rd week of January 1966:
"the Balewa Government had something up its sleeve. Otherwise the minister would not be so emphatic . . . we discovered that the Balewa Government had a terrible plan to bring the Army fully to operate in the West for the purpose of eliminating the elites of that region, especially the intellectuals . . . It was also intended that if the plan succeeded in the West, the next target would be the East," and they were "to use loyal troops for this purpose." Who were the "loyal troops" to be used to commit this crime? Ademoyega named them: "Lieutenant-Colonel Largema . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon . . . Brigadier Maimalari . . . Brigadier Ademulegun (?) . . . Inspector General Alhaji Kam Salem." - Ademoyega, pp. 66-68.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, despite his initial anti-Igbo diatribes did acknowledge that late Isaac Adaka Boro's "Niger Delta Republic" may actually have been staged to "use this as a pretext" to also declare a state of emergency in the East, and join it to the "walloping" campaign - _On_ a _darkling plain_, pp. 30-31.
So, Gowon was one of those privy to the evil plan to destroy the West and East, and he thought it was his "duty" to do so, in "allegiance" to the political criminals unlawfully propounding the destruction of innocent parts of Nigeria, namely, Middle Belt, West and East of society? Is this reason for Gowon's everlasting bitterness that the ringleaders were preempted before they perpetrated more atrocities on Nigerians, with him fortunately saved by God with an opportunity to change course, but rather chose to carry out the same atrocities between May/July 1966 and January 1970, and on and on till he was ousted from power? By 2026 that "plan" has not ended, and every Middle Belt leader worth his salt has spoken against it, with Nigerians waiting endlessly for General Gowon to also add a voice of condemnation of "the plan."
GOWON'S EVIDENCE FOR IGBO COUP THAT JUSTIFIED HIS POGROMS AND GENOCIDE AGAINST THE IGBO
General Gowon badly needed a justification for killing the Igbo and other Easterners in the "military revenge," pogroms, genocidal war, the ethnic-cleansing code-named Abandoned Property, and series of other policy measures that were systematically eradicating and bringing them down permanently. To every atrocity he ties a reason and for every bout of killings he would offer a great explanation to justify it as "reprisal," "revenge," or "reaction," but never a premeditated act.
Why was "the mass killing of Easterners, mostly Igbo, in various parts of the North, notably Kano, Kaduna, Zaria, Bauchi and Jos" permitted? It was "Radio Dahomey (that) . . . relayed a news item on purported mass killing of Northerners in the Eastern Region. This triggered . . . reprisal killing of Easterners . . . that the central authorities and leaders of the North instigated the killings . . . was not the case . . . the killings (were) executed primarily by ordinary people . . . in reaction to the radio news item." - pp. 228-9. So, for Gowon, the "mass killing of Northerners" was known in Dahomey before anyone in Nigeria.
Ademoyega had named Gowon in the plan to "wallop" the West and East, and Gowon's memoir had to throw back the walloping charge to the Igbo to justify his killings, citing rumours and girlfriends, as source of his information:
"Rumours of plans by young Igbo officers to execute . . . the 'unfinished business' began to gain ground . . . after the January 15, 1966 coup. Its objective was . . . elimination of the remaining senior Northern officers who survived the putsch . . . A rough headcount of targets . . . included me . . . Major Hassan . . . Major Murtala . . . Major Joe Akahan . . . Major Martin Adamu, and Major Yakubu Danjuma . . . much of the information came from the girlfriends of our colleagues from the East who bragged about finishing off the remaining 'Northern officers' anytime soon." - p. 198. So, after an Igbo Coup that got "the Igbo" entrenched, the Igbo yet again planned "finishing" the job, and girlfriends of Ironsi and other Igbo let Gowon know the plan? When the Igbo were planning the January 15 Igbo Coup, did they confide in their girlfriends or first let Radio Dahomey know?
Gowon had given a specific order to Danjuma to apprehend Ironsi ("When you have done it ring me at this number") - Lindsay Barrett, pp. 52-53, confirmed in Efiong, _Nigeria and_ _Biafra_, p. 129, and many other sources, but Gowon announced in his memoir, "I instructed Danjuma to handle the situation with extreme caution . . . to ensure that Ironsi was kept safe" - pp. 201-202. Where would Ironsi have been kept "safe" in the hands of his abductors obeying Gowon's "instructions"?
The implicate-and-exonerate, plant-and-uproot "sophistication" of General Gowon.
Many strategists deny the doctrine of two-fold truth and bilocality. A thing either is or is not, and an object cannot be present in two or more places with the same coordinates simultaneously. But, for General Gowon that is no problem; most of the things he says he did were actually what he never did, and those he says he didn't do were actually the ones he did. To him, a person can do something and not do it; hence, he had to first plant some doubt, contempt and hatred in someone's mind against another, implying guilt and culpability against any Igbo he fancied, before appearing to exonerate the same person. With this planting and uprooting dualism he dealt with the Igbo and other Easterners.
General Gowon did everything to end the pogroms while ensuring they lasted three long months till satiety, promulgated a Decree 8 to implement Aburi by reneging on Aburi, waged a genocidal war in a humane way, murdered almost five millions because he didn't want to waste too many lives, fed the populations so much food that they perished with starvation, saved Ironsi by ordering his arrest, reconstructed the East with 3Rs by making them poorer and without reconstructing anywhere, exonerating almost every Igbo of consequence by implicating him or her, refers to "thousands who perished" (p. 467) in a genocide in which "It is difficult to adequately estimate the impact of that tragic war . . . The bare figures are grim . . . estimates are that . . . over two million Biafran civilians, many of them children, died of starvation and disease" alone - Babangida, _A_ _journey_ _in service_, pp. 74-75, not including the dead by mass bombings of the civilian populations, etc. Those millions were Gowon's "thousands." On the pogroms alone, Babangida regretted that "Gowon's commitments to the Igbos that their lives were safe in northern Nigeria were unfulfilled . . . The killings were frightening." - Babangida, p. 63.
Gowon had not a single good word on Ironsi. He starts with maligning Ironsi, and implicating him in the coup: "the GOC . . . briefing officers and men about what had happened . . . That was strange . . . because if anyone was to be around . . . at that time of the night, it should have been . . . Maimalari and his staff!" Then, "It now seemed clear to me that the GOC, General Ironsi, must have known what was happening . . .". Then, "I found the story of unforced hand-over of political leadership to the military a little incredulous, as the acceptance of such an 'offer' (by Ironsi) was at variance with . . . a loyal Army." And then, "I really cannot tell why he (Ironsi) wanted to move me. Or was the plan ("the plan") to remove the only senior officer from the North from the command and control of troops?" - see pp. 164-6, 172-3, 188-9, 193.
Having delivered as much damage as possible to the reputation of Ironsi, making him appear as an accomplice in the coup to justify his murder, he reverses to hypocritically exonerate the same Ironsi: "Colonel Conrad Nwawo . . . was able t
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