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6. NKU UKWA: On the whole, and from my opinion, a lot is going on in Abuja as we speak that will shape our Nation for years to come. "Nku Ukwa" is being shared at Abuja as we speak, while some of us here are content with noise making and meaningless analysis of false information in the e-groups. Ndi Igbo are seriously holding their own in various areas in Abuja, especially in Business and the economy. Ndi Igbo have done well, and have continued to do very well in acquiring property in the Capital. We urged more aggressive acquisitions. The Business groups we met are waiting for our proposed Economic Conference. In fact, one Igbo son in Abuja took us to his property, and proved to our amazement that he has enough room in his compound to hold a Summit of about 500 to 1000 people. He gave us a tour, and our jaws dropped as we exchanged unrehearsed "high fives."

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Brothers and Sisters....Greetings!

At about 5:00 p.m. this evening, I got back to my house in Houston, Texas, after my wife picked me up from the Airport, following our week's visit to Nigeria. I have not changed my trip dress before making this preliminary report. Our visit to Nigeria proved to be so important for Diaspora Igbo issues that I will be failing in my duty if I did not quickly update the grassroots on the truth of this mission. A quick glance at the e-groups comments proved to me that the usual tongues are already "wagging" even when they have no information or basis whatsoever for the statements they are making.

A detailed report of the trip will be made to the WIC Board, House of Delegates and Affiliate Presidents and Organizations. The Secretary General of WIC took notes during the meeting with the President, and he will compile a comprehensive report to be disseminated as I stated above. Also, prior to the actual visit, I sent a representative to the Ohanaeze meeting that was held a weekend before the Aso Rock meeting. That report will also be given to the WIC stakeholders.

While in Nigeria, my delegation met with Ministers of Igbo extraction in the OBJ Administration, senior staff to the President of Igbo extraction, Senators, some Business men/groups and the leadership of Aka Ikenga, who flew from Lagos to meet with us at my request.

Our meeting with the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was really quite unprecedented and I will start from the beginning:

1. THE INVITATION: In September, shortly after Los Angeles, we received a written invitation to visit Aso Rock on September 26, 2005. The WIC Board debated on whether to go or not to go. We decided not to go. WIC sent a letter back to Aso Rock that we could not honor the invitation. Again, on the Wednesday to the weekend the First Lady died, we received another invitation from Aso Rock, via a DHL Courier package. This time, we were requested to now make the visit on December 05, 2005. I quickly called a Board Meeting, and this time the Board decided that the invitation must be honored. When the weekend came around and the First Lady died, coupled with the Bellview Air crash, we sent a FedEx letter to Aso Rock stating that if they wanted to reschedule, WIC will understand. The feedback was that we should continue to plan for the visit.

2. THE PREPARATION: I set up a panel of four Igbo Experts to prepare WIC for the meeting with the President. This panel was led by Dr. Kalu N. Kalu, a Professor at Yale, assisted by Professor Ebere Onwudiwe, a Professor of Government at a University in Ohio, who is also currently the Chairman of the Political Action Committee for WIC. The other two members of the Team was Attorney John Udo, Esq, the WIC Legal Adviser and ofcourse Attorney C. Chikezie, the Secretary General.

I must mention that Professor Kalu authored the "Igbo Roadmap" that formed the basis for the agenda Ndi Igbo presented at the National Conference that was held in Abuja recently.

The Team produced what they called "RUBRICS" (This was my first time of seeing this word). The Rubrics were contained in three professionally bound reports. One report was titled "Study Rubrics and Protocols" - which detailed what every member of the delegation must know, how to behave, seating arrangements, what to say and when to say it, and the profile of OBJ and what to expect at the meeting. The Team even predicted how long the entire meeting will last, based on research.

The second report was the "Bullet Points/Talking Points - the basis of the presentation I made to His Excellency, and the third report was titled 'In the Matter of State and Governance" - This was the detailed report of what we went to Abuja to meet the Head of State with. It was this third Report that His Excellency received a copy from me, and it was this report that was discussed during our meeting.

3. THE DELEGATION: The trip consisted of a seven (7) man delegation, namely; Ichie Onwuchekwe, Chief Joe Nzepuome (Vice Chair), Attorney Chikezie (Sec. Gen.), Dr. Anthony Ihunna (PRO), Mrs. Patience Oruh, Chief Theo Egbujor and Dr. J.O.S Okeke. I received several advices when I was deciding on the composition of the delegation. In the final analysis, I made a decision on the composition. When I make my detailed report to the stakeholders, I may expand on my reasons for limiting the delegation to seven, and going with the names I listed above. To end further speculations on this, I do accept full responsibility for my decisions.

4. ACTUAL MEETING: Details will be given to the stakeholders. Historically, meetings with OBJ for delegations do not last more than fifteen (15) to twenty (20) minutes. This delegation found a way to engage His Excellency, President Olusegun Obasanjo for about two (2) hours on December 05, 2005, discussing nothing but Igbo related issues. He had to overrule his Chief of Staff twice for this to happen.

5. WHAT'S NEXT: Due to the unprecedented manner in which we were able to burn valuable "Presidential Time", on Wednesday, December 07, 2005, the Minister of Information (An Igbo), and four Senior Presidential Aides hosted us to a dinner. At that dinner, it was revealed to us that there is a program that is dear to our hearts that the President will be interested in knowing more about our plans. We are going to brief the appropriate committee for a quick follow-up.

We were able to identify senior staff people of Igbo extraction who will place on the President's desk any issue that is dear to our heart as an organization for possible consideration. The President and the delegation agreed that this visit must not be a one act event.

All the other meetings with the various other Igbo Groups will be reported to the stakeholders........WHY DO I KEEP REFERRING TO WIC STAKEHOLDERS?

My mission is to insist on grassroots participation, but there must be responsibility. Some of us in the general e-groups are really not serious, and do not have any understanding as to the seriousness of our affairs/issues as Ndi Igbo. We are not a one-issue Nation and while some are making efforts to address our issues, some are dragging us backwards, while others are simply being mischievous. To separate the noise makers from those that actually make things happen, we must insure that those who have our information are responsible groups amongst us who will use such information for the good of our people.

6. NKU UKWA: On the whole, and from my opinion, a lot is going on in Abuja as we speak that will shape our Nation for years to come. "Nku Ukwa" is being shared at Abuja as we speak, while some of us here are content with noise making and meaningless analysis of false information in the e-groups. Ndi Igbo are seriously holding their own in various areas in Abuja, especially in Business and the economy. Ndi Igbo have done well, and have continued to do very well in acquiring property in the Capital. We urged more aggressive acquisitions. The Business groups we met are waiting for our proposed Economic Conference. In fact, one Igbo son in Abuja took us to his property, and proved to our amazement that he has enough room in his compound to hold a Summit of about 500 to 1000 people. He gave us a tour, and our jaws dropped as we exchanged unrehearsed "high fives."

Finally, by this posting, I am calling on (a) The HOD Recorder (b) Parliamentarian and (c) the Secretary General to liaise ASAP and determine the schedule for the issuance of these important reports to the stakeholders. There are three options.

(a) A Report to the WIC Board only - Chairman and Delegation
(b) A Report to the HOD by the Chairman and Delegation
(c) A Report to a joint HOD and Board - Chairman and Delegation

Whichever is the case, I want a meeting as quickly as possible as we have work to do and decisions to make. Secondly, I wish to keep the momentum.

For the grassroots, everyone is welcome to the meeting where detailed and actual Aso Rock and other Reports will be given. All you have to do to be in the meeting is to be:

(i) A Board Member
(ii) An Affiliate Organization President
(iii) A registered WIC Delegate (HOD) Delegate.

You can register before the meeting starts or even at the door, but you must be registered. It is time to decide whether you really want to join Ndi Igbo in the quest or whether you will continue to just "sit on the fence." The decision is yours.

This is the truth as I know it......... Stay tuned for the detailed reports!

Igbo Ekunie!
Ichie

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Umu Igbo:
There are two problems in responding to Mr. Chibuzor Onwuchekwe's message. The first is in its highly tentative form; he indicates that there's much more to his report. The second is that he speaks to his choir, which eliminates many of us who do not find a song to chirp about. But an important dimension to his tentative report is the hint of the current state of anomie in Nigeria. Abuja is where "nku ukwa" is distributed, and not where a country is goverened; or put it in this way, and we have known this all along: Abuja is the seat of of the Nigerian patronage system that finds its model in the highly decadent court of the Ottomans. It bribes and corrupts you or it kills you. So Onwuchekwe and his fellow travelers have gone to Abuja to be witnesses the phenomenom first hand, and have become recruits to the nku-ukwa anomie.
Now, the Igbo position is that Ala-Igbo is not about the distribution of Nku-Ukwa to a few Igbo people doing the dirty work of the Abuja overlords. We know before now that the Igbo are building houses in Abuja, and serving as fronts to Nigeria's men in people, that many are even acting as sub-contractors to the major players; and in the typical Igbo sense of "ebe onye bi k'ona awachi" - they are staking their yam barns in Abuja. We see a few glass houses and we think that "ndi Igbo are doing well!" The trouble is that those people in Abuja are not the millions of the Igbo sick and unemployed - university graduates, graduates from trade schools, artisans and such others who cannot find meaningful employment and meaningful ways of excercising their talents because of the policies of the federal government; the Abuja boys do not mindthe skewered federalism which undermines Igbo search for its own autonomous growth; the Igbo ministers and advisers have no sense of the material condition in Igboland - bad roads, lack of clean water; inadequate supply of energy compounded by the destruction of Igbo economic infrastructure by successive regimes in the Nigerian fed. govt. Onwuchekwe reports that Obasnjo talks about federalism and the duty of all component parts. Good talk indeed. But they should have asked him whether the banks established by Igbo governments, the last of two of them - Progress Bank and Orient Bank - were not destroyed and sunk by the fed. government; they should haved asked him the Nigerian government's hands in the fate of the Cooperative Bank of Eastern Nigeria; did Mbakwe not establish the first Independent power Plants in Nigeria - the Amaraku Station and the Izombe Gas station? Did the Nigerian government, using its Igbo surrogates not dismantle that infrastructure, and did they not sell it back to the South-Koreans as spare part? The airport established at Owerri is still under the blanket of the Federal Aviation organization (FAAN). Why should Imo state build an Airpoort and hand it to the Federal government, when it could, under normal federal systems, organize its own transporation policy? I am saying that Obasanjo talks about a pseudo-federation that checks every attempt by the Igbo people to operate and establish viable economic systems that might challenge the federal government's strategic interests and plans which generally regards the Igbo areas as a black hole.
In any case, what Mr Onwuchekwe exhbits is merely symptomatic of a general conduct of Igbo power surrogacy; he has become the next motion picture to watch of how the Nigerian federal government and its security agencies use highly unrepresentative, surrogate organizations like the WIC and the Ohaneze: they co-opt them for every government in power, to serve the clear purpose of maintaining the infrastructure of state power which by its very nature undermines larger Igbo interests. These things have been happening, and on each occassion, WIC has continued in a very unsophisticated way to reveal its existence as an Igbo mole within the center of the operations of power in Nigeria. Its very existence is a cog in the wheel of progress for Ndi Igbo.They help to move the mortar and tar in constructing the ascendancy of the Nigerian power elite. WIC must now be seen as the American arm of Ohaneze, whose history has to be fully examined, in order to see exactly why its current contradictions is nothing new.
People should recall that the late Sam Mbakwe refused to attend any meeting of Ohaneze; and when the fog of exile cleared from his eyes, Odumegwu-Ojukwu saw through its elaborate fraud, and has been treating Ohaneze with a lot of circumspection. Every self-respecting Igbo should place a very clear distance between himself/herself and WIC, and its double, Ohaneze. These may wear elaborate Igbo masks, but the language they speak is the strange tongue of the stammering alunsi (the fourth finger of the afa!). In other words, I personally do not think that WIC represents me as a Diasporic Igbo. Nor does Ohaneze. I think that the earlier the Igbo dismantle these groups by isolating them, and creating true, viable alternatives, the sooner we will wake from this fog of fragmentation.
The invitation sent to the WIC is the move of recruitment. Anybody who is conversant with the way Nigerian governments and their security services (as well as their foreign mentors) operate would immediately sense the game that is at play. Its all complex, and it has the backings of significant foreign interests. Its all leading towards Obasanjo's third term, and an anticipatory move against possible Igbo resistance to it. They have made the same move with the Afenifere, by breaking them; they have been using the so-called Yoruba Council of Elders; and they are softening the grounds against possible arrow-heads of Igbo resistance. We should watch the move as it unfolds. It is only the Northerners that have so far not been broken apart. Obasanjo has even recruited Nigerian students through the moles at NANS who have made a public statement supporting the 3rd term bid at the price of N10 million. What Onwuchekwe, who might be visiting Aso-Rock for the first time forgets is that there was no move which he made, and no place which he visited in Abuja that was not scripted and coordinated and directed. It takes only a certain kind of highly sophisticated leadership to see these moves; and it does seem clear to me from his effusions that Chibuzor Onwuchkwe is not the leader of the Igbo in the Diaspora. He lacks political training. He lacks the strategic instinct. He is apparently emotive and self-regarding. He does not see the large picture beyond "nku-ukwa." Compare him with Zik leading the Nigerian delegation to Whitehall in 1947, and we will see why it is absolutely important for political leadership to emerge from a highly sophisticated awareness of history, politics, and the anthropology of power; and the capacity for circumspection. Even a measure of asceticism. He or she must be an individual whose self-confidence should not be overwhelmed by the glittering surfaces of power. In any case, I should repeat, that WIC does not respresent the Igbo Diaspora. When such a group emerges, and speaks, we will know. They at WIC can go on with their nku-ukwa without the Igbo in the United States and North America. In the end, every one, under pain of death shall account, measure for measure.
Obi Nwakanma

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Now, let's return to Dr. Pius Okigbo's minutes of the last meeting metaphor. Obi, if you read the minutes of the last meeting, you would have known that President Obasanjo did not invite WIC to Aso Rock. WIC requested the opportunity to meet with President Obasanjo, the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to address what WIC considers to be issues of importance to Ndi Igbo in Diaspora, and President Obasanjo obliged her.---C.C. Chikezie
Secretary General
World Igbo Congress

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Why are you calling Onwuchekwa efulefu, do you know if his statement is a mistake. You make excuse for Achuzie but you call another man efulefu. This is not how to be a good watchman for Ndigbo, Onwuchekwa is doing the same thing with Achuzie and Irukwu, they are all selling Ndigbo.

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THE INVITATION: In September, shortly after Los Angeles, we received a written invitation to visit Aso Rock on September 26, 2005. The WIC Board debated on whether to go or not to go. We decided not to go. WIC sent a letter back to Aso Rock that we could not honor the invitation. Again, on the Wednesday to the weekend the First Lady died, we received another invitation from Aso Rock, via a DHL Courier package. This time, we were requested to now make the visit on December 05, 2005. I quickly called a Board Meeting, and this time the Board decided that the invitation must be honored.

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…which detailed what every member of the delegation must know, how to behave, seating arrangements, what to say and when to say it, and the profile of OBJ and what to expect at the meeting. –

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This was the detailed report of what we went to Abuja to meet the Head of State with. It was this third Report that His Excellency received a copy from me, and it was this report that was discussed during our meeting.

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Originally posted by MeBiafran:
[QB] Sylva,

I think it is still ok to address me directly, there’s no enmity here. Ndewo.

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I did not have you in mind while making my comments. In fact I had nobody in mind, I simply noticed that "efulefu" was part of the title of the thread and had been repeatedly used by the first respondents. Ndewo.

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Subject: [IgboEvents Live] THE CORRUPTION OF WIC.

OUR JOURNEY IS NO LONGER JUST ABOUT US, IT IS ABOUT ADDING TO THE JOURNEY OF THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE US AND PAVING A WAY FOR THE JOURNEYS AFTER US. CREATING A MONSTER IS RATHER EASY, HOWEVER KEEPING IT FROM EATING YOU IS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT.

It is a serious concern to me that Ndi-Igbo in the diaspora continue to wallow and people who have been put in leadership position continue to abuse the trust of Ndi-Igbo. Any general would tell you that the worst fight is to fight rear guard action. Naturally, the battle is made easy when the opposition is in disarray and deeply corrupt. While individually Ndi-Igbo in the diaspora have done very well, but success as a group has eluded us. Much less educated and less successful ethnic groups have done way better in terms of having their presence felt; the Haitian community in New Jersey immediately comes into mind. By looking at how WIC and other Igbo outfits are run it becomes crystal clear why we have failed as group.

I was very reluctant to join any Igbo organization despite pleadings from family and friends. When I decided to come out, I gave conditions, there must be order and discipline, transparency and accountability. There must be achievable goals set because I hate to fool around. Folks, Anthony M. Adubasim here reporting from the front, mission has been accomplished. AESA, 16 years old Igbo organization here in New Jersey has been pulled back; order, discipline, transparency and accountability have been restored. There were some people who believed that they were untouchable but now they no longer believe that. They wanted to disrupt the AESA proceedings and they were expelled and others have been put on notice. When I am involved, you cannot do what you want.

What we did in AESA is important because without focused and disciplined leadership an organization would rarely make progress and WIC readly comes to mind. The outcome of CSC investigation of Kalu Diogu's administration confirmed what many people suspected. I want to thank Nelson Ilodigwe and CSC leadership for performing this valuable civic duty. WIC Board of Trustees are supposed to work for the upliftment of Ndi-Igbo everywhere however their effectiveness has been hampered by wickedness and corruption. To make omelets, you have to break eggs. One who fails to condemn corruption because he does not want to betray his friend is equally corrupt. The failure of WIC can be attributed to the failure of it's Board. WIC affiliate organizations must do a better job in screening those they send to represent them, as obviously true, garbage in, garbage out. Talking about garbage, the level of rote in Igbo/USA is complete however reasonable people decided they no longer want to remain silent. During WIC Convention in LA, executive of AESA sent a letter to WIC executive and Board informing them that they should suspend two board members from Igbo/USA, well that did not happen. WIC has still not acted on this request. The two board members are Kenneth Igwe and Augustine Uzodike. There you have it, a fake doctor and a disbarred lawyer. If you ask me, I would not have those two fellows keep watch over a dog **** on the sidewalk of South Bronx.

Finally, creating a monster is rather easy however keeping it from eating you is much more difficult. I read that MASSOB disrupted census in Anambra State and that's sad. My feeling is that there must be a better way to help Ndi-Igbo than this type of insidious disruptive activity. It is difficult to understand how this type of activity is going to move Ndi-Igbo forward. So whatever we do, we must remember that we have our children coming after us, we cannot leave failure and corruption for them.

A. M. Adubasim.

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