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The once fearless Biafrans are now a timid nation. Why has Biafra allowed the nigerians and their Oil Minister olusegun obasanjo to take control of crude oil wealth found on Igbo/Biafran land? Why have we allowed yoroba culture of awufu (free, fraud) to prevail in the oil industry and in our relationship with nigeria. Billions and billions of dollars continue to be made from Biafran crude oil, yet there is over 80% unemployment in nigeria; citizens do not receive any benefits from oil; the standard of living today is the lowest ever; Igbo people traveling to Biafra are made to go thru all kinds of harrassment, inconveniences and intimidation in yoroba/awusa territories because there is no international airports in Igbo land.
Today the nigerian Oil Minister olusegun obasanjo is building a $7B natural gas plant in yoroba Ogun even though there is no natural gas deposits in that territory. The yoroba controls all aspects of the oil industry, from drilling to distribution, with olusegun obasanjo giving away Igbo oil wells to any one he likes, with little regard for transparency or economics.
When are Igbo/Biafrans going to wake up and say no, and stop behaving like a conquered and timid people?
Nigeria vows to investigate $90m oil deal By Dino Mahtani in Lagos
Nigeria's most senior anti-corruption official has said he will investigate the sale of oil acreage that was offered in open auction but subsequently sold off behind closed doors. Nuhu Ribadu told the Financial Times he would examine how a lucrative oil block was sold off without being declared by Nigeria's petroleum ministry, despite open bidding procedures designed to bring a measure of credibility to Nigerian oil licence awards.
ADVERTISEMENT The promised investigation shadows efforts supported by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who doubles as Nigeria's official petroleum minister, to improve transparency in Nigeria's hydrocarbons sector. "I want to assure you that this will definitely be investigated, " said Mr Ribadu. "As I have always said, it is no longer business as usual in Nigeria." Addax Petroleum, a Swiss-based Canadian listed company that has a strong interest in Nigeria, this month announced it had agreed to pay $90m (€70m, £47m) to take control of an oil block that had been left untouched in an open auction in May. The block is adjacent to an offshore oilfield being developed by US oil group Chevron. Addax said in its statement it had agreed to acquire its interest in the block from Starcrest, a little known company. Starcrest had taken initial control of the block with a promise to pay the government a $55m signature fee, according to a petroleum ministry official. Petroleum ministry officials have yet to publicly explain how the block was awarded to Starcrest, a company with no proven track record in the oil industry but which industry sources say has strong political connections. Blocks that receive no bid in open auctions are normally reserved for future bid rounds, a policy not applied when Starcrest privately negotiated control of the block after the closure of the 2006 bidding in May. Africa's top oil producer last year introduced a -system of open oil block -auctions as a break from the discretionary awards prevalent under past military regimes. But, to date, no comprehensive list of the dozens of license winners in 2005 and this year has been published officially by the government. Nigeria should collect more than a billion dollars in signature fees from the rounds, which have been largely ignored by Nigeria's established US and European partners but which attracted interest from smaller groups and large Asian companies. Nigeria is preparing to auction 50 blocks in a bid round planned to take place before the year's end but government officials are already talking about keeping a watchful eye on licence awards. "If anything happens that is not in the spirit of the transparency template, we will flag it and take it up," said one official in Nigeria's government extractive industry transparency unit, NEITI. Anti-corruption activists have voiced fear that, in spite of strong rhetoric from government officials, transparency efforts could be undermined as senior politicians build up funds in the run up to next April's national elections. "Let's hope we are not preaching one thing, but doing another," said Assisi Asobie, head of Nigeria's chapter of Transparency International. Obiageli Ezekwesili, NEITI's chairwoman, said she would ask petroleum ministry officials to explain the Addax deal before she could make a pronouncement. NEITI is due today to discuss the findings of an audit of Nigeria's oil industry between 1999 and 2004. A preliminary report for those years had concluded that there was a discrepancy of $232m between the amount the central bank said it received and the amount oil companies said they paid. Under pressure from Mr Obasanjo, the government's auditor has conducted further work, bringing the figure down to about $16m, said the NEITI official. Nigeria's transparency efforts, backed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and UK government via the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), are seen as vital in improving governance in one of Africa's most corrupt countries. Mr Ribadu estimates $380bn of Nigeria's public funds have been looted or wasted since independence. Nigeria is one of the first countries to sign up to the EITI but has yet to pass legislation that would enshrine the recommendations of EITI into law.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
___________________ achieve Biafra and show the difference Posts: 643 | From: Los Angeles, CA | Registered: Nov 2002
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Akuo, oma n'ogwe, akuo oma n'ogwe! Owuzi ogwe k'emere aku? Two important developments, all closely related needs very complicated analysis, beyond all these public show and tell. One is the real purpose behind the current drama playing out in Anambra state. Although we love to think so, but Peter Obi is not the target. Something far more spectacular is generally the purpose, and it has both international and domestic significance: it is basically the control of the beachhead of the upper gulf of Guinea. The second is the ascent of the current Sultan: please carefully examine his background: Barewa College, Military accademy, and wait for it, military attachee to the Nigerian legation in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan with oversight to Iran, and Afghanistan. The implication is fundamental in any strategic analysis, and the implication, especially to long and short term Igbo interest must be closely examined. I do not know about you folks, but I'm prepared to sepculate, and even venture some theory of conspiracy (in spite of what some people have been made to generally think, conspiracy theory is an important tool of strategic thought and scenario building and is legitimate): but I do have serious doubts that the ADC crash in which the 80 year old "moderate" Sultan Maccido died, was an accident. And if it is not an accident what is the purpose? A quick change of the regime of the sultanate? Why?
The trouble with the current Igbo is that we have not established tools for strategic analysis as all nations playing in the murky waters of domestic and interantional politics do. Lest we forget, the Igbo is a nation, and is engaged in a very complicated struggle with other nations in the global sphere. Our willingness to subsume our collective national interest under a fraught Nigerian umbrella is dangerous, and the strategic ignorance of lose canons like Orji Uzo Kalu in his political acts, is both dangerous, embarrassing, and reflects the fact that Igbo land is the most vulnerable culture and nation in the contemporary world, especially since it has no means to check the activities, and the undirected politics of free agents like Mr. Kalu. We need to do closer backgrounds checks and analysis, and form broader pictures of contemporary developments, otherwise, OUR deaths would be faster than some of us have even anticipated. This generation of the Igbo must also as a magtter of urgency establish and build very sophisticated methods of shadow power, regulatory and disciplinary capacity, and an internal exchange system that can very quickly devalue external means of exchange aimed at controlling Igbo land, by using internal moles and free agents upon whom the Igbo have no serious, direct control. That is where our competitors have great strenght: the the government of the caliphate still provides shadow authority, and a second primary public sphere, whereas we have allowed our own "Umunna" system to be penetrated, and to collapse in the name of being "like our neighbours!"
Ndi Igbo, please watch the pattern of the Fulani onslaught, which should be familiar to anybody who has closely studied their means of power and methods of conquest: it is patient, long-waiting, and clever. And it is connected with a broader pan-Islamic globality with the Caliph in Sokoto as the overseer of lower Sudan. First, they come as visitors, and begin to settle in little isolated clusters. The preach peace and live in exemplary forebearanc while they scope the underbelly of their host communities. Then they become your security guards. Then they slowly recruit internal agents from among you. Then they introduce their systems (like the Eze and Igwe phenomenom introduced to Igbo land by the Dasuki panel in 1977 under this same Obasanjo) and they make it increasingly relevant and familiar, then they rise against you, using your own people as their soldiers, informants, and supporters; and then they overthrow your psuedo-monarchs, and install their own as Amirs and commanders of the faithful, and establish them as ruling houses. Please do not say that this cannot happen in Igboland becaue the Igbo are "clever" and are currently "overwhelmingly Christian." The truth is that the Igbo are at a very ripe stage of conquest, and at their most vulnerable: an allienated population, massive sense of ambiguity with the loss of a traditional culture and its anchor of identity, the loss of serious matriarchal oversight (Igbo women are no longer the protectors of the culture and are increasinly subject as victims of conquest as trophy wives), a national sense of inferiority, an increasingly diasporic population with a capacity to absorb alternative cultures to replace an empty one, and a large population of unemployed youth who can be recruited quickly and effectively with jobs, money, and the promise of an alternative life of safety under new conditions, and of course, an incoherent elite, driven not by a larger sense of personal and group security, but by fear and desire for primitive accumulation (onye nwere ego abughi ogaranya!) . There condition is made even more vulnerable because they function mostly as middlemen and compradors, and so their fortunes depend largely on the goodwill of their competitors whom they increasingly see as benefactors! This loss of economic oversight is, of course, artificial, but it is most dangerous in defining Igbo larger interests.
But this generation of the Igbo must act and act quickly and resolve the Igbo connudrum, with less ego-tripping, with a sense of emergency, or our people will be slaves for the next one thousand years if we fail. It is futile to continue to blame old men like Ojukwu, Ekwueme, Mbazulike Amechi - men in their 70s and 80s. First, these men have no security coverage. This is exactly what Zik meant when he said, "you do not argue with a man with a gun." Those who did not understanhd how vulnerable Zik from 1970 would ultimatelky be unable to understand his parable. But it is a simple question: if the commander of the regiment in Onitsha is given direct, but secret orders from Abuja, to dress ten trained soldiers in rags, and send them to Nnewi to assasinate the Ikemba Nnewi or waylay him on the road after a meeting with Mbazulike Amechi in Ukpor where they may have discussed the affairs of the Igbo one evening, and shoot him and his driver, and in all that, make it seem like an armed robbery attack. Then get the Police Commissioner in Awka to gather some poor Igbo kids arrested in Onitsha for "wandering" in the night, (possibly coming back from Night vigil) and kept in police custody for the last two years, and arraign them before some press men as those arrested for robbing and killing the Ikemba Nnewi, and then, wasting them a week later for trying to escape from police custody, even before coming to court and telling their story, what could the Igbo do? That is the fundamental question, why sometimes, it takes profound courage, even suicidal insinct, for these men to talk. But what alternative protection or security arrangement has the Igbo made for some of these folk whom we expect to always talk and write for the Igbo: Okey Ndibe, Obi Nwakanma, Eziuche Ubani, Pini Jason, Chuks Iloegbunam, etc, who could all be taken off the street, killed and dumped in the Lagos lagoon for talking too much, and nothing happens? The Igbo must ask themselves these profound question: how safe can a people be who abandon their national security to alien hands, whom they can neither trust, determine nor control? And to the "cosmoplitan" Igbo, who think they are above it all: Uwa, o zuuru onye?
Perhaps now is the time to begin to take a more penetrating look - beyond the costmetics - at the nimportant truths of the Igbo condition. We are still playing in the little league, while others have other plans. We are still talking bread and butter stuff, and squirting our little egoistic juices, and playing "suwey" like kids, while real men and women are in more sophisticated flight modes. It seems very clear, there are no more men in Ala-Igbo, just agbala. Give them toys - gleaming cars, cellphones, and all the public accourtements of the inferior arriviste mentality, and you take them over, while they are busy fiddling and celebrating their new toys, and new fake titles, and such other marks of arrested development. Please do not ever think that location in exile provides safety. Those who lose their homelands condemn their children to become homeless wanderers on the face of the earth, and perpetual victims of the violence of the settled. It took the Jews 2000 years to reclaim their homeland, and they are not even sitting pretty. May this not be the curse for our children and their children after them. Ndewo nu!
Obi Nwakanma
___________________ achieve Biafra and show the difference Posts: 643 | From: Los Angeles, CA | Registered: Nov 2002
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