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POSITION STATEMENT BY EKWE NCHE ORGANIZATION ON THE STALEMATE AND TENSION IN NIGERIA ARISING FROM THE 2003 GENERAL (S)ELECTIONS
Ekwe Nche Organization is an organization dedicated to independent self-determination for Igbos through non-violent means, foundation of a political system based on Igbo indigenous values, and (re)unification of Igbos in Igboland with tens of millions of their brothers and sisters from all over the world, including the United States and the Caribbeans. Our members are drawn from the Igbo Nation worldwide, including (Nne Ala Igbo) Igboland, Haiti, Jamaica, the United States, and the West Indies.
We have watched with deep concern events in Nigeria through the just concluded general elections and ever since those elections. We have, as an organization, met and deliberated over those unfortunate events and have reached numerous decisions, some of which we will like to share here with our people and the world.
(1) Individuals and organizations from within and outside Nigeria who observed and monitored the 2003 elections, including the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the European Union (EU), and the Commonwealth Observer Group (see the phone numbers and website following this statement for detailed information) all, without exception, agreed unanimously that the elections were marred by malpractices and irregularities on a scale never seen before in the miserable history of this failed country. These observers have used words such as “monumental fraud” and “charade” in assessing the so-called elections. Ekwe Nche Organization agrees wholeheartedly with these credible assessments and we strongly condemn the massive riggings.
(2) We find it appalling that in the face of these massive irregularities President Olusegun Obasanjo still claims “overwhelming mandate” based on these fixed and fraudulent elections. One Igbo saying goes that the dog does not eat a bone hung around its neck. We are disappointed that a supposedly responsible government charged with the sacred constitutional responsibility of conducting free and fair elections for the country, the basis of the country’s pretense since 1999 to “democracy,” has turned around to abuse this trust by rigging those very elections. These electoral malpractices utterly negate the constitutional right of our abused and long-suffering people to peacefully change their governments. Governments based on stolen votes are not based on popular consent and therefore do not represent the will of the people. Moreover, as President John F. Kennedy once said, governments–such as General Obasanjo’s–who block peaceful change make revolutionary change inevitable.
(3) We call upon the government to take immediate action to correct the electoral irregularities and defuse the tension and acrimony the (mis)conduct of the 2003 elections have generated in the country. General Obasanjo must not swear himself in as President for a second term until all of the documented irregularities have been corrected. General Obasanjo ought to know and does not have to be told that, throughout the cursed history of Nigeria, electoral “victories” won through irregularities have brought nothing but trouble for the country and the perpetrators of those malpractices.
(4) We call upon the government to institute without delay a high-powered, independent inquiry, into all documented cases of electoral malpractices in the 2003 elections and to institute legal actions against all individuals and organizations, without exception, found to be connected with those irregularities and malpractices.
(5) We appeal to the government to call, urgently and without further delay, a sovereign national conference at which the various nationalities who make up the country will meet and work out terms on the way forward, including the option, our organization has repeatedly advocated, of separate and independent existence for nations now within the country, such as Igbos, inclined to that option.
(6) We call upon Britain and other Western countries committed to one Nigeria to step forward and admit courageously that their experiment in Nigeria has failed. They owe it as a moral duty to their conscience, if they still have any, as well as to the world at large, to correct their mistake by working to put in place now measures that will set free the different nationalities in the colonial jail called Nigeria since 1914 illegitimately lumped together in an incompatible and unholy union.
(7) Published reports reaching us indicate that General Obasanjo has argued that Nigerian elections cannot be judged by the same standard as Western elections, that he has taunted his opponents as “bad losers,” and has rejected calls for the formation of an interim government, among other unbecoming assertions and actions. We deplore these behaviors and consider them pathetic, not to say exceedingly polarizing, coming from an individual like General Obasanjo who never misses an opportunity to stake the moral high ground for reunifying the country after a genocidal war waged against the Igbos.
(8) Developments in Nigeria since the general (s)elections, for the umpteenth time, validate our conclusion, reached years ago and expressed repeatedly since, that Nigeria is beyond reformation and that the only way forward is the break up of the country into its constituent disparate units so as to give nations wishing to opt out of the illegitimate (dis)union, the opportunity to pursue their own separate development as independent entities and begin to fix the rot in their areas. Failure to do so will only delay the evil day which is bound to come sooner than later. When will Britain finally courageously own up that its colonial experiment in Nigeria has failed woefully? For how long will the international community continue to hold its breadth and composure in anxious trepidation about events emanating from Nigeria? How many more massacres, pogroms, holocausts, genocidal wars, marginalizations, and other atrocities directed against Igbos will it take for the international community to say “enough”? For how long will Western countries and the rest of the international community continue to prop up an utterly incompetent and corrupt national government that abuses its citizens with impunity and is lacking in capacity that it is not able to organize a beauty pageantry, much less credible national elections? How many more crises and conflicts will the international community tolerate and how many more emergency fire brigade rescues before it says “enough”?
Death to one nigeria. Long live the Igbo Nation Worldwide. Long live the sovereign and independent Republic of Biafra.
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