Author: Henry Chukwuemeka Onyema

I could not resist the urge to rush to a virgin page on my laptop after reading online newspaper accounts that Twitter had deleted IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu’s  latest tweet that threatened that any Nigerian  army sent to Eastern Nigeria (Biafraland, in Kanu’s dictionary) would not return alive, even if, in the IPOB chieftain’s words ‘it means sacrificing my people.’ Twitter said the tweet violated their standards of social engagement. First, I say thank you to Twitter for deleting that tweet. At this tense time in Nigeria it puts at grave risk security agents who may be sent to the…

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Emmanuel Okocha’s book ‘Blood on the Niger: The First Black-On-Black Genocide’ was already out for about eleven years before I read it for the first time in January 2013. It was befitting I encountered the book in its revised and updated edition in Asaba, the capital of Delta state, where my Lolo and I had attended my brother’s wedding. The book focuses on the massacres carried out in Asaba and other Igbo-speaking communities in the former Mid-Western region and state, now split into Delta and Edo states, by the Nigerian military during the Nigerian civil war. The more I read,…

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Madmen and tribal chauvinists are not exclusive to any ethnic group. I have been reading the posts by one Grandson Adeyinka telling the Igbo to leave Yorubaland between 23-25 October, following which as from 26 October, there will commence a systematic liquidation. To quote him, roads will be blocked; vehicles searched; Igbo people found; and treatment similar to what they tasted following the Biafran invasion of the Mid-West (which came close to Ore) in August 1967, will be meted out. This chap, who is based in the UK, is the president of the Young Yorubas for Freedom, a group that…

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The ongoing national drama over the ‘revolution’ of Omoyele Sowore has engulfed Nigeria and created a theatre where tragedy and farce may end up being staged, if Nigerians are not careful. These are times that try men’s souls in Nigeria and to avoid disaster, it is not out of place to learn one or two things from history. To the best of my knowledge, Sowore’s civil disobedience/protest/militant agitation campaign is not in the same league as the coup carried out by a group of left-wing, radical army officers on January 15 1966. The plotters called it a ‘revolution.’ Whether it…

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The possibility of this short article being misunderstood is a fact I have accepted. Nevertheless, what has to be said must be said. All I ask is readers form their conclusions based on fact. President Buhari’s marching orders on election ballot-box snatchers at the APC caucus meeting is well known. It bothers me that many commentators on the president’s statement did not carefully analyze it. While everyone is free to draw any conclusion, it should be based on fact, either overt or implied. Tiresome though it may be, let us look at the president’s words: ‘Anybody who decides to snatch…

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