My attention was drawn to a Video documentary titled: “Wole Soyinka’s Lost But Found Video on Biafra, A Conversation I had with Ojukwu” with a time-stamp of January 7, 2024 and a source imprint of “In-depth Analysis” crediting the authorship of the Documentary to the BBC. (Link to the said video HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhCVejHE94g ).
I wish to respond as follows to the contents of that Documentary which is obviously fake:
(1) Listening to the first few minutes of the video, it was clear to me that whoever put it together had merely used AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools to assemble clips of several actual interviews, to weave a false story that sought to cloak itself with the garment of truth.
(2) Whatever be the motive for cobbling together this poorly scripted pretense that Prof Wole Soyinka, who was an actual participant in the hectic events of 1966 to 1970, was going around on behalf of the BBC, 40 years after the War, and speaking with the key dramatis personae, Ojukwu and Gowon, – the storyline is patently false, especially in the claim that Wole Soyinka was the one speaking in the purportedly lost but found BBC Documentary on the Nigeria-Biafra War.
(3) With the exception of Yakubu Gowon whom I once had cause to disrupt and challenge to his face, publicly, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Victoria Island as he reeled out jaded falsehoods about what led to the War, I had worked very closely with the rest of the three actors disingenuously assembled as the cast in this fake Documentary, namely General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Professor Wole Soyinka and Chief Ralph Uwazuruike of MASSOB.
(4) In addition to several private sessions of quality Discussion Time spent with each of these three personalities in course of the many years of our collective search for answers to the complex and almost intractable Nigerian Question, the three were deeply involved in PRONACO (2005-2006) and all three were Plaintiffs in the 2007 and 2009 Suits filed in the Abuja and Lagos Jurisdictions of the Federal High Court respectively, Challenging the Legitimacy of the 1999 Constitution on Grounds of Fraud and Forgery. (Other Plaintiffs in those Suits include Chief Anthony Enahoro, Chief C.C Onoh, Bishop Bolanle Gbonigi, Prnce Tanimose Bankole-Oki (SAN).
(5) Proceeding from my responsibilities at PRONACO, and the MNN Implementation Vehicle (now NINAS), the Onerous Task of Filing and Leading the Prosecution of those Suits fell on me.
I could therefore say without equivocation that I know the three men well enough to identify their voices.
(6) I say with certainty that apart from the portions of the video clips cleverly cut out from actual interviews, the voices heard in the Fake Documentary, particularly in the voiceover presented as BBC Documentary are Fake and artificially generated.
(7) More importantly, as one with a fair grasp of what truly transpired in Nigeria through those turbulent years between the Coups of 1966, the War of 1967-1970, and the Post-War distillation and codification of Union Protocols (ie Nigeria’s Imposed Unitary Constitutional Arrangements), AND from my many years of heart-to-heart private and confidential discussions with each of the three men on the subject under discourse, I could say with certainty that the Fake Documentary is a hatchet job commissioned by vested interests, to distort the truth and set up false narratives especially about what led to the War.
(8) My suspicions about who those vested interests could be, are framed by the many false claims in the “Documentary” including that lie that the Quest for Control of Oil was the Chief-Reason the East went to War, whereas the whole World knows that it was the Genocide of Nigeria against the East, triggered by the British and Caliphate Greed for Oil that triggered the Nigeria-Biafra War in which the East was fighting for Self-Preservation.
(9) Further pointers to the identity of the vested interests who commissioned the Fake Documentary come from the false claim that Ojukwu rushed to War while Nigeria was seeking peace. Unfortunately for the Proprietors of the Dying One-Nigeria, the truth about what led to what, in that sad episode of 1966-1970 are well documented in many archives across the world. There is even an 800-Page Diary-book titled: “The Untold Story of the Nigeria-Biafra War” chronicling unedited, the accounts of foreign eye-witnesses to tumultuous events, day-to-day, throughout the period between December 31, 1964 and November 28, 1970.
(That Diary-book is available on Amazon).
(10) Looking away from recent missteps in the periphery of Nigeria’s muddled political waters, I know for certain that Prof Wole Soyinka who was caught in the crossfire between the two sides in the War of 1967-1970, will disclaim this fake Documentary as soon as it gets to his attention. As for the BBC in whose name the fake Documentary was put out, I am in no position to vouch for their non-involvement in this sordid pollution of the Truth, on a very sensitive matter, going by BBC’s many antecedents and so I would expect a Disclaimer from the BBC if it has no hand in this Documentary.
(11) In closing, I would challenge the Genocide-Generals of Nigeria (Class of ‘66) who removed History from School Curriculum in Nigeria and particularly Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Theophilus Danjuma, Jeremiah Useni, David Mark and any others who are still alive, and who today watch the slow-motion catastrophic collapse of the Unitary Nigeria they erected on the Foundation of Falsehoods and on the pool of the blood of the millions of Easterners particularly the two million innocent Biafran Children they starved to death, to find the courage to speak the truth now and join the effort to halt Nigeria’s drift to unprecedented anarchy.
(12) Without any hesitation, I challenge all Stakeholders in the affairs of 2024 Nigeria including the Interregnum President of Nigeria, to take advantage of the Five-Point Proposition offered by the NINAS Constitutional Force Majeure Proclamation of December 16, 2020, and take Nigeria into an Immediate Transitioning Process for an orderly Union Reconfiguration as Apartheid-Era South Africa did in 1990 to ease itself out of the Apartheid Bind, before the choking Constituent Components resort to Unilateral Self-Redemption Actions that could result in the kind of Disorderly and Disastrous Union Dissolution witnessed in the Defunct Yugoslavia.