(Being an Anniversary Note by Tony Nnadi on behalf of the Igbo Caucus of the LNC in NINAS, issued January 15, 2025)

The Genocidal War launched by Nigeria against its Predominantly-Igbo Breakaway Eastern Region in 1967 in the wake of massive Igbo pogroms that began in July of 1966, (reported worldwide as the Nigeria-Biafra War), was rolled back January 15, 1970, but with a string of deeply Punitive Post-War Economic and other Policy Measures Unleashed against the East, culminating in the imposition of a Pernicious Unitary Constitutional Order on Nigeria in 1979 as Victory Charter by the rest of Nigeria from the 1967-1970 War, which initially targeted the Permanent Political and Socioeconomic subjugation of the East in the Nigerian Project but which ultimately degenerated into the Unitary Constitutional bind holding all of Nigeria to the ground today. 

The aforementioned Anti-East and Anti-Igbo Punitive Policies and Debilitating Strictures include the May 27, 1967 Gerrymandering that Wrought the East Central State Dot-In-Circle Land-Locking and Pushback from International Border on the Igbo East; the Air, Land and Sea Blockade of the Igbo East, Compounded by the Shuttering of the Eastern Economic Corridor; the immediate post-war Confiscation of the Biafra Pounds with a 20-Pounds-Per-Pre-War-Account Expropriation Policy compounded by the heinous Abandoned-Property Expropriation; the Indigenization Decrees of the early 1970s which not only excluded the Igbo, but also advanced Igbo Money already Warehoused from the 1970 Biafra-Pounds-Confiscation Heist as Facilitation for the rest of Nigeria, to acquire controlling Stakes in Nationalized Assets, buying out Igbo businesses and Igbo sweat; then the Glass Ceiling against the Igbo in the Military, Police, and Public Service, reinforced by the atrocious Quota System Policy. 

None of these Post-War Punitive Policies have been reversed or remediated to date, despite official pretenses that took the form of an empty No Victor, No Vanquished Proclamation and the vacuous Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Reintegration (3-Rs) pronouncements of 1970.

On the Contrary, these Debilitating Policies were reinforced and Codified into a gridlock Unitary Constitutional Instrument in 1979 under the Military-headship of Olusegun Obasanjo, strictly within the dictates of the Caliphate-inspired Draft Constitution Commissioned by Murtala Ramat Mohammed in 1975 into the hands of Rotimi Williams and Ben Nwabueze. The 1977 Constituent Assembly was merely a window-dressing as Obasanjo upturned the finished work of the Constituent Assembly by the 17 Amendments he announced in his National Broadcast of September 21, 1978.

This 1979 Codification of Military-Era Policies into Constitution was reincarnated by Abdusalam Abubakar’s Decree No 24 of 1999 christened “the 1999 Constitution” by which the Proprietors and Enforcers of Unitary Nigeria imposed a grotesque 36-State/774-Local Government Structure with a 68-Item Federal Exclusive Legislative List on the already Distressed Federation of Nigeria. 

The result of these decades of wickedness is the Unitary Nigeria that has now become the global poverty capital saddled with an Overcentralized, Corruption-Ridden Governance System that is totally Unaccountable to the People. 

This is unmistakable nemesis for all who conspired in the aforementioned decades of wickedness against the Igbo-East such that if Nigeria were to die today from the complicated debilitations of its Unitary Constitutional Dysfunctions, it will be apt to write on its tombstone, the epitaph: “Nigeria Died Trying To Kill The Igbo”.

Whether anyone understands it now or not, it is our contention that the choice of Jan 15 as Nigeria’s Armed Forces Remembrance Day is Nigeria’s deliberate design to gloat over their conquest and subjugation of the Igbo and to constantly remind the Igbo that the 1967 Alliance of the rest of Nigeria won the 1967-1970 War. 

Tragically, in Unleashing the 1967-1970 Genocide against Its Eastern Region, the Distressed Federation of Nigeria launched a War against Itself. By virtue of that self-immolating war, the Federation of Nigeria has defeated itself in the global competition for Development, Security, Economic Prosperity and Progress amongst the Nations of the World. 

It does not require the insight of a seer to explain to Nigerians that the pathway to redemption for the Distressed Federation of Nigeria, is to make a U-Turn from the untenable Unitary Constitution by which Nigeria has bogged down itself and its Constituent Peoples into the embarrassment we have become to Africa and the Black man. 

In the same vein, it does not require the divination of a clairvoyant to point the Distressed Peoples of Nigeria to the Constitutional Reconstruction Propositions of the Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-Determination (NINAS), as the Most Viable and Most Immediate Mechanism for undertaking that U-Turn that Nigeria MUST now make to save itself from the looming catastrophic consequences of the poor choices it had made across the last six decades.

Nigeria’s Unitary Constitution: Product of North & South-west Alliance of 1967.