The history of humanity is littered with wickedness, cruelty, injustice, tragedy, butchery, carnage and mind-bending examples and graphic episodes of man's inhumanity to man.
The mass murder and wholesale genocide of innocents by the Assyrians, the Amalekites, the Canaanites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Medes, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Mongols, the Romans, the Ottomans, the Incas, the Aztecs, the British, the Belgians, the Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese, the Russians, the Turks, the French, the Germans, the Australians, the Cambodians, the Nigerians, the Hutus, the Boers, the Chinese, the Arabs and so many more.
I have studied much of world history and I have come to the conclusion that man is inherently evil.
Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa
"Every bird flies with its own kind. Crows fly with crows and eagles fly with eagles"- Muyhideen Ibn Arabi.
Muyhideen Ibn Arabi (1165 AD -1240 AD) was one of the greatest clerics, philosophers, teachers, poets, intellectuals, spiritual masters and Sufi Muslim scholars that ever lived.
Colonel Odimegwu Ojukwu
You are either a historian or a politician. You cannot be both. And generally speaking Nigerian politicians hate historians more than anyone else because they remind them of a past that they would rather bury and forget.
Today I am speaking and writing not as a politician but as a historian, a servant of truth, the voice of the voiceless and the champion of the oppressed.
"Nigeria's a typical West African mess of a country, only bigger and meaner. It's divided up the usual way: the coastal tribes are Christianized from sucking up to the European colonists. The further inland you go, the drier, hungrier and more Islamic it gets. The Brits grabbed the Nigerian coastline from the Portuguese when they realized there was money to be made, and turned the two big coastal tribes, the Ibo and the Yoruba, into their overseers on the Nigerian plantations. That left a lot of the inland Muslim tribes, the Hausa-Fulani people of the Sahel, permanently pissed off, sharpening their knives and biding their time.
"The Hausa-Fulani got their chance in 1963, when the last Brit in Nigeria hopped on a plane, yelling back to the Natives 'Congratulations, chaps! You're independent!' As soon as the Brits bugged out, the tribal massacres got going. Muslims in the north hacked to death every Ibo they could find. They hated these smartasses from the coast -- and now the Redcoats weren't there to stop them from taking revenge. 30,000 Ibos were killed in a few days.
"The massacres kind of soured the Ibo on the idea of Nigeria as one big happy inter-tribal family. In 1967 an Ibo General in the Nigerian Army declared that the Ibo region was now an independent country, 'Biafra.' The Nigerian Army, a big, sleazy outfit, begged to differ and invaded the Ibo region in SE Nigeria. The Army had 250,000 men. The Biafra/Ibo army had maybe a tenth that many, but they were brave and smart -- the Ibo had always been the brains of Nigeria.
"Every time it was a question of real battle on anything like equal terms, the Biafran rebels won. They stopped the government troops cold, then grabbed tactical surprise by staging a long-range raid into Western Nigeria.
"A risky advance like that by untrained civilian recruits (which is what most of the Ibo fighters were) is really impressive. But sad to say, courage doesn't count for much in West African warfare. It's ruthlessness that wins these wars, and the Nigerian junta had it.
"Instead of facing the Ibo army man to man, the Nigerian troops grabbed the coastline around the Niger River delta, this miserable maze of fever swamp was the supply route the Ibo needed. They stopped all food shipments heading for Ibo territory and sat back to let the Ibo starve.
Chief Moshood Abiola
Today is June 12th, our nation's Democracy Day and I have some home truths to tell.
The struggle for June 12th was indeed a noble, worthy, cataclysmic and monumental one. It was also something of a nightmare which littered our fields with many corpses and soaked the very foundation of our nation with blood, sweat and tears.
I can confirm that because I was deeply involved in it and for many years I, along with many others, fought for it's actualisation.
Many were martyred, many were jailed, many were tortured and many were compelled to flee into exile.
"History teaches us of the danger of being afraid to speak truth to power"- Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, 2nd June 2019.
Pastor William Kumuyi, who says we should not attack President Muhammadu Buhari, has much to learn from these words. If the world had remained silent in the face of Hitler's Nazis we would not be here today.
May 30th, 2019 represents the 52nd anniversary of the declaration of the Republic of Biafra.
I have written the following contribution to help mark that day. I hope it goes a long way to show where and when the trouble and challenges all started.
I also hope that it widens and stimulates the debate about the plight of the Igbo in the Nigerian state and to enlighten those that may not know why it is that so many young Igbos feel strongly about the concept of Biafra.
Some of the events that I have written about here are painful and deeply personal but write we must in order to educate others, in order to establish the truth, in order to ensure that history does not repeeat itself and in order to usher in an era of true reconciliation, peace, love and forgiveness in our nation. Kindly fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the flight!
For your own sake and for the sake of your family and nation please take what you are about to read very seriously and please endeavour to read it to the end.
Take it or leave it, this is my final warning and admonition to the good people of my beloved country Nigeria. After this I shall watch how things unfold and maintain a studied silence.
In the Book of isaiah 54:15 the Holy Bible says "surely they shall gather but it shall not be of me: whomsover gathers against thee shall be scattered for thy sake".
To add to that in the second Book of Timothy 1:7 it says "God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, love and sound mind".
'Lord of the Rings' by J.R.R. Tolkien is my favourite book. This is followed by C.S. Lewis' 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' which, like 'Lord of the Rings', was also made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie a few years ago titled "The Chronicles of Narnia".
George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire', which has been immortalised by HBO's just concluded 10 year long television series production titled 'Game of Thrones', is also an excellent book which I recommend for all to read.
"Reduce the number of Nigerians you give visas"- Federal Government of Nigeria.
I have never seen a Government that hates and despises its own people and treats them with as much contempt and disdain as the Buhari regime.
Governments are meant to support and encourage their people and not discredit and undermine them. This is indeed a Government of suffering, blood and tears.
Yet despite it all Nigerians just continue to accept and tolerate this rubbish and the opposition remains fragmented, intimidated, naive, badly-led, weak and divided.
"Ignorant and useless Zamfara people where are you? We are here in your Zamfara and we are urging you to come out and face us!"- ISIS West Africa (ISWA).
These are just some of the ugly and boastful words that were spoken in a graphic video that I posted on my Facebook page by an ISWA commander and the barbarians and terrorists that are decimating and butchering our people. I had his words translated from hausa to english.
The largest empires that the world has ever known are, in order of size, the British, Mongol, Russian, Spanish, Umayyad, Yuan, Qing, French, Abbasid and Portugese empires.
There were a number of other large and notable empires in world history such as the Roman, Ottoman, Greek, Babylonian, Persian and Mughal empires.
The post-World War 1 Soviet empire was massive and powerful and it was followed by the establishment of the post-World War 1 American empire which was equally formidable and which matched it in all ramifications.
The race for supremacy between the two continued after the defeat of Hitler, Nazi Germany and the Axis powers in World War 11 in 1945 and this resulted in the establishment of an unpredictable and frightful bi-polar world, a dangerous cold war and a tense balance of power between them.