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BIAFRA IS A STATE OF BEING

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Biafra is a state of being.

Until we have achieved that state of being, the desired geopolitical region remains at risk. So we must pursue both tasks together.

And the State of Being is as follows:

We have to do as the Catalonians do in Spain.
When they realized that the Castelianos (Madrid) will never voluntarily or easily give them Independencia, the Catalonians (Barcelona) decided to turn inwards and develop their region Technologically, Economically and Infrastructurally – and now they are the economic powerhouse of Spain.

The same thing is with Bayern in Germany. When Germany was declaring itself as a nation, Bayern (Bavaria) had the choice to stay out and be a country on its own (like Austria did) . Instead it opted to stay within a greater Germany and become it’s best part. Today Bavaria is the most technologically and economically powerful region in Germany – and it has the whole of Germany now as its primary and biggest market.

The same thing is with California in the USA.
It’s not only the biggest economy WITHIN the US, it’s also the 6th largest economy in the World! However, this is only because it is within the US and can leverage on all the synergies that come with that, that it can be so powerful. If it were suddenly to try to break away overnight to stand alone, as a competitor against the rest of the US, things would not be so easy.

Nigeria does not fear IPOB as it is. In fact, they WANT IPOB to challenge them, so they can militarily wage war on the Igbos. IPOB at present is not the Biafra that Nigeria fears. They fear the Biafra that becomes like Catalonia, like Bavaria, like California. That’s the Biafra they fear. So they NEED this militant IPOB to give them an excuse to come and reduce Ala-Igbo to a wasteland again and turn back the hands of our clock once more to Zero, like they did in the last Civil War. Even if we don’t want and don’t start any hostilities, they will use the slightest excuse or provocation or accident to send in their troops. Britain will support them and in the end USA will establish a military base in Igbo Land, to keep the peace. And that is how we will become occupied territory.

We have to be smart, and shift the battle to the field where we can win.

What I am saying is this: yes we will continue to ask for Referendum, like Catalonia does in Spain, like Scotland does in Great Britain.
But it is not Referendum that will give us the Biafra we need. And of course It is not guns that will give us Biafra, that we know. As Igbos, we have to conquer our chronic INDIVIDUALISM – and we have to pool our wealth, intelligence and efforts together to turn Ala-Igbo into a First World region, right here and now. But this is the most difficult thing for us because we are individualists! It is easier to protest.

The second point is: Our Governors. As much as we don’t like them, we have to work on them and with them.

If IPOB mobilises the people against the Governors, the same way it is mobilising them against the Federal Govt, you will see how fast things will change. What will the governors do? Start shooting their own people? If any governor does that, where will that governor run to hide from the people’s revenge? They have nowhere to hide. Your State is your home – so they MUST listen to the people. If the people are united, (and IPOB can unite the people because IPOB is very powerful), they MUST start DEMANDING ACCOUNTABILITY from EVERY elected official in the South East.

Demand that they invest in INFRASTRUCTURES. Roads and transportation. Potable water. Drainage systems. Housing. Health. Education. Tax breaks for small businesses. Regional economic integration. Constitute expert groups accross every field from within and the diaspora to develop and advice on the framework for regional development.

Instead of going to Abuja, the Governors should come together, put money together from their budget and start building a second Niger Bridge. Start dredging the River Niger at Onitsha. Start developing the dry port at Abia. Start NOW and make it mandatory that EVERY South East governor prioritize regional integration. Taxes and tarrifs for business MUST come down to encourage investors.

Computer Village in Lagos is full of Igbos.
The governors and leadership should put their moneys together and build TECHNOLOGY TOWN in Aba. Follow up on the likes of the Geometrics power project in Aba, with a view to completely electrifying Ala-Igbo. And many more of such things.

Put their money together and elevate Enugu Airport to a level HIGHER than Lagos or Abuja airport. Things like that. Developing the Owerri Airport to a full international cargo airport and take advantage of the central location of Owerri in the South East.

Quality educational institutions are lacking in the East even though we constantly produce the highest number of applicants to universities. Let us build more by collaboration with our foreign diaspora. They’re the best in many parts of the world. Lets harness this advantage.

We need a world class Stock Exchange in Ala-Igbo. We can achieve that without the Federal government, because we own trading. Encourage our diaspora to work with government to establish and run QUALITY WORLD CLASS HEALTH CARE institutions in Ala-Igbo.

IPOB has already come up with a blueprint for an Igbo-wide democratic customary government, the people’s government, very republican in nature, and this is good. THIS IS POWER. Ironically, it might even be in accordance with the Nigerian constitution. If peacefully achieved, this can be the leverage with which to control the elected executive and legislative levels, if Nigeria stays together. And if Nigeria falls apart, then automatically we already have a framework state in operation.

However, IPOB must win Igbo people over by championing their welfare with their own governors and officials. Threaten them with no re-election and criminal prosecution if they fail to serve their people. They must also encourage the training, standardization, integration and sharing of information by the different state security groups to stamp out crimes like robbery, kidnapping, human trafficking, etc. We are Igbo. We are in the communities and we know those who are into crime. People MUST start explaining their sources of wealth. IPOB can utilize its huge following to ensure crime is wiped out and good governance is entrenched in the South East.

Then IPOB and Nnamdi Kanu would forever be remembered kindly by history.

If we are doing things like all these, Arewa will not need to issue quit notice – NDIGBO will come back in droves to build up Ala-Igbo.

Is it beyond the Igbo to venture into modern and very lucrative cattle rearing and be the leaders in all of Africa? Are we not known to come late into any venture and excel beyond those in it for centuries?

The governors in Ala-Igbo should AS A MATTER OF URGENCY introduce RANCHING across Ala-Igbo for prospective and enterprising IGBO CATTLE FARMERS, after which they will enact, implement and execute ANTI OPEN-GRAZING LAWS in their States, then call on all indigenes and States security groups to participate in monitoring its implementation. This will empower all Igbos and we will rid ourselves of these gun-totting Fulani Herdsmen in no time.

*This is priority. Every passing day is too much.*

Ekiti State did it. Benue State has done it. It’s not impossible. Why cannot the States of the South-East ALL do it as ONE? *Anti Grazing Law.* This will shake the Nigerian Govt more than asking for referendum.

IPOB has power. If they use it wisely they can bring about tremendous change in Ala-Igbo without a single blood shed. They are uniquely positioned at this period in time to use their massive following and break the individualistic Igbo trait to bring about change that will positively shape Igbo history for generations. If they misuse it by going the route of war, that didnt work decades ago, then it would be a great loss indeed.

If Nigeria stays together, Ala-Igbo can become the most advanced region of Nigeria if we START NOW. If Nigeria breaks up, we have to be ready to survive on our own. And at this moment, we are not yet ready. This is where we need to put our eyes into. Because the ball is already rolling.

What we want is for people to come and start investing in Ala-Igbo, from all over the world. They will do this massively if they see the political will and infrastructures being laid down in Ala-Igbo. If that happens, everybody will protect Igbo land. Biafra will grow from within. Let Nnamdi Kanu, all Igbo leaders and thinkers read this and run with it.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije (Ogbuehi)
August 2017.

DO AFRICANS BELIEVE THAT AFRICANS CAN INVENT?

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We have to make our own world, because there is little space for us in the world others have created, out of their own ingenuity, for themselves.

So what we need is to create in Africa an African system that supports research and invention from Dream to Done Deed. What we need is to awaken the strong sense of the need to create our own world, a new world. A desire, the unquenchable thirst and unslackening desire to do this or perish. It becomes our racial focus, and the essence of the DNA we pass on, henceforth, from Generation to Generation. Our black spirits will come ready-made with the natural Urge to do this. We will be born differently from today. Born to invent.

But…: Do Africans believe that Africans can invent? Do Africans who feel the spirit of invention and innovation stirring within them have the guts to sacrifice their whole life to it? Are there financiers and patrons ready to support them to the bitter or sweet end?

If all you do is extract natural resources and minerals from the earth and the waters, and sell them unprocessed to others, then you are just a glorified miner. Now, today, as oil revenues dwindle, the call is sounded. Any mathematician can do the arithmetics and work backwards from the finish line. It is the point in time when our oil becomes worthless and our ability to invent and innovate becomes the only natural resource we have left. Untapped?

Yes I made the the jump from oil to inventions; whereby the popular wisdom proclaims that the alternative to oil bears another name: Diversification. But… Diversification Alone Is Not The Answer! It is only an interim puffer, but not the guarantor of survival. Only the fit survive. The fit are those who have trained the power and ability to create the future.

But…: Are African governments, think tanks, traditional institutions and financial institutes really ready to chart and push this course and pour all their resources into creating a new world, their own future? Do Africans believe that Africans can invent?

If we simply diversify from Oil to Solid Minerals, we will make the same mistakes again because not only are the underlying methodologies unaddressed and unchanged; nor the corruption issues in terms of persons, institutions and systems unammended; but, most importantly, the fundamentally flawed ideology that drives and guides our concept of nation-building, people-building, capacity-building – whatever you want to call it – remains the most entrenched and in-built weakness that we carry with us from generation to generation, from century to century. It is an ideology that supports a taker-mentality as opposed to a giver-mentality; it remains a receiver-mentality as against a creator-mentality; it stays a past-deifying and present-indulging mentality instead of a future-engineering one.

But it is better to produce the future than to reproduce the past. What our so-called education so far has not done for us is trigger the creator-gene. Systemically, deeply and deliberately. En Masse. The discoverer-Complex has yet to be activated within the context of African Culture, Upbringing, Orientation, Foundational Thinking that later guides investors, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and every citizen. We are talking about the Survival of the Species here.

The human being, in the end, respects only intelligence. Not just articulated intelligence, but intelligence that has yielded action and tangible form. The human species‘ only hope for survival and expansion, right from time, and for escaping extinction, has always been innovation and invention, i.e. the practical application of intuitive perception and intelligence. Thus, humans finally only respect those persons and groups whose ingenuity or depth of perception leads to discoveries and inventions that continue to move humankind forward. The urge to move, physically, mentally and spiritually, and to defend gained territories, is a deep evolutionary expression of primal survival instinct.

Therefore: Africans had better start believing that Africans can invent and that Africans SHOULD invent. And start pouring all their resources into making this a reality. Otherwise, the future which is being currently invented and designed by Non-Africans, for Non-Africans, will have no place in it for Africa and Africans. Or the place that will be reserved for us, we will not like it, nor possess the power and ability to change it. It will be worse that the days of Slavery and Colonisation. It will be a depth of systemic powerlessness and denigration not yet seen in the history of humankind. Because, if you don‘t make anything, you‘ll never own a thing.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Thoughts on Africa

REALPOLITIK: AFRICA, THE REAL AFRICA

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African Unity is Inter-ethnic (not Inter-national) in nature. Unlearn Africa. Learn Africa. Know the tribes and ethnic groups, their languages, histories, cultures, sentiments, traditional friends and enemies. Then you will suddenly see the real Africa and the real African boundaries and borders. They are very different from what was left behind by colonialism. Still unresolved.

African peoples and ethnic units, the real ones, not the national mirages. Any African countries that scrap their tribal languages are taking a lazy defeated step backward, not forward; suppressing forces that will still break out one day again – with even greater force. You can not deny Ethnicity in Africa.

But it does not have to divide us. On the contrary: the acknowledgment and knowledge of it helps us to form natural bridges across ethnic lines. This leads to more – and true, natural – peace and understanding. On the other hand, ignoring it has led to us over and again walking blindfolded and naively into pogroms, genocides, wars at worst – or just never-ending fractures at best.

However, in our need to find peace we have often taken the self-destructive path of sand-papering all our ethnic identities away in order to reduce us all into one amorphous history-less post-colonial European-speaking being. But we thereby go backwards, or sideways, not forwards. We lose, in the illusion of gaining. You have to know your tribe and your fellow African’s tribe; and allow the ethnic part of you to forge ties and forms of understanding with the ethnic part of them. Because our ethnic identities is what we on our own developed for ourselves over the course of millennia. They are not just surface-identities and nothing. Our colonial identities, however, were imposed on us and still sit on us like ill-fitting clothes.

It is ironic that when we associate with non-Africans, we make room for differences based on race and ethnicity. We acknowledge their race and take it into account in the bridge we build between us and them. This then smooths the way to a firm relationship and makes it easy for the shared humanity in us and them to link up with each other. But when we progressive Africans are associating with our fellow Africans, we carelessly believe the colonial white-wash of the irrelevance of our original ancient ethnic identities, and we try to build a relationship on an illusory foundation within which we have not yet reciprocally understood and arranged our minor but important ethnic differences according to their natures. But: Once done, harmonisation becomes very easy and in fact inevitable.

One of the reasons why Igbos and Yorubas, for example, quarrel so much and seemingly find it so difficult to unite politically is that they each keep on expecting the other, unconsciously, to be like them. To be the same end-product of colonialism. To be another version of themselves across the Niger. Especially politically. But since this is not the case, they CRITISIZE that which is different in the other. However only when they have have acknowledged and accepted not only the differences, but the fact that it is natural and complimentary to be different, will they – upon then understanding how to harmonise those differences – begin to see their vast Similarities too.

Despite being the victims of the same conditions all over Africa – corruption, mismanagement, abuse-of-power, and indiscipline – yet we find it difficult to form a strong fist to punch against these situations; and we don’t know why, although the answer is staring us in the face and we are living it everyday. We bunch ourselves into our ethnic groups and then say that tribalism is the problem. But tribalism is not the problem, because most people will always be true to their ethnic identity. It is natural. The problem is that the template for African Unity was created by non-Africans for economic purposes – today we call these templates “African Countries” and they are the member states of the so-called AU (formerly called OAU).

However we Africans need to create alternative theaters and templates of unification and conflict-resolution where the ORIGINAL African identities (today called ethnic groups or tribal families) can themselves work out the rules of engagement or disengagement. Then they can do away with Tribal or Ethnic BIAS. Denying this fact will change nothing, as the Realpolitik in Africa will nevertheless calmly continue to run along those lines and be powered by those forces. Thus, there needs to be a theatre and a dynamic where and whereby this reality can interact with itself and sort itself out.

That is what is still missing: an African self-made Inter-Ethnic OAU. An AU of the original ethnic families. Because the truth is this: the different constituent parts of it are already there. Look at Nigeria: Biafra, Arewa, Oduduwa, Bini Cosmos, Middle Belt. Some even extending naturally beyond the borders of Nigeria. They are all there, the true power blocs and centers of force; the true African identities of the Africans living there. Their FIRST socio-political and cultural identity. Nigeria is in this regard only their second identity. But as long as the first identities find no platform to engage according to homogeneity and share power equitably, the second identity will also know no peace and will remain unstable.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

INVISIBLE GARDEN

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Creation is soft and beautiful. But it is also meticulous and thorough, such that in all its softness it is also very hard, merciless and adamantine. Because everything comes back.

And in all it’s beauty, it is also very terrible and gruesome and unsmiling, because EVERYTHING is absorbed, tended, grown, prepared, strengthened and returned back to its originator. It is beautiful perfection.

You feel it but you don‘t realise it. All the time.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

REALITY

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Reality is a stranger. And we live in it, and live with it, but we don‘t know or understand it. We don‘t know what it’s Laws are, why it does the things it does. Why we fall sick, why we die how we die when we die. Why the Fulfilment of our dreams are cut short unexpectedly. Those who pray are not spared. Those who don’t, don’t fare better either. We live in Reality, something strange that we don’t understand. Understand why it apportions this to that person and that to this person. Why it is so inexorable, so unyielding, so mysterious. Why it will hit you tomorrow with something you don‘t expect today. Why?

Abd-ru-shin explained the Laws of Creation in his book The Grail Message „In the Light of Truth“ the best I have ever heard or read them explained. I return to it ever and again, to find clarity. But knowing of Reality is one thing. Becoming in harmony with Reality is the next step, and the hardest. Because for that, a person has to change, really really change from deep within. And only Reality itself can change a person that deeply. The more Reality confronts and confounds one, and hits one, the deeper it simultaneously seeks to pave its way deep into one, until it gets to that immortal light within one‘s core which alone can burn in harmony with Reality. Only then, at that final moment, will Reality cease to feel like a stranger, and start to feel like a father, like a teacher, like a guardian, like mother and like Home.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

INTUITION AND DEVELOPMENT

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Environmental and spatial Beauty starts with Intuition, Art and Imagination. When you imagine it, draw it, design it, form it and then outwardly build it after that Image. Then suddenly you have outwardly what you crave and imagine inwardly. What you sense inwardly.

As simple as this may sound, this is the key to quantum leaps and to infinite development. This is the assurance that the boundaries of Genius will always be crossed, as long as we continue to march through Time, guided deeply by Intuitive Perception. Space is flexible, and bendable to Imagination and Inspiration.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

LICHTSCHATTEN / LIGHT-SHADOWS

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Wenn Ihr nur Schatten Euer Selbst seid
Wenn you are mere shadows of yourselves..

Seid Ihr immer noch Ihr selbst
You are still yourselves…

Lichte Tage, dunkle Tage
Light days, dark days…

Meistert sie alle cool 😎 und souverän
Ride them all in style 😉…

Dein Leben ist Dein Gedicht
Your life is your poem…

Jeder Schritt muß zählen
Let every step count…

Jedes Wort, jeder Tag, alles
Every word, everyday, everything…

Ist das einzige, was Du hast
Is all you have.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL

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Horrible to him
Wonderful to me
Ugly to day
Beautiful to night

I see with eyes
That see surprise
I hear with ears
That hear falling tears

I see the woman
Being human
I love the human
Being in the woman

I know your value
I know the worth
Of your old-fashioned Virtue
Pretty or not,
You’re beautiful.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

FEAR NOT THE IDES OF MARCH

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Fear not the Ides of March
Go boldly your path to the end
What’s unclear today, another Plutarch
Will explain one day again

Fear not the Ides of March
Fear is the foe of your nature
Your feet it’ll drag, tongue it’ll patch –
Heed not every Seer or Preacher

Fear not the Ides of March
Though your friends turn into traitors
Or family conspirators, sly and arch,
Join and jubilate with your tribulators

Fear not the Ides of March
Death cannot upturn your victory
Tough as larch and strong as starch
Shall eternally inspire your Story.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
15.03.2019

ONE DAY IT’LL BE TOO LATE

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If you’re mad and you know you’re mad
Are you mad?
If you’re sad and you know you’re sad
Why don’t you smile?
If you’re bad and you know you’re bad
Then you know what’s good –
If you’re glad and you know you’re glad
Share it and make someone else smile.

Life is going by so quick
Not just the individual life of you and me
Sometimes one has this strange feeling
That humankind itself also
Won’t be here forever
Our species too will die out
Inspite – or because – of all our great knowledge.

One by one, we will bury each other
And after the last sister has buried her last brother
Her final prayer before she too quietly departs
Will be that God forgive all our human hearts
For not understanding on time
That only Love furnishes the perfect last rhyme.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.