Four days ago, November 26, 2018 faithfuls from all over Nigeria and beyond gathered in Owerri the Imo state capital to mark the memorial of the greatest hero of our time, Dim Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. One of the best Nigeria, Africa and the World has ever produced. A man, if I am to worship or have any mortal as a god, in-equivocally Ojukwu would be my god.
As I watched the events of the memorial of the man who died for me organized and spearheaded by her indefatigable widow, Ambassador Bianca Ojukwu, a woman whom I hold to the highest esteem her qualities and character as she will stop at nothing to uphold Ojukwu legacies. I couldn’t just but recall one of his great and memorable speech in February 1994 at the Lagos Law school. Hear him.
“The war has come and gone but we remember with pride and hope, the three heady years of freedom. These were the three years when we heard the opportunity to demonstrate what Nigeria would have been even before 1970.
In the three years of war, necessity gave birth to invention. During those three years, we built bombs, we built rockets, we designed and built our own delivery system. We guided our rockets, we guided them far and guided them accurately.
For three years blockaded without the hopes of import, we maintained engines, machines and technical equipment. The state extracted and refined petrol with our own indigenous technology called the Biafran pot. Individuals refined petroleum in their backyards gardens.
We built and maintained airports and air strips. We maintained them under heavy bombardment. We spoke to the world through a telecommunication system engineered by local ingenuity. The world herad us and spoke back at us.
We built armored tanks and cars. We modified aircraft from trainers to fighters, from passenger aircraft to bombers. In three years of freedom, we became the most civilized, the most technologically advanced black people on earth.
Now you wonder why I am deeply passionate about Biafra, the answer lies in the above speech. Biafra was able to achieve much in war time under the strictest condition what Nigeria has not been able to achieve in its long years of peace. To show their deep hatred for Biafrans, out of jealousy they destroyed all the feats achieved by Biafrans. The Biafran research documents were burnt, what a waste of ingenuity.
Nigeria all along has what it needed to compete with the world but fear and jealousy blinded them and a people ingenuity has been left to waste while the whole populace wallow in ignorance”
