Biafra Youths Should Rise Up And Proscribe Military Patrols And Mindless Abductions Across Their Communities

The Nigerian army has callously persisted in it's abduction of innocent and law abiding Biafran citizens in their respective communities and towns and transferring them to barracks amongst other detention facilities in Northern Nigeria. This ugly trend is persistently being carried out in Obigbo, Orlu, Aba and Owerri, with Igbo leaders keeping dead silence. Worsening the already worst situation, the Nigerian soldiers do not consider sparing the young ladies and even married women while committing this atrocious crime. They abduct these victims on the streets under the guise of hunting for the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). These women are being forcefully taken to military barracks in Abuja, Niger, Kano and Katsina States in batches where they are indiscriminately raped.

It is therefore necessary for all the youths of different communities, towns and villages across Biafraland, to courageously stand up in synergy and map out plans to outrightly proscribe military patrols within their respective domains. If the youths fail however to place ban on these unwarranted military patrols and siege in Biafraland, this unwholesome scenario will definitely continue. This is the set time Igbo youths should jettison their cowardice and proscribe the terroristic maneuverings of the Nigerian soldiers in their communities in their morbid search of the innocent to arrest. Community youths could hold on the fact that soldiers are not policemen that are constitutionally empowered to carry out arrest, detain, interrogate, arraign and prosecute suspects if found resistant to illegitimate abductions.

The youths of Biafra communities should learn from the courage of their counterparts in Isu town which is the Headquarters of Onicha Local Government Area of Ebonyi State. They frontally declared that nobody whether an indigene or not, within the seven consisting communities, is allowed to invite policemen or officials of Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), to Isu town for whatever issue no matter the intensity of provocation but should rather, lodge  their complaints with the Peace Committees already put in place in each of the villages to seek redress. By this singular development, Isu youths placed ban on every form of police patrol and unwarranted checkpoints throughout the entirety of Isu town. Moreover, the violent eviction of Fulani killer cattle herders out of the bushes, forests and farmlands by the youths on the 1st of February 2021, by Isu Youths Assembly (IYA), became effectual as the declared dusk to dawn curfew came in as an extraordinary measure aimed at monitoring activities. Movement of persons both in and out of the town was strictly coordinated. During the cause of this declared exercise, the youths  made it emphatically clear that no human, vehicular or animal movement including that of government security agencies, was authorized between the hours of 7:00pm and 7:00am. Isu youths proceeded further to ban the purchase and slaughtering of Fulani cows, possession and consumption of beef throughout the town with well defined consequences as penalties for offenders. The most interesting aspect of the entire drama is that inclusive of both army and police officers quartered in Onicha Divisional Headquarters in Isu, everyone was forced to face the imposed curfew without raising eye brows. This came to be because Isu youths were no longer smiling over the situations that triggered off the curfew.

It will interest the youths of other Biafran communities to know that when the Ebonyi State Governor, Dave Umahi authorized the deployment of soldiers to Isu town as a means of cowing the youths for evicting the notorious Fulani hersdmen, the youths had to take the war right to the doorstep of the soldiers by hitting the police station where the soldiers were quartered, and awaiting command from their Abakaliki based commander at the military cantonment. The attack orchestrated by these brave Isu youths greatly demoralized the stationed soldiers who came primarily on assignment to intimidate the youths as usual. They were left with no other option than to withdraw back to the barracks.

It is time therefore for the youths of various communities in Biafraland, to conquer their fears and courageously put a stop to the menace of the Nigerian army. If Isu youths can give matching orders to all to obey even including the political office holders, traditional rulers, cattle merchants, saboteurs and security agencies, against all odds, the youths of Nsukka, Udi, Oji-River, Nkanu, Orlu and Isuikwuato, can equally challenge the status quo and roundly bring to an end, this subsisting wave of unwarranted abductions and brutalities by the Nigerian military in the cities and towns of Biafraland. Biafra youths should come out of their shelves, stop folding their hands and watching helplessly, the desecration of the pride of womanhood in the barracks of these aliens in army uniform from the Sahel region of Africa. Now is the ample time to take the bull by the horn, once and for all.

Written by Ogbuebor Onyebuchi Eze

Edited by Peter Oshagwu

For Family Writers Press International