Biafra is Dead, Says Ex-Police Chief

A retired commissioner of police, Mr. Ibezimako Aghanya, has said that the renewed agitation for an independent Biafra state was baseless as Biafra was ”˜dead and buried’ with the end of the Nigerian civil war. The former commissioner of police who served in Kogi, Benue and Ekiti made his comment about Biafra during an interview with press men at the Igbo Day celebration at the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida Square in Makurdi, Benue state. The arrest and continued detention of Nnamdi Kanu, the director of Radio Biafra has escalated the protest for an independent state in the eastern part of the country. The protests under the aegis of the Independent People of Biafra and The Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra have sometimes resulted in violence and the Nigerian Army has warned that it would not fold its arm and allow the country degenerate into a state of lawlessness. Aghanya claimed the leaders of the renewed agitation for Biafra know nothing about what led to and transpired during the civil war. He added that the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu who championed the Biafra war later contested to be the president which meant he had submitted himself to Nigeria. He urged Igbos to fight for their right to be successful in Nigeria and not try to break away from it. He said: “Nnamdi Kanu and Ralph Uwazurike, who are now agitating for Biafra, were born in the 1980s. I was a boy of about 15 years during the war. I didn’t go to war, but when federal troops entered Port-Harcourt, I trekked for about 35 kilometres from Port-Harcourt to Igita. We were running like the refugees you now see in the northeast.”