Yakubu Gowon and the wonderful assurance of hell
By Lilian Onoh
Because of people like Yakubu Gowon, it is wonderful to remember that in God’s infinite wisdom and justice, hell is an assured eternal dwelling place for his kind – a mendacious, unrepentant fellow, who superintended the physical slaughter of about three million Igbos during the Nigerian Civil War and then committed the economic genocide of the Igbo survivors by his heinous £20 policy after the war ended – ethnic economic decapitation which he now frames as an act of benevolence on his part in his wormy fiction that he calls a memoir.
It should never be forgotten that the monetary bank balances of Ndigbo stolen by Gowon and Awolowo in return for £20 represented the entire monetary wealth accumulated by all generations of Igbos from the beginning of time to 1970. All the money made by our ancestors, handed down generation after generation until our traditional currencies were converted into western monetary instruments, were stolen by Yakubu Gowon at the end of the war.
Let the gravity of that horror sink in. All monetary wealth belonging to Ndigbo from the beginning of time to 1970 taken in return for £20. There is no historical parallel for this abomination. The Nazis did not frame the holocaust as benevolence. Till today, artifacts, gold and other treasures looted by the Nazis are being traced and returned to the descendants of the original Jewish owners. Nobody has ever tried to justify it.
Yet Gowon calls his unparalleled physical and economic holocaust – the banditry, raping and looting of the Igbo Nation’s wealth from the beginning of time – an act of benevolence.
According to him, the CBN offices in Benin and Enugu were looted during the War and because of this all Igbo wealth disappeared, in his magnanimity, he came up with the £20 policy as an act of kindness towards the Igbos.
In the first place, CBN does not hold individual bank accounts but government bank accounts. Yakubu Gowon knows this fact. Even the least educated person in Nigeria knows this fact. More ridiculously bombastic is Gowon expecting anyone to believe that the funds in the CBN in Enugu and Benin belonged solely to Ndigbo.
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Even if we discount the fact that it was Murtala Mohammed and his death squad that looted the CBN Office in Benin, there is no connection between the bank balances of Ndigbo. Igbos lived all over the Federation and their bank accounts from Sokoto to Maiduguri, Zungeru to Ibadan, Onitsha to Lagos, were held in banks ranging from Barclays Bank, African Continental Bank, UBA, British Bank of West Africa (1st Bank) et cetera.
These deposits remained intact during and after the war. All these banks survived the war as did their records of the bank deposits of all individuals of all tribes. It was based on these bank records that the surviving Igbo remnant with bank accounts received £20 in return for their billions deposited in these banks. How Gowon could use these two minor incidents to justify his voracious, cannibalistic devouring of the wealth of Ndigbo is baffling. He is so enamoured of his evil that he has lost the ability to reason like a human being.
There is no question that the Civil War was an attempt to replicate Hitler’s Jewish holocaust against Ndigbo. The nonsensical excuse that the slaughter of Ndigbo was justified because of the Northern leaders that died in the January 1966 coup cannot even stand scrutiny under the light from the dimmest star in the sky on a moonless night. The £20 policy was a continuation of this genocidal war against Igbos.
It was designed to kill the Igbo remnant that survived being butchered by Buka Suka Dimka and his slaughter squad, being disembowelled alive whilst trying to cross the River Benue in Makurdi as they fled the pogroms in the North, being starved to death and bombed in markets in violation of the rules of war, being massacred by Murtala Mohammed and Ibrahim Taiwo in Asaba, and being slaughtered by the death squads led by Ken Saro-Wiwa in the Riverine zones, as well as being stripped of their property in Rivers State under the unconscionable “Abandoned Property” daylight robbery by the greedy, lazy fellows who have occupied these properties since the war.
Despite gorging himself on the blood of three million Igbos Gowon couldn’t stop his bloodlust at the end of the war and enacted this genocidal policy against Ndigbo, the impact of which is still being felt 56 years after the end of the War and will be felt to the end of time.
Yorubas, Hausas and other tribes of Nigeria should ask themselves if they could be as resilient as Ndigbo if today, their entire monetary bank deposits as were confiscated solely because of their tribe and they were given N20 in return, whilst the balances of Ndigbo remained intact. I am sure that they cannot imagine such horror.
But this is what Yakubu Gowon had the effrontery to frame as an act of benevolence and glorified it as, “no victor, no vanquished.”
To him, mass murder, and stealing the economic wealth accumulated over millennia by Ndigbo, is benevolence.
His level of audacious mendacity is almost impossible to fathom.
His memoir, published in his 9th decade on earth, proved beyond doubt that the only person gaslit by his own gaslighting is Gowon himself. In layman’s terms, he is like a drug dealer overdosing on his own supply.
As part of his gaslighting enterprise, he cloaked himself with the garb of a prayer warrior and concocted something called, “Nigeria Prays”, at best a satanic entity, since it is the brainchild of an unrepentant fellow who stole the wealth of an entire nation to fill his insatiable appetite for Igbo blood. It cannot be classified as “Christian” by any Biblical definition of the word. With the condition of Nigeria since he started his “prayer ministry” in 1996, it is evident that the entity he has been praying to must be from the pit of hell.
Since he’s been using the Name of Jesus Christ to masquerade and deceive, it is therefore necessary to use the Bible to assess his eternal destination in light of the Bible; and without any doubt, it is hell.
We know that our Saviour Jesus Christ stated that on the last day, the charlatans who used His Name to deceive will be cast into outer darkness where they will be wailing and gnashing their teeth eternally.
We also know that the New Testament clearly states that God removes restraint from those in love with their bosom sins and lets them go gaga and wallow in it. In secular terms, “those whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad.” With Gowon’s inability to distinguish between truth and self-adulating fantasy, he’s clearly been handed over to his sins. His fate is sealed.
God says He’s a God of Judgment and Justice. His judgment is only stayed by His Mercy, extended only to those who recognise their sin, admit it, repent and genuinely ask for forgiveness. Gowon has never acknowledged any wrong doing, shown any remorse or sought forgiveness. Instead he has repeatedly justified himself and praised himself and framed his hideous blood lust as “duty.”
It is therefore absolutely certain that Yakubu Gowon will be going to God’s specified destination for his kind – hell.
That is absolutely comforting. It is totally Biblical. Gowon no longer has the capacity to repent and sooner rather than later, he will be in the eternal bosom of Lucifer, his father below, gorging himself on blood day and night, being bathed in blood, engulfed in the nauseating stench of fresh and stale blood, burning blood and dried blood, with no hope of escaping his personal blood drenched hell for all the years of the Igbo race on earth and eternity. Yakubu Gowon makes the certainty of hell something to be grateful for.
- Lilian Onoh was Nigeria’s Ambassador to Namibia and former Chargé d’Affaires to Jamaica.
