The general elections in 2011 showed that you have become aware of your role, especially in Imo and Anambra where you called a halt to the worthless drift of our people into the hands of worthless people posturing as leaders. You have now become aware that you command 60 per cent of the population, and wherever you stand and resolve to vote, there shall leadership lie.
More is expected in other parts of Igboland in the years ahead. The other Igbo youth in other cognate states and zones should identify themselves and bring Igbo nation into homogeneity with Imo and Anambra. There shall lie our new relevance in Nigeria and the world.
Ndigbo in the Diaspora should be fully aware of the fact that their sojourn in foreign land should attract only one benefit. That benefit is transferring foreign technology to our own land – Igboland. No one should listen to the frightful impression that crime is pervasive in Igboland, so investments should not be brought home. It is atrocious. It is untrue. We have had cycles of beginning again induced by our fellow Nigerians to slow us down. They cause us to lose our investments in their own lands, force us to use our capital resources to better their own lands. Their lands provide us employment and resources to improve their own ranges of choices. We have monuments of capital in country homes and nothing else. We have few plants producing our needs. We have strong traders, no manufacturers. Yet we trigger industrialism in other lands in the world. You youth are endangered.
Poverty is roaring at the distance. It must be stopped. You must insist on proper leadership with your votes. Proper leadership must be provided by people who have communicated their vision and goals which the people find appropriate for their level of development. No one should access power without first being heard in these paradigms: Where are we? Why are we here? Where should we now go? How do we get there? The answers to these questions must be unique to Ndigbo. They must draw fully from our system. They must assure growth for all time. No one should be found on the portals of leadership without vision and satisfying mission that answer these questions.
I entered the Nigerian nation in the womb of my mother on April 14, 1944. Although I touched down in my village, Amohuo in Aboh Mbaise, my father in service of Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) at the time whisked me off to a town called Lafia within two days of my birth and had me formally registered as a citizen of Lafia, Nassarawa State. I was baptised by Rev. Fr. Donovan of St. Williams Catholic Church within two days of our arrival there. Registration of birth was quickly accomplished then through the churches. My first real and conscious contact was with Hausa-speaking people. I was privileged to regard myself as a citizen among them. At that time, all Nigerians were equal in all parts of the country. Independence was still afar off and there were no spoils to distract us. We were colonised by the British decades before my birth, and during that period, our colonisers ensured that they looked after one another at home and in foreign lands.
Yes we came into a dilemma of the incursion of the military. I played my part in fighting them, aiming at salvaging our corporate psyche afflicted by pogrom in the North of our country. I led students of University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) into revolt against the pogrom, and this revolt materialised into clamour for the sovereign state of Biafra in 1968. Unfortunately, I was not home to participate in that movement and its actualisation for I was on a mission to destroy Jebba Bridge and got caught by Nigeria Police in Ibadan and consequently was kept in detention for the entire period of the fratricidal conflict. That probably was the only reason I am alive today because I might have carried out many irrational and dastardly act in Biafra were I to have been there to experience first-hand the profligacy that spelt the doom of our experiment in forming our own nation.
I have, however, persuaded myself that all systems are ordered by the volitions which people hold and leaders to fulfil such volitions arise and play their roles of up-building or down-destruction in accordance with their volitions.
I am writing to acquaint you all with how my generation failed. I will continue this letter later. In the meantime, brace up for change.