Mr Ikoku denounced and condemned in the strongest terms the continued detention of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu. He said the detained leader has as , a matter of fact, not committed any crime worthy incaceration seeing that he was only leading a peaceful protest.
Tuface Idibia called for a similar protest though he called it off in the nick of time , other anti-government and pro-government demonstrators held theirs and were all given police protection.
He called particular attention to the continued detention of the IPOB leader and other pro-Biafra agitators that have been detained in various detention facilities across the country.
Below is an extract of his interview with the New Telegraph published on February 26, 2017.
Excerpts:
For some time now, IPOB and MASSOB have been agitating, what do you make of their mission and strategies?
These people have been very diligent in their methodologies and they have been going about their struggle without causing trouble. An in a civilized society, their demonstrations should be guided by security officials. You remember what happened when 2Face Idibia said people should stage an anti-government demonstration and the police said they should stop? You know at the end of the day you had two demonstrations- one pro-government and the other anti. You see and the police did not stop anybody, rather they protected them. So why is it that when IPOB and MASSOB carry out demonstration the police descend on them?
It shows that there are differences in the methodologies security officials use to treat people. If they are not treated as Nigerians, then they are saying give us our own system. It is their fundamental rights which the UN even recognizes and Nigeria is signatory to those treaties.
These people feel offended because of the way they are treated. They were not born during the Nigerian Civil War because most of them are about 25 years old and Biafra was a matter of 50 years ago. But they are looking at the whole thing and they observe they are not getting the right treatment other fellow Nigerians are getting. Hence they are asking us who are their parents ‘what are you doing?’
Why are you not protecting us? Why have you left us to the treated as second class or third class citizens in our own country of our birth where we pay tax and so on? So they have a right to demonstrate and the security agencies also have a right to protect them.
Why did they lock them up without bail? Why did you kill 21 of them? Why did they kill 177 of them? For what? Are they not part of this country? For what? These make us who are their parents and other Nigerians who understand their plight very angry too. And it is our duties to take care of our children and we are doing it. The South-West started taking care of their children and their economy. The Middle Belt can also do the same, just like the South-South and other parts of the country. So this country should be restructured into parliamentary democracy in line with the 1963 Constitution which General Yakubu Gowon upheld.
He spoke the other day and called for restructuring of Nigeria. That is why he is interested in restructuring the country. That does not mean that the country should be broken up.
This does not mean everyone should go his own way; rather it is a way of making Nigeria be great again as the largest concentration of black people in the whole world. And if it is done the glory will come to all of us whether you are Yoruba, Tiv, Igbo, Kanuri, Hausa or Ijaw. Anywhere you go you are a proud Nigerian because you are contributing something not only to Nigeria but also to the whole world.
Then what do you make of the recent statements by Prof. Ango Abdulahi and Dr. Junaid Mohammed that the North is ready for a breakup of the country?
Let me tell you. Let us not deceive ourselves, we believe that if we use the six geo-political zones as federating units, each of them is more viable that any country in West Africa. The North-East is more viable that Senegal; it will be more viable that Niger Republic, than Chad, than Benin and Togo. So if you say everyone should stand on its own and becomes a state of its own, it does not mean that everyone is finished.
They will all be viable and good. But what we are saying is that the totality of all these geo-political zones coming under one umbrella call Nigeria, the greatest black nation in the whole world, in a parliamentary system, will grow like the Asian Tigers. You know when the regions were first created; the Western Region was the fastest growing region. But it was emulated by the Eastern region and within two years, Easter region was growing faster than the West at a high rate which was acknowledged internationally. So we should not deceive ourselves. The fact that Abdulahi and Mohammed said everybody should go does not mean that everyone should perish.
They may become a smaller state, but they will still be more viable than many African nations. But they have to know that all the agitation for restructuring is to curb corruption. The presidential system of government is very expensive and it promotes corruption. If we go back to parliamentary system, corruption will be reduced; it will not be wiped away, because there is no government that is free from corruption.
But the institutions to curb corruption will be strengthened and people will work harder and get good emoluments. We are deceiving ourselves when we say that the minimum wage should be N18, 000. How many breakfasts will that buy even at one meal par day in our contemporary world? If we restructure, I can tell you that the minimum wage will go up to at least N30, 000 if not more. And as the economy grows, so will our children’s pockets grow and they will become more digitalized and have more work to do thereby bringing down the rate of unemployment.
There will be so much employment that the children will be selecting jobs because the economy is growing at a fast rate, unlike what we have now. So they should leave all these warped way of thinking and face the fundamentals of what makes a nation great. Otherwise, I can tell you that a lot of Nigerians are migrating from the country elsewhere where they are appreciated. Millions of Nigerians in Europe and the United States do not want to come back home because they are appreciated there for their contribution to the economy of those countries, but when they come to Nigeria, they don’t have up to six hours of electricity in a day.
Whereas, in Mosul, in Iraq where the whole world is fighting ISIS, do you know that they have a minimum of six hours of electricity in a day in southern part of Mosul? But in Nigeria where there is no such fighting, and a country that boasts of oil and others means of generating power like coal, solar and hydro does not have power at all. These are the things diversification of the economy in a restructured system will erase.
The people in the East and Middle Belt will use coal just like they do in Uganda. America uses coal to generate 40 per cent of their energy requirement. And in Germany now, you have what you called refined coal that does not give much pollution and that is what we should be doing. We should be thinking because right now we are not thinking, but we are just dullard, sleeping and wasting our resources and this make our children very angry. They go to school, acquire education and the knowledge they acquired are not being implemented.
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