Prominent Northern youth organisations ob Tuesday held a meeting in Kaduna where they asked Igbos residing in the region to leave on or before October 1st this year. According to The Sun, the youth organizations had their meeting tagged “Kaduna Declaration” in at the Arewa House in Kaduna state Tuesday.
According to the youth groups, their order for the Igbos to vacate the region is premised on the shut-down of major towns in south eastern part of the country on May 30th by members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and their sponsors.
Among the Northern youth groups present at the meeting were members of the Arewa Citizens Action for Change, Arewa Youth Consultative Forum, Arewa Youth Development Foundation, Arewa Students Forum and Northern Emancipation Network on The Igbo Persistence for Recession among others.
In a statement read out to journalists after the meeting, the spokesperson of the groups, Abdulazeez Suleiman said, the region was tired of the marriage between the Nortern and Southern region, hence the need for restructuring as been proposed by some Nigerian leaders like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Sen. Shehu Sani and others.
“The persistence for the actualisation of Biafra by the unruly Igbo of South-Eastern Nigeria has lately assumed another alarming twist which involved the forceful lockdown of activities and denial of other people’s right to free movement in the South-East by the rebel Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its overt and covert sponsors. This latest action and similar confrontational conducts which amount to a brutal encroachment on the rights of those termed as non-indigenous people residing and doing lawful businesses in those areas illegally demarcated and defined as Biafra by the Igbo, are downright unacceptable and shall no longer be tolerated”.
Speaking further, he said:
“The Igbo people of the South-East, without remorse for the carnage they wrought on the nation in the 1960s, are today boldly reliving those sinister intentions connoted by the Biafran agitation that led to the very first bloody insurrection in Nigeria’s history. Emboldened by the apparent indifference of the Nigerian authorities, the Igbo secessionist tendency is widening in scope and action at every stage, with adverse effects on the law-abiding people of other regions residing in or passing through the East, while the Igbo leaders and elders by their utterances and direct action or inaction appear to support and encourage it.
This is happening irrespective of the undisputable fact that, Igbos have done and are doing more damage to our collective nationhood than any other ethnic group; being responsible for the first violent interference with democracy in Nigeria resulting in a prolonged counter-productive chain of military dictatorship. It is on record that since the inception of the current democratic dispensation, the Igbos have shown and maintained open contempt and resentment for the collective decision expressed by majority of Nigerians at various stages via generally acceptable democratic processes.
While these provocative acts of aggression persist and grow in dimension with each new move, leaders of the North whose people are at the receiving end of the threats, appear helplessly unperturbed. Without pursuing a resolute action-plan, these northern leaders have adopted and have been dragging its people into a pitifully pacifist position in order to sustain an elusive national cohesion that has long been ridiculed by the Igbos. From today, June 6, 2017, when this proclamation is signed, the North, a critical player in the Nigerian project, hereby declares that it will no longer be disposed to coexisting with the Igbos and shall take definite steps to end the partnership by pulling out of the current federal arrangement”.