IPOB PRESS RELEASE,
02, November 2024.

The noble and great family of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) led by the prophet of our time Mazi Nnamdi Okwuchukwu Kanu wish to notify Biafrans, friends of Biafra and lovers of Biafra freedom that ESN formed and established by our indomitable leader Mazi Nnamdi Okwuchukwu KANU are on top of the job for which our leader Mazi Nnamdi KANU established them. That job is the defence of the length and breadth of Biafraland from the ravages of killer herdsmen from the Sahel.

For it has come to our notice that some faceless individuals, perhaps perhaps propelled by hunger and deprivation and under the pay of some inconsequential political entities in Nigeria, appear to be busy on social media trying very hard to mislead the public into blaming ESN for the government sponsored insecurity bedeviling the south-east. Their pathetic attempt to change the narrative about the nobility of our movement and the vision of our leader Mazi Nnamdi Kanu in establishing ESN is bound to fail as other previous attempts did.

These cowardly and shameless individuals, operating under the cloak of anonymity afforded them by use of fake accounts, were nowhere to be found when killer Fulani herdsmen from all over the Sahel region were marauding through our farmlands, forests and villages in Biafraland, pillaging, looting, raping and slaughtering our men, women and children. The situation became so deplorable that some Igbo governors that summoned the courage to call 82 Division of the Nigerian Army at Enugu and later the presidency found to their shock that their calls were ignored. Reduced to issuing watery, inconsequential and ineffectual press statements, they resorted to begging the Federal Government of Nigeria, through newspaper publications, to intervene and reacue them. At a point our mothers stopped going to the farm. Fear and terror gripped our land. None of these quislings ranting online raised a voice of condemnation at the despicable cowardice of the so-called political class in the East, in the face of this mass slaughter of their people.

We all recall instances of wholesale massacres and bloodbath in Enugu, Ebonyi, Anambra, Abia, Imo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Benue and Imo. How can any same Igbo person forget Nimbo and Uzo-Uwani? Or have we all forgotten that these sustained slaughter of the innocent by Fulani herdsmen was the sole reason why our leader formed the formidable Eastern Security Network (ESN)?

The sole purpose for the existence of ESN is to checkmate the excesses of these killer herdsmen from the Sahel and to ensure that no inch of the Land of the Ancients (Igboland) is forcibly taken over and occupied by killers disguised as herdsmen. IPOB will never condone the mistakes made by other ethnic groups that allowed their ancestral lands to be forcibly seized and converted to a mini caliphate, to be visited on Igbo people or replicated anywhere in Igboland or across the entirety of Biafraland for that matter.

Not many people in Nigeria today know that a sizeable chunk of Yorubaland, Oyo State in particular is under forcible occupation by these killer herdsmen from the North. This was what some Yoruba agitators were fighting against or have we all forgotten?

Today no Yorubaman would dare enter a forest renamed Gambari in Oyo State that is the heart of the Yoruba race. Is Gambari a Yoruba name? Tiv people of Benue today have forfeited their ancestral landcestral land, which was has long been renamed Katsina Ala. Meaning a mini Katsina in another person’s land. The last time we checked, Gambari as a name is not an indigenous Yoruba name, neither is Katsina Ala a name anyone can associate with native Tivi people.

Every well meaning Easterner should be grateful to Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and ESN for blunting and putting a permanent stop to the relentless advance of killer herdsmen from the Sahel who are hellbent on conquering Indigenous populations all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Like the Yoruba Amotekun formed to give legitimacy to the quest to eradicate killer herdsmen from Yoruba farms and forests, ESN is here to protect the people, nothing more nothing less. If other Nigerians are comfortable with killer herdsmen taking over their forests and farmlands and slaughter their people at will, that is their prerogative. Such state of affairs will never replicated in Biafraland. As long as IPOB exists, Fulani herdsmen will never takeover any inch of territory in Biafraland.

If you want ESN disbanded as some of these badly informed and misguided online urchins are demanding, they should presure the Federal Government to first disband hordes of killer herdsmen invading our forests. Miyetti Allah that is their public face must be banned and open grazing abolished. So long as these entities are in existence, ESN shall continue in their duty to defend Biafraland.

Those mischievously linking ESN and extension IPOB to ongoing insecurity in Igboland are not only misguided but are jokers. These attention seekers know the politicians sponsoring the destruction of Igboland in exchange for enlarged security budget with which they hope to contest for vice presidential slot come the next election in 2027 if President Tinubu decides not to run.

Cheap playground bully tactics and empty propaganda against IPOB never worked in the past and it will not work now. People should instead be grateful to Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB for saving the entire Middle Belt, Oduduwa and Biafraland from the devastating effect of RUGA. If not for IPOB, everybody would be living under RUGA today. ESN deserve praise. In the same measure those bringing mayhem to the south-east should be dealt with without pity.

COMRADE EMMA POWERFUL MEDIA AND PUBLICITY SECRETARY FOR IPOB.