No fewer than 20,000 Igbo people since 2013 have been slain or declared missing after being abducted by Nigerian security forces, according to the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
The group accused the federal government of instilling ethnic hatred in the Igbo people through arbitrary arrest, incarceration, and extrajudicial killings by the police, military, and Department of State Services.
It further asserted that the federal government of Nigeria pursued ethnic hatred towards Biafrans as a state policy both before and after the Nigeria-Biafra war.
IPOB revealed that the federal government’s ethnic hatred of the Igbo is why its leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, began the Biafra self-determination struggle to free the Igbo from racial profiling and bigotry. The pro-Biafra organisation called President Bola Tinubu’s attention to how the DSS and other security agencies are humiliating and victimising Igbo people.
It was claimed that Igbo country, particularly the South-East zone, has been militarised by ethnically biassed security personnel who kidnap and execute Igbo youths.
Comrade Emma Powerful, Media and Publicity Secretary of IPOB, claimed that Boko Haram insurgents in military detention facilities in the North had been released without trial while innocent Biafrans, primarily Igbo, had been abducted and imprisoned.
“These innocent people picked up by security forces along the streets are made to pay huge amounts of money or be branded IPOB or ESN and be executed. Some of the victims of illegal abductions are held incommunicado, and their family members do not know their whereabouts.
“This genocide is going on a daily basis in a supposed democratic country called Nigeria. Daily, a lot of Igbo youths are extrajudicially killed or abducted and hauled into detention facilities without being charged with any crime all over Nigeria. There is no region in Nigeria that is militarised like the South-East Region. Most of the time, the Nigerian government sponsors violent criminals in the south-east so that they can justify their military siege on the region.
“The Nigerian government, through a backdoor court pronouncement, proscribed the peaceful movement of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2017. The federal government proscribed IPOB without IPOB having legal representation.
“Which court gives judgement without hearing from the two parties except the Nigerian judiciary in their own court of law? This can only happen in Nigeria, where injustice reigns supreme. Nigeria’s judiciary is the only judicial system that took a fourth-place candidate and put him in the first position. The IPOB legal team challenged this black market under the table proscription. IPOB has been at the Court of Appeal of Nigeria since 2018, but the Nigerian government suppressed the hearing of such an appeal even when IPOB lawyers had fulfilled all the process requirements.
“The Nigeria government, through her security forces, capitalising on the death of the justice system in Nigeria, anchors on the illegal proscription of IPOB to indiscriminately abduct and indefinitely detain many Biafrans, particularly Ndigbo. In all detention facilities across Nigeria, 95% of the inmates are innocent Biafrans. Today, almost all the people detained at the Department of State Services (DSS), are innocent IPOB Biafran citizens. Even if you release all Boko Haram terrorists and bandits with the DSS, the facility will remain full of innocent Biafran civilians.
“IPOB is not violent and has never been involved in any terrorism act, yet the Nigerian government clamped down on us while romancing with the terrorists in the North. This is pure ethnic profiling, hatred, and dehumanisation.”
