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IMA ONWE - THE WAY TO THE FUTURE

IMA ONWE - THE WAY TO THE FUTURE
BEING TEXT OF A KEYNOTE ADDRESS DELIVERED BY HIS EXCELLENCY, GOVERNOR IKEDI OHAKIM, GOVERNOR OF IMO STATE, NIGERIA.
AT THE 13TH WORLD IGBO CONGRESS IN DETROIT MICHIGAN, USA, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2007

My brothers and sisters, if I say I am delighted to be in your midst today, I am stating the obvious. I bring to you warm greetings from Nigeria and the blessings of the people of Imo State.

Permit me, brothers and sisters to speak to you frankly, and as I usually do, from the heart. Annually, when we leave Nigeria in great numbers to attend the World Igbo Congress, our neighbours and competitors in Nigeria are usually in great discomfiture, believing that Ndigbo have gone to strategize on how to overcome the Nigerian encumbrance.

But sadly, it is usually not so, in the sense that we do not set achievable but measurable short term, medium term and long term goals. I have seen some of the previous conferences packaged, parceled and sold to the highest bidder. I have seen our brothers and sisters serving at the federal level play roles of agents of the Federal government, instead of Igbo pathfinders.

These inimical tendencies are more evident during election years. It is my hope and prayer that from this day forward, we shall have a change of heart and really make the World Igbo Congress, a serious planning and strategy session for the benefit of our people. It is with that hope that I have chosen to share with you my thoughts on a way for the future, hence the title of this address: Ima Onwe - The Way to The Future.


IMA ONWE-WHO ARE WE?
Ladies and gentlemen, I have chosen my topic conscious of the need for us to move the Igbo nation to the next level. That next level is not where we indulge in lamentation of our sorry state in Nigeria, it is not where we languish in self-pity, it is not where we blame past leaders or the present Federal Government and its policies. The next level is where we do a thorough self-examination, diagnose our problems dispassionately, reach deep down to those core values that make us Ndigbo and come up with strategies for dealing with our problems. In doing so, therefore, we must first of all seek to understand ourselves, for the fundamental law of life is that which admonishes: Man, Know Thy Self.

Rene Descartes, the French mystic and philosopher in trying to understand what makes him a human being, summed it up thus: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Knowing our self presupposes a critical enquiry into our attributes as Ndigbo, our responses to our environment, our relationship with our critical competitors and our appreciation of the world in which we live, that is, Ima Onwe anyi. It is often said that man is a product of nature and nurture, in other words, our environment helps to shape what we ultimately become.

Indeed Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo captured this in his seminal work: Nigeria: The Challenge of Biafra, when he wrote that, 'Man, whether white, black, yellow or red is compelled to find solutions to problems posed by his environment". Thus whenever a person acts contrary to the expectation from a product of a particular environment, the question is often, onye a omakwa onwe ya? This self-re-examination, therefore becomes a very important exercise because it seems to me that part of our problem derives from a total lack of understanding of where we are coming from as Ndigbo. As the great man himself, Prof Chinua Achebe always reminds us, if we do not know where the rain started to beat us, we will never know when we dry.

It is natural that you can never cure a disease you do not know; you cannot solve a problem you do not understand. This particular excursion into our very being and existence is particularly important for those of you who live in foreign lands, whose children are first and foremost citizens of the foreign lands of their birth. Most of those children are Igbo just by name. Many of them do not speak one word of Igbo and know not much about the Igbo nation. These are faults of some of you here, their parents. But if you do not yourself know thy self, the probability is that you will mis-educate the young ones and complicate their woes.

There are enough literatures on the Igbo nation that I do not want to reduce this address to a pedantic academic exercise. But what is clear from accounts in Elizabeth Isichei's Igbo World to Olaudah Equiano's narrative, to G.T. Basden's Among the Ibos of The Niger and other accounts, is that the Igbo has always been a great race of noble rulers (the embreeche that Equiano, John Adams and Hugh Crow wrote about as far back as 1700s). While Adams reveals that the Heebos, (Igbo) has an aversion to enslavement, and therefore 'use every stratagem to effect the commission of suicide", Crow wrote that the Eboes (Igbo) are spoken of 'as a superior race and the inhabitants, generally, are a fair dealing people" and generally 'honest". It is important to establish these facts because of the general stereotyping of Ndigbo which, unfortunately our people, including so-called leaders internalize. And I shall return to this issue of stereotyping later.

IMA ONWE - THE CIVIL WAR COMPLEX.
I have often heard many Igbo speak of our circumstances and problems in Nigeria in a way that can only inflict inferiority complex on our young ones. The common cliché is that the civil war is responsible for our degenerate condition in Nigeria. They tell the young ones that because we lost the civil war, in fact others less generous say because we were defeated in the civil war; that is why we have been reduced to fourth-class citizens today. We cannot deny the obvious. Yes, I must admit, war is not a picnic. It means dislocation of families. It means leaving the security of your home and trekking into an uncertain future as a refugee, even in your own country. For the youth, war means not going to school. It means loss of valued property. War means loss of means of livelihood. It means being maimed. It means poverty, hunger, starvation and disease. War means loss of respect and dignity. It means a complete devaluation of life. War means death. Brothers and sisters, we, Ndigbo, went through all of these and more!

The civil war set the Igbo nation back. The civil war devastated our economy, destroyed our infrastructure, and created a mendicant political class, subservient to other cultural groups. It destroyed the Igbo core values, which indeed was the intention of the enemy, and I shall return to that. But the question is; is the Igbo history just the history of the war? What were we before the war? Were we simply defeated in the war? In fact, did we fight against an equal enemy force or did we fight the combined forces of Britain, Russia and Egypt, with neighbouring countries providing logistical assistance, while America looked the other way?

Part of Ima Onwe Anyi is to look at the Igbo nation before the war so that we can understand where the rain began to beat us. This is important because often I hear our people dampen the spirit of young generation of Igbo with defeatist stories that detract from our manhood. Too often our people dwell on our dark side as if we never had sunshine in our lives. If we continue to feed our children with only accounts of defeat and surrender, we will be unconsciously perpetuating self-doubt and lack of confidence in future generation. If we know who we are, it will be possible to tell our children that we are a great nation, the only one in Africa that resisted the British conquest and checkmated Islamic jihads towards Igboland. The Igbo nature is one that rejects imperialism or a supreme ruler over us because our nation was founded on republicanism.

The story of Amistad by Howard Jones is the story of Joseph Cinque, (Joseph Chikwe), Kenna (Ikenna) and others who led the mutiny of Igbo slaves on the slave ship Amistad. The Interesting Narrative and other writings of Olaudah Equiano, is an incredible account of an Igbo boy taken into slavery at age 12, who struggled with unconquerable Igbo spirit to eventually buy his own freedom, and later became a navigator, abolitionist and merchant. He was commissioned by the British Monarch to resettle freed slaves in West Africa, and in the Igbo spirit of onye aghala nwanneya, he said 'I decided to help my own countrymen". If you recall that there was no country called Nigeria in the 1700s, Equiano's 'countrymen" could only mean those slaves who spoke the same language with him, fellow Igbo. And that accounts for the heavy presence of Ndigbo in Sierra Leone today. But sadly, our so-called leaders are unaware of these diasporan Igbo in Sierra Leone today.

If we know our selves we would be inspired by the story Dr Francois Duvalier, then a post-graduate medical student at the University of Michigan, this very state we are today, told another great Igbo son, an 'unrepentant nationalist" and Pan Africanist, Dr Okechukwu Ikejiani who passed away in Canada in the early hours of Sunday 19 August 2007. Dr Duvalier, who later became President of Haiti, and popularly known as Papa Doc, told Ikejiani that the Haitians were of Igbo origin. These Igbo slaves in the then Island of San Domingo, as Haiti was then known, led the first successful revolution of black slaves that defeated the British Forces and established the first black independent Republic of Haiti. But, that history is obliterated by British historians till this day. So, my brothers and sisters, defeat has not always been the lot of the Igbo man. We have done great things in the past. We come from a great ancestry.

Back home in Nigeria the Igbo had made astonishing strides. At the time the first Igbo lawyer in the person of Charles Dadi Onyeama was called to the bar of Lincoln's Inn in 1940, the Yoruba had had two generations of lawyers. At the time the Igbo had the first medical doctor in the person of Akanu Ibiam in 1935, the Yoruba had had more than two generations of doctors. But ladies and gentlemen, by 1965, in a space of 30 years, we caught up with our closest rivals. By 1965 if you talked of commerce and rich men in Nigeria you talked about Sir Louis Ojukwu and people like M.N. Ugochukwu. If you talked of academics, you talked of Prof Eni Njoku at the University of Lagos and Prof Kenneth Dike at Ibadan.

We built the first indigenous and still the best university in Nigeria before other regions followed! Before the Allison Ayidas and Philip Asiodus cadre of Super Perm Secs, there had been the Nwokedis and the Enelis at the top of the civil service of Nigeria. In the Army, not only was an Igbo, Major General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi (Ironside) the General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army by merit, about 60 percent of the officer corps were Igbo. In politics, Igbo sons, led by the great Zik, not only were at the forefront of liberating Nigeria from colonialism, the Igbo regarded the liberation of Africa as their manifest destiny! Zik was the colossus who inspired the likes of Kwame Nkruma, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore and others into the Pan African struggle. In Nigeria, Zik an Igbo son introduced modern professional journalism and published from Warri to Kano and from Onitsha to Port Harcourt, with Lagos-based West African Pilot as the flagship of journalism. If it was sports, you talked of the Emmanuel Ifeajunas, the Violet Odogwus, the Onyealis, the Onyeanunas, the Dick Tigers and the Killwees. The Igbo nation has done great things, my brothers and sisters and we should not walk about with drooping shoulders just because of the civil war.

Even if we must dwell on the civil war, why not also tell our children about our prowess and exploits during the war? Why not start by disabusing their minds that we were rebels as our competitors have labeled us? Why not begin by telling them that we never set out to dismember the country, because we built Nigeria more than any other ethnic group? Why not tell them that we were fighting injustice; the same injustice other oppressed Nigerians are fighting today? Why not tell them that the Igbo were defending their core values that had come under attack by people determined to stop our advancement?

Why not tell them that in that war we held the combined forces of Nigeria, Britain, Russia and Egypt for 30 months with our bare hands, almost repeating what Igbo slaves did in San Domingo (Haiti)? If we must talk about the war, why not tell our children about our exploits in Abagana, Nkpo Junction, Owerri sector etc? Why not tell them how we ran a mobile government, setting up government in another city 24 hours after being chased out from one, a feat no nation at war has achieved? Why not tell them that we invented our own rockets and weapons of mass destruction (ogbunigwe). Why not tell them that even when we were at war, we never lacked petrol as is the case in Nigeria today, because we refined our own petrol in refineries constructed by Igbo scientists, as well as produced our own whiskey, soaps, etc?

IMA ONWE - WHY THEY DEMONISE US
The point I am making, brothers and sisters is that we must know where we are coming from before we know where we are going. And if you do not know where you are going, every route leads to your destination. Our past was a great past, not just a past replete with defeats. It was in fact that great past that came under attack during the civil war. And it is the fear of that great past that has continued to sustain that attack, and which manifests in what many of you call 'marginalization". Keeping the Igbo down has become a vehicle for the political advancement of other rival groups. And to perpetuate that, all manner of stereotyping of the Igbo is employed. External forces exploit the greed among some of our mendicant political class, induce crisis among us and turn round to demonize us as people incapable of providing leadership.

But such stereotyping flies in the face of truth for, those actually holding up the system in Nigeria are mostly Igbo. The truth is that there is a mortal fear among fellow Nigerians that, rather than destroy us, the war honed a more resilient and enterprising Igbo race, and that if they allow us space, we would not only surge ahead, we would probably wipe out everybody. Thus the Igbo have become a people to be feared, a people to be suspected, a people to be subjugated and a people not to be trusted. But to me, what is important is not how people choose to see us, but how we want them to see us. There a huge industry today in the business world devoted to creating the correct perception that people or organizations desire. That industry, called Public Relations, is worth over $200 billion annually. What this suggests is that we must take deliberate and sustained steps now to reposition ourselves in the minds of the world.

Another truth, which proceeds from the above, is that Nigeria has developed a strategy of needing the Igbo but not wanting them. This may have succeeded in making the Igbo marginal players in the Nigerian economy, that is, if we ignore self-inflicted limitations, but it has really done more harm to Nigeria itself. The fear of the Igbo has held Nigeria down and will continue to hold it down. After all, it was Harry Truman, an American President, I think, who said that you cannot hold a man down without staying down your self. And I will illustrate. Many times in the past, during Nigeria's many constitutional Conferences, the proposal was made that Nigerians should enjoy full rights and obligations of citizenship wherever they have lived for some minimum specified years and paid tax.

The knee-jack response by other Nigerians to this proposal was that it would benefit the Igbo and make him take over the entire country. The proposal was always thrown out with the belief of keeping the Igbo man caged in his own geo-political area. Now, years after, the war of 'indigenes" against 'settlers" emerged in the North, claiming thousands of lives. It has not subsided even as I speak. Those who killed the unity of Nigeria for the fear of the Igbo are worse for it. There is also the case Dr. Njoku Obi of the University of Nigeria Nsukka, who produced anti-cholera vaccine soon after the war. His effort was reduced to ethnic debate, probably because it was not expected that such a feat could come from a rebel. Dr Obi simply sold his patent abroad while Nigeria continued to import anti-cholera vaccines!

WHY WE MUST RE-BRAND IGBO NATION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY - THE WAY FORWARD.
The first important question we must ask is, why re-branding? Why re-position the Igbo nation? The first answer to that is that we cannot ignore the valid fact that we have made some mistakes in the past. There are things we got wrong in the past. There are things we are doing wrongly even now. I recognized this and called attention to it in a paper titled: The Youth (Ahamefule) In the Quest For Igbo Manifest Destiny, I delivered at the Igbo Summit on 15 June 2006. The second answer is that as a businessman and Management Consultant of many years standing, I know that governments, nations and states are now packaged and marketed like any other product. I also know that what keeps an organization, a business or product alive is built-in obsolescence, which creates repeat purchase and sustains demand. The secrete is that to remain in business you have to induce your own obsolescence. Any time someone else induces your obsolescence, you are out of business. What I am saying is that we have to destroy some traits in ourselves to create a new winning ways for the future.

Let me return to the issue of our stereotyping for a moment. When other ethnic groups try to give us negative stereotyping, they are really trying to induce our obsolescence. That effort translates to what we call our marginalization. They paint us black to justify our oppression. Prof Okwudiba Nnoli in his work, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria, validates this when he said, 'Colonial racism provided a myth whose primary objective was the complete alienation of the colonized African, enabling a better and more complete domination and control of him" The result according to Frantz Fanon is a 'rejection of self" an 'identification with the colonizer" and 'the acceptance of the latter's image of one's inferior status" If you watch the Nigerian scene closely you will notice a progressive lack of self-belief among our people and an identification with our internal colonizers.

Some Igbo regard our language as inferior, but show off their mastery of Hausa or Yoruba language. Our young millionaires are so showy, loud and noisy, thus attracting resentment and envy to themselves. Our enterprising spirit is sometimes carried to an exuberant excess eliciting an aggressive resolve among our competitors to contain and subjugate us. Our leaders have become compromisers and cash-and-carry commodities. There is no discipline in the land because those who should lead by example have abandoned their responsibilities for mess of porridge. I can go on and on to give reasons why we must reposition the Igbo nation for the future.

I am sure you all know most of these reasons and have been yourself agitated by the condition of things back home. But one important reason that I must not fail to mention is that every other ethnic group in Nigeria is re-positioning and re-branding itself for the future. As we speak, power is in the hands of the North once again, and Umaru Yar'Adua is silently telling Nigerians that a new brand of the Northerner who also understands the rule of law, instead of feudalism, has arrived! The minorities of the Niger Delta in the last eight years have imposed themselves on the nation's consciousness as a force the nation cannot ignore. So there is really no where else for us to go except to repackage ourselves for the challenges of the future.

WHAT WE MUST DO.
In my paper presented at the Igbo Summit referred to earlier above, I itemized six points we must embark on in what I called 'PROJECT IGBO" PIG, as 'a deliberate marketing strategy to repackage Igbo as an acceptable brand within and outside the Nigerian nation". These include:
internal rehabilitation of displaced Igbo security within the Nigerian state economic partnership of Igbo states for massive job creation systematic rejection of men of less integrity at the polls re-orientation and citizenship education, and cultivation of Ndigbo outside the south east. I may even add a seventh point which is cultural revival.

For want of time, permit me to just elaborate on the issue of leadership, because as Achebe has continued to lament, the problem with Nigeria is the failure of leadership. That is equally true of the Igbo condition. We must grow and develop the right leadership. In my view the Igbo leadership for the 21st century must be informed, transparent and honest. The leadership for the future must be committed, focused, highly motivated and accountable to the people. The new Igbo leadership must be bold, bright, brave, forthright and above all compassionate. The new leadership must be educated beyond just the ability to read and write, but must be knowledgeable about the dynamics of the environment in which Ndigbo live. In other words, we need to put our intellectual class to work in the field of political leadership. We must never be led in the 21st century by bit-players and artisans who lack a complete view of the structures they contend with and cannot relate politics to the need for development.

We must return to our age long value of hard work, moderation, and delayed gratification. Our youths are now too much in a hurry to make it, thus many of them are into crime. If we revere hard work, then, we must never worship sudden and unexplained wealth or countenance the ostentation that goes with it. Ladies and gentlemen, you would have noticed that in Igbo culture the yam ban, which is the storehouse of a man's wealth and possession, is never at the forecourt of the house but at the back. In some places yam bans are put in the bush. The simple reason is that it is offensive in Igbo culture to exhibit your possession or wealth lest you attract the ire of your neighbours. But today an Igbo youngster who can boast of a million Naira in his bank account, makes the noise of N50 million to the irritation of his competitors who are probably richer than he is.

He is thus marked out as a target for economic strangulation. We must re-orientate our people against that. We need a long term strategy and guile if we must capture the presidency of this country, not the usual four yearly ritual of noise and rank opportunism we have exhibited in the past. We must develop a long term goal to which the drive for the presidency fits, for if the presidency becomes a short term end in itself then, the probability is that it will not serve our purpose. We must see politics as a noble quest to serve the people. And above all, we must return to the spirit of onye aghala nwanneya. We must once more become our brother's keeper, help those less privileged, pull up the weak among us and raise the hopes of those in despair. That was how we did it in the past. That was how we bridged the educational gap between us and the Yoruba in a space of 30 years. We can do it again. It will work for us again.

THE IMO EXAMPLE.
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, it was Archimedes who said da mihi locus standi, urbenquo movebo, meaning, give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. In the last 20 years I have dreamed and aspired for an opportunity to serve the Igbo nation. I have prepared myself for leadership. That opportunity presented itself on 28 April 2007 when I was overwhelmingly elected the Governor of Imo state, through the intervention of God using the electorates in Imo state. The first thing I said to myself was that this is the time to walk the talk; that it is not going to be a business as usual, but a business unusual! In my acceptance speech on Sunday 29 April 2007, I told the people of Imo that I shall run an open responsible and responsive government, anchored on the highest ethical standards and holding myself accountable to the people. And since my inauguration, I have tried to practise what I preach.

The first thing I did was to bring together people of like minds, many of whom are people who look me in the face and argue with me. Working with such world-class professionals and with the cooperation of the wonderful members of the Imo House of Assembly we have been able to debunk some pristine assumptions, one of which is that a Governor of a different party cannot work with an Assembly dominated by another party. Together with the Imo legislators, we are teaching Nigeria a new lesson in democracy, we are setting an example of Executive-Legislature understanding and inter-party cooperation. And our partnership is working. The motivating force for the course the Imo state Assembly and I have decided to chart is the happiness of the people of Imo state. The leadership the Imo Assembly and myself have decided to put in place is that which puts Imo people above partisan politics.

We have therefore embarked on a paradigm shift from the old politics for politics sake. We have embarked on a total transformation of the state through attitudinal change and value re-orientation. We encapsulated all of these into a brand called the New Face of Imo. I am happy to tell you, brothers and sisters that the entire people of Imo and Nigeria have bought into this new brand. That was why when we told them that living in filthy environment is a derogation of their humanity, they agreed with us and when we called them out for our Clean and Green Initiative designed to clean up our state and make it investment and tourist friendly, they came out in their thousand at the Dan Anyiam Stadium on 10 August 2007 for the launching of the Clean and Green campaign with the Senate President, senator David Mark as the Guest of Honour.

We have in the last two months moved over 200,000 metric tons of refuse that accumulated in the past nine years. We have dismantled over 3000 unsightly billboards in Owerri metropolis alone. The Lagos State government is now copying us and has started dismantling billboards all over Lagos. As part of the beautification of Owerri, we have obtained the permission of the Federal Government to dualize all roads leading into Owerri, starting from different points. We are building street lights on selected major streets in Owerri to be powered by dedicated generators from six pm to seven am, so that Owerri will not only be beautiful and safe but have a thriving 24-hour economy. We are planting over 3 million trees in the state in the next one year. Where there were stinking refuse you will now find sweet smelling flowers and lush green.

We place God and the people of Imo at the centre of our policies and political actions. Thus we have decided that we must create jobs for our youths who are our major constituency. We have therefore created a Job Centre to collect and collate data about the qualifications and competences of our job-seeking youths so that we can plan for them and where necessary help them acquire new skills for job switching. We have embarked on the Imo Wonderland Lake Resort and Conference Centre at Oguta. This project estimated to cost over N60 billion, N30 billion of which will be sourced through bonds, will create over 20,000 new jobs in the first instance. We have embarked on the 100 classrooms in 100 days project to build modern classrooms with VIP toilets for our children. The first 33 will be commissioned in the next few weeks. We are building five new roads in each of the senatorial zones. The original designers of the Owerri master plan have returned to help restore the original plan. They will similarly design tourist cites at the Abadaba lake, Okigwe Rolling Hills and Lagwa Monkey Colony.

Ladies and gentlemen there are many things we are doing that I need not bore you with. My passion for what we are doing derives from the reality that Imo people have endured poverty for too long. I believe that Imo people not only desire good governance, they deserve it. I am telling you all these for two major reasons. First, if it works in Imo, it will work in the entire Igboland. Secondly, we are offering you an opportunity to buy into our vision, and embrace our Come Home and Invest Drive, CHID.

We in Imo have re-branded our state. My colleagues in the State Assembly and I believe that it is time the people of Imo enjoyed the benefit of good governance. We believe that the greatest legacy we can leave for posterity is to show that we as Ndigbo are once more capable of doing great things; that we are capable of running honest, transparent and accountable government that places the people first; that it is our manifest destiny to bring our people out of poverty. As I speak to you today, my brothers and sisters, I am reminded and inspired by the words of James Baldwin: 'There is never a better time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now". Ladies and gentlemen, we in Imo State have embraced the golden opportunity the moment has offered us, confident in the salvation of our people from poverty, from second-class citizenship in the land of their great fathers, from alienation and subjugation in their country because we know that Imo is In the Hands of God!

Let me end this address by making an attempt to propose a brand new vision for Ndigbo; a vision that will radically transform Igbo into a purpose-driven nation, with the goal of making us second to none among the majority group of the constituent ethnic nationalities of the Nigerian Federation.

THE PROPOSED VISION.
Brothers and sisters, my proposed vision is this: 'To knit together the atomized components of the micro-ethnicities that constitute the Igbo nation (the states) towards the goal of a fructifying, homogeneous and irredentist common cultural identity, distinct and co-equal with other competing cultures that constitute the melting pot of Nigeria's culture, working in synergy to induce capital formation, radiate and disseminate the creative genius of our people to transform us into a greater oriental power, not in terms of territorial expansion or acquisition; but in the fecundity of ideas that will help us develop and propel us into the mainstream of the 21st century of industrialized states".

A vision like this serves as a lighthouse that beams a pathway for the Igbo nation to its manifest destiny. The first thing we did to re-brand Imo state was to fashion out a vision, which was further reduced to a logical framework and strategic pathway. That has guided everything we have done so far. The process of re-branding the Igbo nation should be understood with the seriousness we attach to the fallouts of this kind of platform set up by the World Igbo Congress, WIC.

As we are struggling back home to get things done, the World Igbo Congress must not stand aloof as by-standers. The World Igbo Congress will continue to command respect and recognition from the Igbo nation back home only if it identifies with the struggles and aspirations of our people back home.

Today we stand on the threshold of new and exciting times. The political leadership and destiny of Ndigbo are now in the hands of a new generation, to make or mar. If we fail, we will not be able to say it is because our leaders deceived us or lied to us. It will be because we ourselves have proved unfit as vessels for the manifestation of God's power to change the lives of our people. But such a failure will not be the end of Ndigbo. A new generation will rise to mock and discredit us, and God willing, help to fulfill the hopes and aspirations of the Igbo nation. This is an unalterable law of the universe, so eloquently expressed by Christopher Okigbo in 'Paths of Thunder: 'An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore Gazing heavenwards for a new star appearing The new star appears, foreshadowing its going
Before a going, and coming that goes on forever.

Here today, we burn and consign to the dustbin of history, the memory and guilty legacy of the civil war, so that unbound and set free, we may pursue the Igbo dream. And what is that dream? I have a dream of Igbo cultural renaissance. I have a dream of the restoration of Igbo industrial might and entrepreneurship. I have a dream of the renewal of the Igbo commitment to hard work and unremitting toil. I have a dream that one day soon, the undeniable contribution of Igbo to the Nigerian commonwealth, will be recognized and rewarded with the prized political offrice of the presidency. I have a dream that the latent prejudices of others against the Igbo will become a thing of the past. Indeed, I have the same dream for the Igbo that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had for Africa