If America says to you today that they are proud of the fact that, for two hundred years, they have been trying to make their union more perfect, it … - Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu

The Federation of Nigeria is today as corrupt, as unprogressive and as oppressive and irreformable as the Ottoman Empire was in Eastern Europe over a century ago. And in contrast, the Nigerian Federation in the form it was constituted by the British cannot by any stretch of imagination be considered an African necessity. Yet we are being forced to sacrifice our very existence as a people to the integrity of that ramshackle creation that has no justification either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the people.

What happened was that Nigerians decided that they would like to put a final solution to Igbo problem. They unleashed a massacre. We tried to contain them; they unleashed a second wave more vicious than the previous one. I looked upon the situation, did the best I could for our people who were scattered all over Nigeria. I said okay, this is our boundary. If you can find your way back to within this area, whatever there is within this area would be shared amongst all of us. You have as much right here as anybody who happened to be here. That actually is another way of seeing the declaration of Biafra and they had a goal and aim in their flight. The other thing to bear in mind is that we didn’t really wage a war. What we did was resist Gowon’s coup d’état and I hope that he would enter the Guinness Book of Records as the person who has waged a coup longer than any body else because the whole three years, he was actually trying to legitimize his coup.

If the Igbos feel that things are best for them in a country of their own, why shouldn’t they have it? If after all we have been going through in Nigeria we feel that Biafra is best, we have every right to seek to re-create Biafra or any other place.