The Igala Youth Leaders Assembly Worldwide hereby notes the incendiary, presumptuous and constitutionally warped communique ascribed to the Igbo Leaders of Thought, wherein they, with brazen impudence, and overambition seek to annex Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Benue, Cross River, Edo and Kogi States into a contrived, United Igbo Region while canvassing for the suspension of the 2027 general elections. This proposition is not restructuring, it is premeditated territorial adventurism. It is not agitation, it is suspicious historical revisionism. It is not intellectualism, it is cartographic brigandage and an expansionist buccaneering masquerading in borrowed robes of vainglorious thought.
IYLA, as the vanguard of Igala consciousness, conscience and continuity, deems it imperative to educate the ILT and set the record straight with unambiguous clarity, precision and finality on the matter. For silence in the face of expansionism is either admission or complicity, and we shall never silent in the face of this bogus exertion tantamounting to the auctioning of our ancestry.
Kogi State, as presently constituted, is a creation of military fiat, an ephemeral administrative convenience decreed in 1991, and therefore cannot in proper perspective define, delimit, diminish, circumscribe or capture the essence, expanse and entirety of the Igala nation. States are transient lines drawn on paper by soldiers, the Igala nation is an eternal civilization etched in blood, evidential proof and antiquity. To conflate a military contraption with a precolonial sovereign empire that predates the Nigerian state itself is not only a fallacy of logic, it is a lie against historical truth.
The Igala nation is a distinct, autochthonous, imperial heritage with over eight centuries of unbroken statehood, a distinct language, a distinct culture, a distinct kingship and a distinct cosmology. At no epoch in history, whether in antiquity or modernity, in war or in peace, in conquest or in commerce, has the Igala nation ever been under Igbo hegemony, suzerainty, tutelage or tributary control. Over 75 million Igala people scattered across Nigeria cannot by fiat, by fantasy or by forceful communique be subsumed into a United Igbo Region. The insinuation is therefore not merely spurious, it is an assault on our age old traditional corporate existence and a violent desecration of our sovereign memory.
Let the world be told in clear candour that the Igala nation is over 75 million strong, scattered across various states in Nigeria, not as migrants begging for accommodation, but as aborigines standing defiantly upon their own truncated ancestral soil. Our people are not dispersed by the accident of migration, we are dispersed by the conspiracy of colonial conspiracy and cartography. Our sovereign territory was brutally truncated, balkanized, dismembered and excised by colonial pencil and sustained by post-colonial gerrymandering, a surgical amputation of a nation without anesthesia, without consent, without referendum, without justice.
This truncation is the original sin that must be interrogated with vehemence. What are today conveniently labelled as local government areas in Anambra, Delta, parts of Enugu, Benue, Edo and Nasarawa are not Igala outposts, they are Igala heartlands violently severed from the mother body. They were never ceded, they were carved. They were never lost, they were excised. And aboriginal ownership is never extinguished by administrative fiat, by military decree or by expansionist or irridentist communique. Wherever Igala people live today in those states, they live as title holders by birth, by blood and by heritage, not as tenants at the mercy of latter-day landlords.
Where then is the mandate? When, where and how did the highly revered Attah Igala, the supreme custodian of Igala heritage, the spiritual embodiment and royal oracle of over 75 million souls, give you leave to subsume a sovereign nation into your fantasy region? Self-determination cannot be selective and justice cannot be one-sided. You cannot demand a referendum for yourselves while unilaterally decreeing the political future of others without consultation, without conversation, and consent. That is duplicity of the highest order – a political hypocrisy embellished with imperious impunity.
IYLA remains an unapologetic apostle of genuine restructuring, of resource control, of regional policing and of devolution of powers. But restructuring must be anchored on justice, equity and mutual consent, not on ethnic imperialism and territorial expropriation. A ten-region structure built on annexation is not stability, it is an invitation to anarchy and a veritable stamp for disintegration. True restructuring edifies, it does not expropriate. It restores truncated nations, it does not further dismember them. It unites through respect, it does not usurp through stealth.
Let it be proclaimed with unimpeachable clarity, unshakable tenacity and royal cadence that the Igala nation reserves the inalienable right to determine its own political destiny through legitimate democratic processes. Our destiny is not tethered to any expansionist agenda, our heritage is not a bargaining chip, and our future will never be railroaded into a region where we are neither consulted nor respected, neither honoured nor accommodated.
We therefore advise the
Igbo Leaders of Thought to restrict their cartographic imagination to their five South Eastern states and confine their agitation within their legitimate sphere of cultural affinity. The Igala nation is not a vacant lot waiting for annexation, it is not a political orphanage waiting for adoption, it is not an abandon territorial haven waiting for a claimant.
Finally, let this be a word to the wise and a warning to the adventurous. Kogi State is not for sale. The great Igala nation is not a bazaar item for grabs, it is the heartbeat, the soul and the sacred sanctuary of the sovereign domain of the authority of the Attah, a mere fragment of a mighty 75 million strong civilization that military creation cannot define and that no communique can annex. The Igala nation will never, now or in the future, be part of any United Igbo Region. Our identity is non-negotiable, our territory is sacrosanct, our heritage is imperishable, and our truncation shall be corrected, not compounded. Any further attempt to peddle this dangerous and provocative narrative shall be met with resolute, legitimate and unyielding political, legal and cultural resistance.
Signed:
Rt.Hon. M.M Audu
Deputy Speaker IYLA
Hon.Salifu Oguche Esq.
Director Legal Services
IYLA
Hon.Philip Ojochegbe Omattah
Director Home Affairs
IYLA
For: and on behalf of Igala Youth Leaders Assembly (IYLA) Worldwide
