A mistake is an action, decision, or judgement that produces an unwanted, incorrect, or unintended result. A mistake is totally different from an error. A mistake happens when you lose focus or slip up on something you actually know how to do, while an error happens when you lack the knowledge or have not learned the rule yet. Therefore, confronting yesterday's mistakes requires looking at history, understanding what happened, and learning the lessons necessary to avoid repeating them.
As Chinua Achebe expressed in Things Fall Apart, whoever does not know where the rain started beating him or her cannot know where the rain stopped beating him or her. The statement remains relevant to human existence and to the search for solutions to the problems confronting individuals and their societies.
Scientists, in their researches and hypotheses, also refer to what happened previously in order to arrive at verifiable answers. History, in its simplest understanding, is the study of historical events with facts and evidence. Looking at yesterday therefore means examining the events of years, decades and centuries and understanding how human decisions shaped the societies in which we live.
Historical events are crucial because the events of yesterday—whether positive or negative—can become lessons for today and tomorrow. Human existence contains both good and bad experiences, and neither can be separated from the development of society. Any historical event being examined must therefore deal with documented records of how and when it happened, together with facts and evidence, so that its lessons can be properly understood and recurrence avoided.
In the BIAFRA fight for its freedom and sovereignty, mistakes and errors MUST be TOTALLY and COMPLETELY AVOIDED, as the consequences in some cases may affect or destroy the movement, with effects extending from one generation to another until only GOD knows. It will be sad for history to repeat itself in this course of Biafra restoration.
Biafran forefathers who sacrificed their time, lives and resources, among other things, for this present generation and generations coming are expecting better results of total freedom achieved so that they can rest eternally peacefully. This makes it necessary for the present generation to examine yesterday carefully and learn from both the successes and failures of those who came before.
We all know the roles Ifeajuna, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Arthur Nzeribe and Adaka Boro, among others, played during the Biafran war and the wider history of struggles involving the people of the region. Whatever judgments history eventually makes about individuals and their actions, the important lesson is that decisions made at critical moments can have consequences far beyond the people who made them.
These references are not for mockery or fun. They have become history, which is the reason Biafrans should know local and international history so they can learn from it and not repeat the same mistakes others have made in the past.
Yesterday, the Indigenous People Of Biafra(IPOB) built the struggle for Biafra restoration around one man instead of building a strong institution around the BIAFRA idea. We praised the man, we worshipped the man, and we defended everything the man did even when he was wrong.
We did not actaully forget that a man can be detained, can die, can get sick and can even make mistakes, but we did everything for the love of Biafra and for the survival of the struggle.
Yesterday, we normalised donating money without asking for accountability. We paid dues, contributed for legal fees, and supported Radio Biafra and the families of our fallen comrades, but we never demanded public audits because of the love for Biafra. We said, 'Do not question the orders of the supreme leader.'
Yesterday, we celebrated shouting over strategy. We celebrated insults on social media as ACTIVISM. We allowed the language of the struggle to become abusive, threatening and so on.
Yesterday, we allowed family members to become unofficial leaders issuing orders without authorization from the IPOB-Directorate Of State(IPOB-DOS) and without any official position in IPOB's structure.
A liberation movement like IPOB should never be handled like a family inheritance, because it is not. The survival of an institution cannot depend permanently on an individual or a family. A man can be detained, become sick, die or make mistakes; an institution must therefore be strong enough to survive beyond any single individual.
This is why the experience of other struggles and historical movements becomes important. Why did the Biafra First Republic fail? Why did other countries that struggled for independence succeed? What remote and immediate factors helped others fail or succeed during their time? These are questions that require historical examination rather than emotional reactions.
A proper assessment of the leadership under the Directorate of State of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, was able to survive five good years of turmoil and what would have been the most deadly harsh consequences to the Biafra cause, because the people in the Apex leadership body — the DOS were able to compare historical events and factors that happened before to our own struggle and other ones and applied them to ours.
Today, the DOS has taken bold steps to correct those mistakes and channel the struggle in the right direction. The DOS's best decision was separating the struggle from an individual family and returning the struggle to the best working system and not the best talking individual, and building an institution that can survive over any single individual. That's the best working system.
In a home, family members can have misunderstandings, quarrel, fight and keep malice, but it does not warrant you to betray your family and sell your family members to their enemies no matter the pain. When you betray your family, you betray yourself because when they are killed you will NEVER be spared. Even your masters can never trust you.
The history of political and liberation struggles contains many examples of betrayal, division, failure and subjugation. Such references should not be viewed merely as political attacks or mockery; they should serve as lessons about the consequences of internal division and decisions that place individual interests above the survival of a people and their cause.
The most important thing Biafrans need to do this time is to support the leadership of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), which is the Directorate of State (DOS) headed by Mazi Chikadibia Edoziem, and all IPOB members all over the world, both physically, spiritually, financially and otherwise, in pursuit of the restoration of the Sovereign State of Biafra. It is a task every Biafran owes the motherland.
The lessons of yesterday therefore demand that everyone must support the building of this BIAFRA struggle around a strong institution rather than around one individual. Also, we must insist on accountability, develop responsible communication, respect established structures and avoid repeating mistakes that have destroyed other movements.
Yesterday's mistakes must become today's lessons. Today's corrections must become tomorrow's protection. Not looking back at yesterday from today to correct what have been its mistakes, may be followed with harsh consequences and a heavy price to pay.
WeMustContinue.
#IPOB_Institutionalisation
#Biafra
Family Writers Press International, Homeland.
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