Interviewed by Chukwuemeka Chimerue, Chief Editor | The Biafra Times
November 24, 2018
GENERAL Miracle Hellfire is the spokesperson for the Biafra Revolutionary Armed Forces otherwise known as BRAF which has been standing to its cause as a defense mechanism for Biafrans and people in oppressive distress by agents of the Nigerian government.
The General held us ‘captive’ in this 45 minutes of captivating treatise on broad issues concerning the general security aspect of the Biafra restoration struggle and what he thinks can be done to make the ascendancy to the Biafra nation very easy for its citizens ‘if the flag is raised today.’
Find out what the former Nigerian military personnel turned Biafra activist has to say about forming a nationalistic security front that would involve all other agitating groups, including those in the Niger Delta and the efforts he is putting towards realising this goal. Having the requisite experience and knowledge, Gen. Hellfire sure has a lot to say when issues of security is brought to the fore.
Enjoy.
So General, let’s go straight to the point. What is your general assessment of the Biafra struggle security-wise, from what you’ve seen, not just from IPOB but other pro-Biafra movements?
It is just a problem I’m foreseeing in our new nation – Biafra, and the problem is power tussle coming from an angle where even those who doesn’t know what politics is all about. For instance, somebody will come out, he wants to be here but if you ask him, ‘this place you want to stay, are you capable, do you know what it takes?’ They know they cannot but just to answer that name. Whereby you found out one thing wrong the person is doing, instead of taking corrections, they would want to destabilize whatever that has been on ground so that it will be said that nothing is been done at all, so everything will be in comatose.
The Media should not allow it to be because if it allows it, their own department would be affected. When our mission comes, for instance, in our IPOB family setting, the whole administrative department will go down(dissolved), the only true departments that will stand tall is the military and the media. So, all these our brothers and sisters who are coordinators here and there, senatorial leaders and all that who already see themselves as substantial state governors and senators are just day dreaming because one, there are even people who are more Biafran than many of our Igbo brothers and who are just folding their arms and watching to see what’s going on.
You can see that from the time of the collective move, the original IPOB, I mean when we had all these our brothers who now have their factions and all that. Anyone you ask, they’ll tell you they’re working towards the restoration of the sovereign state of Biafra and you cannot say otherwise because everybody is in it by their personal perspective. When most of our people will say, ‘Aah! Are you for this or for that?’ Somebody asked me one day, ‘General Miracle, where do you really stand. Are you with Nnamdi or with other people?’ I laughed and said, “every professional freedom fighter has an affiliation but he will stand on the national level as the bridge to cross over those who doesn’t know where they’re going.”
As a member of IPOB, for somebody to come and ask me as the General of the Biafran Armed Forces, ‘where do you belong’ it’s too petty and it’s too insulting. So what I told them is that our duty is to make sure that our nation’s security is safeguarded. When I now tell them that I’m for this or that – that means I’ve brought my own intellectual understanding to their own level because like I’ve said many times, most of all our agitational platforms from MASSOB - Uwazuruike, to Bilie, to BMS to Orjiakor of blessed memory to Zionist - Onwuka to Kanu of IPOB, where we all belong. I’ve watched as a security expert and I saw why the problem is so much on the security.
If truth be told, almost all of these platforms never knew or saw that in the move or agitation or anything they’re doing, that security is number one priority. That is why many of them relegated security to the background and only spoke about security in the layman level of understanding of somebody being at the gate, open and close the gate, check who’s coming in and probably enter a vehicle to follow his Oga behind. This is the myopic understanding of most of these our agitational freedom restoration organizations, including the ones we belong. If truth be told, most of these boys and girls were like brainwashed to see their responsibilities as opening and closing gate and that is why in the professional level, when you try to tell some of them, they now make a mistake of falling victims of number one error of the military which is “Do not be partisan.” Even if it’s your mother who goes against the general law of the military, she must be punished and the military might even appoint you - the son, to punish her.
Now, for instance, our volunteers, as far as I’ve tried to understood and tried to comprehend, there’s nothing you’ll tell these group of boys about looking up beyond ‘pass security’. An average IPOB volunteer would never understand that he has anything in common with the security from MASSOB or Bilie or Zionist, yet Zionist has their own security, Bilie has their as well, Uwazuruike has their security in BIM and MASSOB, likewise the late Orjiakor’s faction and this goes vice-versa. And somebody is now telling me that at the end of the day, those platform securities will not be a by-gone issue? It’s not possible because once the trumpet sounds and they say our flag has been raised and the Biafra nation restored fully, is it the volunteers in one particular platform that will tell those in other ones ‘you can’t come in?’ It’s not possible. This is where Biafra Revolutionary Armed Forces, BRAF, under the foundation of Biafra Defence Force, BDF, comes in.
BDF, has been in existence right from the time of the Great Excellency; our leader, Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu. The concept of BRAF, you can liken it to a modern platform that draws and centralizes the understanding of the military concept of the struggle in one point because when the mandate was given to us and I was appointed as the leader, I took my time as a professional soldier and found out that all these our platforms, including our own family was something there were lacking and I tried to reach out to the administrative hierarchy and I noticed that at every appearance I make, my presence seems so intimidating that some of them thought I’ve come to take away their positions to add to mine. What was it? I tried to let them understand that we had to set up a professional department that would really infuse military understanding and ideology to these boys, including volunteers.
Many of the volunteers are my boys. I’m part and parcel of the men who gave that name. What is even volunteer by the way? You bring out yourself as a volunteering entity, you want to render a selfless service without prejudice, without pay. If you’re remembered, fine! That is volunteering for you. But for these group of boys to now see themselves, of course, they call themselves IPOB volunteers or MASSOB security which really shows the level they are and in my capacity as a professional soldier, I’ll always see them in that level and what is it? If you say you’re a soldier, a force man or a military and you cannot broaden your mind and understanding to accommodate a nationalistic view of every other aspect of the security of the nation, then you’re not just myopic, you’re stupid and this is what their handlers have succeeded in doing to them because from all indications, when I observed certain things, the average volunteer can never reason with any security officer from MASSOB, or from Zionist or any other platforms, yet when you ask everyone of them ‘what are you fighting for?’ They’ll say they’re fighting for the restoration of Biafra.
So, how do we look at it? Thousands and one route, seemingly pointing to one direction. Now, if all these thousands and one route and ideologies are coming to one direction, they must be a meeting point and at that meeting point, the road becomes narrower – this is where they come together to harness and understand and place their thoughts, activities and desires together under an already made platform and department which is the military because in the military, you do anything possible not to get involved in politics. Forget about what the Nigerian government and their military are doing, am telling you how it is and how it would be done in the Biafra nation. The military has no right to get involved with the civilian administration except when the civilian administration is off point, we checkmate them and of course, the foundation being laid is such that even if you say you’re in the administration as a civilian officer or administrator in the Biafra government, you cannot have your usual excesses because the methodological blueprint is there to guide everything that we do.
You talked about organizing the national security which is the military to accommodate other security groups also agitating for Biafra, perhaps that can help to ensure stability in the new Biafra nation but seeing there can be an issue of trust, how do you think that can be achieved?
You see, that’s a very sensible question. Number one, except any officer who did not go through normal training, otherwise, he knows that the military stands as a Watchdog and a defender of equity and justice on the national frontier of the nation. Now, with all these individual platforms, I call it agitational platforms – IPOB, MASSOB, BIM, Bilie, etc, everyone of them have security intentions but how they really put abreast their security understanding to their security teams is best known to them. What we stand to do is to create a platform for orientation of what professional military is all about. So, it’s like a group of schools coming together to have a quiz competition. Each of the schools teach their students according to their own tradition. Many at times, if what they’re taught has nothing to correspond with the national issues on ground when they go to that competition, you see them fail – they cannot answer broader international question.
What we’re trying to do in BRAF is to make sure that whatever orientation we’ve heard as a security personnel in the platform you belong, when you come out, you hear the professional strategies you need to understand and orientated. You’ll see that you have a higher understanding, then you go back to your platform, having a broader mind of accommodating other securities together because what you’re going to hear, unifies the nation and not individual platforms. If for instance, I’ve Bern taught as a member of IPOB, as one of the leading security chiefs, that MASSOB security are not getting it right and that we’re the one doing the right thing and I know that MASSOB is also fighting for Biafra as we’re also doing and I’ve been told certain things, there’s a tendency that if I don’t know who I’m, if I’m not broadminded, I might go out, look at their security and hate them but they’re fighting the same thing as I am.
If I hate them because of what I’ve been told, how would we be able to put our heads together to achieve that aim because there’s a way I would react to that person based on what I was told in my own platform. That person will also turn around and hate me and you’ll now see that anywhere they go, what they’ll say is “don’t mind those security from IPOB, they’re not getting it right,” and we continue to tell others, “don’t mind those Uwazuruike group, they’re not getting it right.” It boils down to a point where we will make fool out of ourselves because the enemies will be laughing at us. And what they’ll tell you is, “look at them, they don’t even know where they’re going and what they want.”
So the way forward is having a broader mind, trying to reach out to other security department of every other platforms with a subtility of preliminary lectures that will make them understand that military is military anywhere, whether you’re in IPOB or in MASSOB, security is security everywhere and in the whole world over, security has only one code. When we’re able to educate them to that level, they now begin to differentiate between the ordinary activities of their platforms and what security is supposed to be.
Then, when we now say all security assemble, you didn’t call any security platform, all security of the National Assembly will come over. What we do in our platforms, everybody will go home differently and you’ll be surprised that many people will begin to tell their own principal officers, ‘see, this thing we’re doing, it’s not how it’s supposed to be, we just came back from security meeting.’ It’s not gonna be, we came out from our platform security meeting. Everything becomes national level and when we talk about nationality, we’re talking about the nation itself because at the long-run, you’ll see that all these platforms, once our flag goes up, they’ll boil down to become political parties, that’s the truth.
This is what I want people to understand, especially the military, the securities because if they don’t get it now, these our leaders will brainwash us for their own climbing and at the end of the day, we’re losing. So, we’re trying to bring all the securities together. In fact, sometimes in the activities of BRAF, we don’t even mention platforms in order not to create distraction; we simply mention security or military, sometimes, we do our own thing militarily.
Okay! You’ve been talking about forming a national security front where everybody, irrespective of the platform you belong, comes together for one single purpose but I understand that even in their individual sections some internal wranglings may exist, I mean, it may be normal to discover some kind of rancour among the ranks over who commands the rest of them. Now, taking it out to other platforms when they come or form a singular unit as you said, how do you intend to bridge the divide when they all come up at the national level because that may warrant someone being picked as a General commander or something who would be overseeing the actions and inactions of the others, looking at their individual platforms, how would you or anyone for that matter, give such an institution that true nationalistic outlook so that people won’t agitate that this one is coming from IPOB or MASSOB and so on?
Thank you very much, that’s another sensible question. First, the military has structures and it’s a community of its own. That’s why when you come close to the military, you have the military hospital, we have our engineers, our builders and all that. We do everything there because it’s a community. In the community of the military, there’s a way things work. When you say General commander, you can’t have that because in the military you have platforms, you have departments, you have Navy, you have the Air Force, Army and paramilitary which is the Police, Civil defence and all that.
There’s no way you’re going to have one central command in the military, it’s not possible and I think one of the problems the volunteers are facing, where they have this one man. I think they borrowed the facet from the words of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu of Command and Control and one, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is a civilian or what we say bloody civilian. When he borrowed that word from us in the military, he wasn’t using it on the military terms. He was applying it on the administrative level of IPOB to ensure that things are moving forward, not on the military level because he can’t defend it. He’s not a military man. We know when we say ‘Command and Control’ if I begin to explain it now, there will be no time.
Command and control comes from a unital department over a particular mission. The mission could rise from the platoon level or company level or brigade level, depending on the scope and the largeness. Now, when you come to the military, we have the general, followed by the lieutenant general. I’m a full general in our nation’s military. You could be a lieutenant general which is a lesser general to the full general and behind you the, next man could be major general but when you mention them appraisingly outside there ‘general this,’ but when you come to the inner house, or how we see it, the full general will sit first before the lieutenant general.
I think it’s probably because most of these security platforms are formed from the layman’s and bloody civilian’s mentality level, that is why they make mistakes but if these things were put in the way militarily, which we try to do immediately you come in, you know where you fit in because the structure is there. So in the platform of BRAF as it is, anybody that comes from other angles may be from Tompolo angle, Asari or Ateke angle, BIM, MASSOB or IPOB, etc and you come and say you’re a general from IPOB or MASSOB, that’s good but where’s your division and how many men because there’s a level of what you do that entails you in that position. We don’t go just by name, we go by ability and capability.
You know militarily, when we say sector, it starts from 15 men to 20-25 men. That’s a sector command. Then from 25 to 35-45 men makes another department which is the platoon, from there the company, the brigade commander and all the rest of the divisions. Now, at the divisional level, how many divisions comes together to give that general the seat of a general, you have to know. So, if you’re coming from MASSOB and you say you’re a general or so, we now ask you, ‘what’s your command, what’s your portfolio?’ You have to show us all these. If your portfolio has not gotten to the equivalent of what dictates your name or title, you have to either be re-assigned to the seat of the lieutenant or major general. That is the principle.
And there’s no way General Miracle will say, ‘I’m the General of all Generals.’ There’s nothing like that. That is rubbish! It’s either you’re a full general or you’re a sub-general. So, in that, there will be no problem if they really want to play the role and of course, in our nation, there will be nothing like the Nigerian mentality, it cannot work. Everything will be done normal instead we will not allow it because we want a situation whereby people can sleep and wake up, reason in the normal sense of human beings not ‘wayo’ because the foundation of Nigeria started with ‘wayorism’ and that has led to a lot of lies which needed more solid lies to cover it up and that has brought Nigeria to this present level to the point where (Muhammadu)Buhari died on 27th of January, 2017 during the period Trump was inaugurated and you can remember all the gimmicks that played out until they brought Mahmoud Al’Sudan Jubril from Sudan, spending Biafra money. I hope you know that the resources, the about $750m that was used in the surgery to transform him to Buhari is from Biafran resources not Hausa/Fulani resources. The money came from Biafraland. This is fraud and we cannot accommodate such.
Tell us the efforts you have been able to put up so far towards achieving this or are you still planning to start out?
Efforts has always been there. Remember I’ve always been a professional officer in the Nigerian military and like I said, military is military all over the world. Right from time, I’ve always made that effort of aligning my thoughts, visions and understanding on a broader level and that is why all the men who have passed through me and all those serving under me, I’ve always tried to let them understand that what we’re doing is military. When it is time for our IPOB meetings, we go to our respective zones and do our meetings but when you come here, know you have come for military activities.
All those close to me and all those who knows me, always know what I stand for as far as security and military is concerned and that is what we are raising a Biafra military formation not IPOB military formation, even as a member of IPOB, not MASSOB, not anything. This is the kind of statement that when I make, so many principal officers will take it as if fuel is being poured upon their mind. Many will begin to talk from the level they understand but what they don’t understand is that it takes a man that sees tomorrow to say certain words of mystery today.
It’s only a man who plays to the gallery for the moment that will always fall in line with saying things that will make the next man happy at the moment but I say things that would make you unhappy today but will make you happy tomorrow when you come in contact with what I told you today that will happen tomorrow. For instance, like I’ve always said, if our nation comes today, is it IPOB alone that would manage the affairs of the nation? The answer is no! If our nation comes today, is it only the IPOB security that would make the bulk of the military? The answer is still no! Remember we still have the Asari Dokubo factor, I respect that young man so much in the sense that he reasons like me and he has determination. We still have the Tompolo factor, the Ateke factor and these are pure militants as far as the international understanding of freedom fighting is concerned.
Are we going to say that they won’t be inculcated into the military of the nation? It’s a bloody lie. If anybody say that, it means he wants internal war but when these standards has been set, you’ll now see as the trumpet sounds, the boys from Asari camp will know where they’re going, and they’ll report to the liaison office where they’ll be redeployed and taking drill, trained and brought to the level of comprehending the present day military manoeuvrings, if you understand what am talking about. So that’s what is there.
Interesting! So, before we rap it up, do you have any regrets or rather what other issues would you want to address as your last words?
Gentlemen of the Press, I, General Miracle Hellfire of the Biafra Revolutionary Armed Force, BRAF, decided to grant this interview today to clarify certain issues. Part of it is – why is it that our people find it difficult to cooperate, to unite affront in fighting a common cause and a common enemy? The average Biafran, especially from the Igbo stock is more freer in fighting his own brother because of position than collectively going after the main enemy. We all know that the Hausa/Fulanis; the Islamic world has different factions but when it comes to their national issue of one goal, they join forces to fight one company. Most of the times, they’re not even fighting with AK47 or AK49 or Bambooza or Bazooka, they fight with cutlasses, daggers, machetes. We have witnessed how they slaughtered most of our people and Christian brothers. I find it difficult to understand why these our brothers cannot channel their energies towards fighting the main enemies yet when they come around, they spot our brothers and sisters who have ideas on how to move this struggle forward, they attack them. It has happened to me.
Some of the principal officers, I wouldn’t mention names for the sake of peace, saw what am doing to unite the security affront as standing against their personal interest. Some of them even said to me that if they keep quiet, I’ll manoeuvre their people and run them out of business and I asked one of them, ‘so you’re in this struggle for your personal business interest?’ Of course, some of you are abreast of so many attacks on my personality even trying to put our securities together has become another wahala because many of them prefer going to coordinators, collect money. They’re going to train them and they’ll eat the money and that has been the cycle but when they see somebody who came out and say I’m going to train them and actually, they were trained, then he becomes the devil.
Gentlemen of the Press, I don’t know how you see that – that the real thing you’ve done, that real thing turns out to be the evil thing while the evil thing of not doing what you’re supposed to do becomes the norm. That is where I’m charging your department. We need to expose those evil so that Mazi Nnamdi Kanu will understand what’s going on and other principal officers outside will also understand because if people like me keep shouting it alone, it will be as if there’s personal interest somewhere. This is the time I want the media to declare war on the personalities of those who have been placed on administrative levels and the personalities of those who have been placed on certain positions, including me. Probe me General Miracle, if am worthy to be who I am in the military of the nation, let us see who are in this for formality.
Am not here to say what in terms of value of economy or whatever I’ve spent. I thank God He blessed me early and I remembered in one of my Bibles, I wrote it that 90 percent of my wealth goes for the struggle while 10 percent goes to my needs and that’s what I’ve been doing. IPOB can never come out and say they have given me one naira, nobody will say so except in our department, may be there’s something to be done. So BRAF stands as a bridge to link up all our multifaceted security fronts.
