Elegant stallion Onyeka Onwenu exploded on Monday, telling Nigeria: “If you don’t want us, let us go!”

She vented her frustration while speaking as one of the three panel discussants at the ‘Never Again!’ Conference, the event put together by Nzuko Ndigbo and Igbo Foundation, Lagos, in collaboration with civil society organisations to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Nigerian Civil War which officially ended on January 15.

According to the chairman of the conference, Prof. Anya O Anya, the planners had to defer to the Federal Government which normally holds its official remembrance activities and chose 13th.

In an emotion-laden remark, Onyeka Onwenu, the popular artiste whom MC of the event, Bisi Olatilo, said should be regarded more as a broadcaster than a musician, recalled her loss of father’s plot of land in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as an “abandoned property”.

She said her father was the Principal of Enitona College, Port Harcourt, who was later elected into the Federal House of Representatives before he died at age 40 in a motor accident.

Noting how her mother was physically abused for demanding the return of the property, Onyeka Onwenu queried: “If we say never again, what about the issue of abandoned property, for which owners were not compensated?”

Admitting the horrors of the civil war such as starving children, sick and dying old people, hunger and malnutrition which led to the death of many, among others, she said there is no apology for the war because Biafrans were fighting in self-defence.

She admonished in an Igbo proverb which drew wide and enthusiastic applause. It translates: Someone rejected must not reject self, exclaiming: “If you don’t want us, let us go.”

News Express reports that it was the military administration of then Lt Col Zamani Lekwot as military administrator of Rivers State that set up the Abandoned Property Committee with then Captain David Bonaventure Mark of the Nigerian Army as chairman, championed by radicals such as the now-late Ken Saro-Wiwa.

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