A Special IgboFacts Report
Prologue: The Dance of Death
When soldiers march into peaceful villages not to defend, but to maim, to kill, to silence — it is not an operation, it is a massacre. It is not a security exercise, it is state-sanctioned butchery.
In 2016, under the cloak of darkness and the deception of “peace-keeping,” the Nigerian Army unleashed one of the most egregious military offensives in the history of post-civil war Nigeria. They named it Operation Python Dance (Egwu Eke) — but to the people of the South-East, it will forever be remembered as The Dance of Death.
It was declared as a mission to curb criminality. Yet what unfolded was nothing short of a theatre of horror. Young men waving flags were gunned down in cold blood. Unarmed protesters were hunted like wild animals. Towns were militarized, terrorized, and desecrated. Women wailed over the lifeless bodies of their children. Fathers dug graves for their sons. Mothers wept over their daughters. And in the sacred land of the rising sun, death goose-stepped in polished boots and camouflage.
The Man Behind The Python
At the epicentre of this sordid drama stood Lt. Gen. Tukur Yusuf Buratai, then Chief of Army Staff — a man whose name has become etched in the painful memory of millions of Igbos as the chief architect of Python Dance.
Where statesmen seek dialogue, Buratai saw warfare. Where democracy calls for conversation, he answered with bullets.
In a nation where the persecution of the Igbo is a well-trodden path to power, Buratai was handsomely rewarded for orchestrating this gruesome campaign. Like the generals of the 1960s who presided over anti-Igbo pogroms and the air commanders who bombed Biafran children during the Civil War, Buratai followed the same bloody blueprint.
His recompense? Promotion, protection, and later, appointment as Nigeria’s Ambassador to the Republic of Benin — an obscene prize for a man whose hands remain indelibly stained with the blood of innocent Igbo youths whose only crime was asking for dignity.
The Massacre Nigeria Refuses To Remember
Credible reports from Amnesty International and local human rights monitors painstakingly chronicled the horror: at least 150 peaceful IPOB members were slaughtered between August 2015 and December 2016. Witnesses recounted soldiers firing live ammunition into crowds, dumping bodies into shallow graves, and conducting night raids that tore families apart.
On September 14, 2017, the madness reached its apogee. Nigerian soldiers, under the banner of Python Dance II, stormed the home of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu in Umuahia. It was framed as an arrest. In truth, it was a siege. A massacre. Many were killed. Kanu himself disappeared, vanishing into the shadows of exile.
Yet, the bloodlust did not end there. In 2021, Kanu was abducted under highly suspect conditions of extraordinary rendition from Kenya — an act widely condemned as a flagrant violation of international law. To this day, he remains imprisoned, a political hostage in a judicial charade designed not to dispense justice, but to extinguish dissent.
The Blood-Stained Playbook Of Nigerian Leadership
Let the record speak plainly: since 1966, with the exception of Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, every Nigerian regime has cemented its authority on the blood of the Igbo people. Whether through military pogroms, genocidal warfare, economic marginalization, or militarized brutality like Python Dance, the Igbo have served as perennial sacrificial lambs on the altar of Nigeria’s fraudulent unity.
The Biafran War alone consumed over three million Igbo lives — starved, bombed, and butchered into silence. Today, the tools of oppression have evolved from bombs to boots, from jets to kangaroo courts, but the agenda remains unchanged.
It is the tragedy of a nation that refuses to heal because it refuses to confront its crimes.
The Forum for the Advancement of the Igbo Race (FAIR): Keeping the Memory Alive
In the face of systemic annihilation, resistance is not an option — it is a duty. From the ashes of silence rises the Forum for the Advancement of the Igbo Race (FAIR) — a coalition of scholars, activists, legal minds, and cultural patriots who refuse to let the blood of their people evaporate into historical oblivion.
FAIR calls for:
- Justice for the victims of Operation Python Dance and all related military atrocities.
- The immediate and unconditional release of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and all Igbo political prisoners.
- International recognition of the ongoing persecution and suppression of the Igbo people.
- The realization of true federalism and the legitimate right to self-determination as enshrined in international law.
This is not a call to arms. It is a call to conscience. A call for remembrance. A call for justice.
Epilogue: When the Dance Stops
One day, history will demand answers: Who ordered the killings? Who benefited from the slaughter? Who danced while Igbo blood watered the Nigerian soil?
The Igbo have survived genocide, survived pogroms, survived starvation, and now survive the tyranny of silence. But the world must never forget: in Nigeria, the price of asking to live with dignity remains death.
The Python may have danced. But the spirit of the East — fierce, defiant, unbroken — rises still.
