IPOB ‘SIT AT HOME’: ENDING A DISRUPTIVE PROTEST

  Governors in the Southeast should be committed and creative in confronting the self-harming protest 

The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) phenomenon remains a questionable expression of identity politics in today’s Nigeria. In the process of driving home their grievances, members of IPOB factions have taken actions that amount to challenging the sovereign integrity of the Nigerian federation. Police installations have been bombed. Security personnel have been killed. The military has been called in to restore law and order in extreme cases. In the process, provable violations of human and citizen rights have occurred in parts of the Southeast.  

One aspect of the IPOB protests that has attracted severe criticism is the illegal imposition of a weekly ‘sit at home’ order throughout the Southeast. During the lockdowns, usually every Monday, businesses, offices, banks, markets, and other essential services are compelled to remain closed. Urban streets, interstate highways and sometimes schools are usually deserted. On such days, an eerie silence overcomes the zone and creates an atmosphere of an undeclared emergency resembling a state of war. Meanwhile, between enforcement of supposed IPOB wishes and involvement in petty crimes, the dividing line is often thin and frequently breached. For the security agencies, enforcement of citizens’ rights to free movement gets entangled with curbing potentially treasonous escapades.     

A more worrisome aspect of the sit-at-home regime has been a colossal decline in business transactions and general shrinkage of economic opportunities. The net loss to the economies of the affected states has been calculated to amount to several billions of Naira. The extensive economic haemorrhage is multiplied by the fact that most citizens in the Southeast operate in the informal sector as traders, shop owners, artisans, craftsmen, industrialists, wholesalers, and retailers of a motley of merchandise. 

Shutting down the economic space and closing schools in the entire zone may have been IPOB’s most effective way of popularising its grievances. But people complied on the sit-at- home lockdown days not necessarily in willing obedience to IPOB and its separatist argument but rather because they were mostly afraid for their lives and the safety of their property from rough enforcers, violent vigilantes, and plain thugs. To compel the citizenry to go about their normal legitimate undertakings, the security forces often come into violent confrontation with these armed miscreants. 

The obvious decline of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Southeast because of the unwise weekly lockdowns is a direct challenge to the political control of the zone by its five governors. The populace was obeying the regime of fear imposed by IPOB and largely ignoring the pitiable elected governors. Such loss of sovereign control was indicative of a larger erosion of political authority and serial failure of the states as agents of law, order, and security. To a large extent, therefore, the IPOB sit-at-home’ order has become a matter of national security. It had started to create a psychology of war and desolate exclusion in the zone to the embarrassment of the federal government. But the community action required to end the ill-conceived lockdowns rested with political authorities in the affected states. 

It is therefore commendable that the newly elected Governor of Anambra State, Chukwuma Soludo, has initiated positive citizen-based action leading to a symbolic end to the sit-at- home’ regime. He has followed up with enforcement of law and order which led fleeing criminals to burn the headquarters of Aguata local government last week. Admitting that 85 per cent of those arrested as gunmen are from a state in the South-east, while the remaining 15 per cent are from another state in the same zone, Soludo asked, “How do you explain to any sane mind that responsible citizens have elected to pursue a supposed legitimate cause adopting criminal strategies of kidnapping, arson and murder?”

  We expect the other governors in the Southeast to be as committed and creative in confronting this menace as Soludo. They need to be stout and proactive in seeing an end to a bizarre militancy that has become a thriving industry for some unscrupulous people within the zone and is harming the same people for whom IPOB claims to be fighting. There is also an urgent need to intensify engagements with the federal government and other stakeholders to heal old wounds and right festering wrongs in the Southeast.