SOUTHEAST AND SIT-AT-HOME MONDAYS
The southeastern states must collaborate to end the ill-conceived lockdowns
Citing the spirit of industry and entrepreneurship which are often associated with the Igbos, newly elected Governor of Enugu State, Peter Mbah, recently asked residents to dump the sit-at-home strike order, and free themselves from the shackles of restrictions to commerce and creativity. Like many people have at different times said, the idea of sitting at home on the first working and business day of the week, according to Mbah, does so much damage to productivity. “My charge to all of you – market men and women, the corporate world, industries, schools, civil servants, and all strata of workers in Enugu State,” said Mbah, “is to take back our sense of industry, pride of place and re-enact our glorious past.”
The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) had in August 2021 introduced a sit-at-home order every Monday across the Southeast to pressure the Nigerian government to release its detained leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who is standing trial for alleged terrorism. The separatist group later suspended the order, but residents of the five Southeast states of Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Abia and Anambra — are still observing the sit-at-home order, now being enforced mostly by “unknown gunmen,” out of fear. Unfortunately, too, Mbah’s order to residents of Enugu to return to work is being observed in the breach. Even the government’s threat to use all powers at its disposal to ensure residents return to work and businesses has fallen on deaf ears. Meanwhile, provable violations of human and citizen rights have occurred in parts of the Southeast. Indeed, the cost of the protest has been devastatingly high in human lives, many of them taken in the most gruesome manner.
During the lockdowns, 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. The net loss to the economies of the affected states is now being estimated in trillions 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, transporters, industrialists, wholesalers, and retailers of motley 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 the sit-at-home order is also 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. While we commend Peter Mbah’s recent initiatives, the southeastern states collaborative action is required to end the ill-conceived lockdowns. Indeed, we expect all the governors in the zone to be as committed and creative in confronting this menace. They should be stout and proactive in ending the bizarre militancy that has become a thriving industry for some unscrupulous people.
However, as we continue to reiterate on this page several times, the federal government must assume a larger premise of its sovereign responsibility. The IPOB phenomenon has been allowed to metastasize into a self-destructive virus. The overriding doctrine ought to be that the nation is unsafe for as long any inch of the nation’s space is unsafe or any citizen is unsafe. The ultimate responsibility therefore lies with President Bola Tinubu. While a combined technique of intelligence and law enforcement may help in containing the resurgence of criminality, it is also perhaps appropriate, like the Southeast governors have suggested, to look beyond the legal to the political in resolving the Nnamdi Kanu conundrum.
