By Kezie Ogaziechi

It would amount to a costly miscalculation or at best, a poor reading of the mood of the people of the South-East for anyone to assume that the agitation for self-determination is a storm in a tea cup.

Anyone in doubt that the agitation has gone beyond the rhetorics of IPOB, MASSOB or IBM or whatever name, should have critical and objective review of the global resonance of the sit-at-home call amongst the Igbo speaking South-Easterners and their sympathizers on the 30th of May 2017.

The compliance level and the emotions it stoked should naturally send a message to everyone and anyone that sincerely cares about the unity of this country that something has to be done now and urgently, too, to check the boiling lava that may erupt as a consequence of this resurgence of Biafra sentiment.

If, forty seven years after the ceasation of hostilities, the Biafran ghost could be called up to loom large in the air and arrest the sentiment and emotions of a people over seventy percent of who were not eye witnesses of the thirty (30) months war, then, there is something to worry about.

As one watched clips on international media of thousands of South Easterners that marched through the major cities across the globe, some with their children below the age of five years, one could not but feel goose pimples on the message and the impact on the psyche of these little lads.

How can we achieve the healing in the midst of all these. Is it just enough to continue playing the ostritch when the fallout of these presentations would endlessly question the essence of the unity in diversity we preach.

Our greatest undoing as a people is that we fail to strike the iron when it is hot. We played politics with the Niger Delta environmental problems until the youths took up arms against the Nigerian State. The toll that took on the economy and social cohesion remains incalculable.

If some level of sensitivity was shown by successive governments in the North-Eastern States to address the basic needs of the youths from that region, Boko Haram wouldn’t have spread like bed bug in the region.

Assuming the governments, politicians and the elite had early invested in education, which is critical in human development, those elements with devilish ideological agenda from the North-East would have found it impossible to enlist the support and buy in of the army of restive and illiterate youths that formed the foot soldiers of insurgency. Creative leadership demands responsibility, sensitivity, commitment, altruistic zeal, thinking out of the box and effectively and efficiently managing the resources to enhance the humanity of the citizens.

Should we have waited to record countless number of causalities of social disorientation due to leadership failure before a North-East Development Commission would be set up?  The fallout of the implosions in the North- East has proved that the concept of a comfort zone in a country like Nigeria is illusionary.

Who would have imagined that terror can easily be exported from North-East to literarily all parts of the country. But we have realized to our utter chagrin that no social implosion should be reasonably treated as isolated. We are all potential targets when the chips are down.

After successive governments deployed jackboot strategies to deal with the Niger Delta issue to no avail, it took a thinking President Umaru Yar’Adua to change strategy and approach and the result is the relative peace in that oil-rich region.

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Were we not all witnesses to the blight the fortunes of the country experienced while the militants were in the trenches? The same characters that are working behind the scene today stalling the meaningful effort to address the problems and fears of the South East were at work then and succeeded in deceiving the government leading to the monumental losses the country recorded.

Can anyone in Nigeria, no matter the ethnic nationality, language and creed in all conscience say that the South-East has been treated fairly by successive governments since after the civil war?. Do we need agitations for governments to create a level playing ground for all citizens of this country?

Could Nnamdi Kanu and his co-agitators have been winning converts in torrents if all were to be well? Building an egalitarian society in a nation with diverse ethnic nationalities should be seen as the main force that can drive cohesion and promote unity seamlessly. Those that see Kanu as an ambitious young man seeking relevance miss the point.

No day passes without incidents and experiences that remind the South-East that in the scheme of things in Nigeria, they are mere statistics and marginal players. While these official neglect and marginalization endure, Nnamdi Kanu like the Boko Haram promoters would continue to enjoy a cult hero status with corresponding followership from the army of the discontented and despondent.

Revolutions are oiled by the emotions of despair and despondency. Any revolutionist that is denied opportunity of having valid message that resonates with the people would hardly gain support and followership. The way the South-Easterners are treated arms the Kanus with the weapon to continue winning converts.Biafran sentiment came alive not because Nnamdi Kanu wants to play a devil’s advocate or enjoys a rare oratorical power to persuade the millions of youths that have lined up behind him. Rather, the Nigerian State has so much served the South-Easterners the shorter part of the stick in this national engagement to the extent that monuments of neglect and short-change dot all parts of the region.

In the light of the above, the National Assembly should, consistent with their constitutional role of legislating for the good of the country, grab the initiative of setting up a development commission to beam the searchlight on and address the infrastructural problems of the South- East.

How can we even be talking about diversification of the economy when a green field like the South- East that has all it takes to change the vista of the economy through private sector driven industrial revolution is allowed to be weighed down by infrastructure decay? All the federal roads in the South-East are not motorable, the zone is not factored in the new rail transportation investment, yet, between Aba, Ebonyi, Enugu and Onitsha, billions of naira worth of investments that can impact positively on the nation’s economy are dying due to infrastructure challenges.

The haste in killing that bill showed that most of the legislators that voted against it apparently did not allow greater wisdom to influence their judgment. Even though the bill reads, “South-East Development Commission”, it should be viewed as a national development bill to address critical political, social and economic problems that demand national intervention and attention.

Must we wait till the South-East implodes before an urgent step will be taken to nip the festering problem in the bud. The lessons of the poor management of the Niger Delta issue and the years of neglect of the North-East human development programmes must not be lost on us. South-East is another flash point and we must make hay while the sun shines to stave off what might turn out another national crisis the dimension of which is better imagined. The South-East legislators should not give up on that. They must intensify effort through robust lobbying to get their colleagues understand the importance of the bill beyond canvassing arguments that sound basal with ethnic biases.

A South-East Development Commission Bill would aid the diversification of the Nigerian economy because of the likelihood of the volume of private sector driven small-scale manufacturing businesses that would spring up from that zone given the rare and unarguable entrepreneurial gravitas of the people from that part of Nigeria.

One doubts that when such planks of inclusivity are erected and the people feel a sense of belonging, anyone would have the time and need to pursue any agenda that would deny him the opportunity of leveraging the advantage of number which our unity presents.

Ogaziechi  writes from  Lagos