By Sunday Ani
The family of Ngwu Alumona of Umuameh, Aguibeje, Enugu-Ezike in Igbo-Eze North Local Government Area of Enugu State, has cried out over the whereabouts of their son, Mr. Chukwudi Godwin Ngwu, 42, who, according to them, has not been seen since December 2022.
In a chat with newsmen at Ogrute, Enugu-Ezike, headquarters of Igbo-Eze North LGA, a spokesman for the family and Godwin’s uncle, Mr. Ifeanyi Ngwu, a timber merchant, described the circumstances surrounding his nephew’s disappearance from public view as fussy, stating that the family feared that there might be a threat to his life as a result of which he might have gone into hiding for safety.
According to the elder Ngwu, until his disappearance, Godwin was among some of the educated and courageous young persons in his village, Aguibeje, who had devoted their time and money to working, amid the widespread insecurity in the area, to build peace and security in the community, until the military’s raid on an alleged Unknown Gunmen’s (UGM’s) camp in the community and the subsequent arrest of the group’s fleeing female gunrunner, Ms. Amaka Onah, at Imufu, a neighbouring community, on December 23, 2022, truncated their peace-building programme, causing all and sundry to scamper for safety.
“For my nephew, it was a case of double jeopardy,” the older Ngwu told journalists. “Don’t forget that at the height of the security crisis in Igbo-Eze North, hundreds of Enugu-Ezike indigenes, both those living at home and outside, were written to by the ‘Boys’ ( as the suspected UGM are called in Enugu-Ezike) and directed to send money to them or refuse to meet their demand and face the consequences thereto. Although they did not follow through with their threats in a number of cases, several of those written to did, in fact, come to harm one way or another.
“In the case of my nephew Godwin, besides the monetary demand from the UGM, his obvious neutrality in his peace-building efforts had the effect of making his actions suspicious in the eyes of both the ‘Boys’ who believed he was spying on them and the security agents who could not be convinced that a young, vibrant and well-off young man like him from that community in that part of the country could be neutral.”
But Uncle Ngwu insisted that his nephew Godwin “had always been neutral – neither hobnobbing with the ‘Boys’ nor passing any information about them to security – and was genuinely committed to working with like minds in the community to build peace and security in Aguibeje, his ancestral homeland and a vast agrarian community in Enugu-Ezike with sprawling forests and suspected solid mineral deposits.”
Asked what qualified Chukwudi to intervene in the social crisis rocking his place in particular and Igbo-Eze North as a whole, even as to undertake peace-building in Aguibeje at a time of high insecurity in the entire LGA, Uncle Ngwu replied, ‘selflessness’.
“As I have pointed out, Chukwudi with whom we all grew up in Ogrute, the local government headquarters, is a young man with immense love of people and community in his heart. He had always done things for the good and convenience of others, sometimes not minding the negative impacts on his own resources and personal needs. As a former banker and businessman who lived in Lagos, where he established a retailing business after leaving the bank, Chukwudi would often gather a lot of his own resources and use them to frequently visit his family in the village and organize the elders and youths to uphold peace through neutrality in the face-off between security operatives and the ‘Boys’ in the community widely suspected to host an UGM camp.”
“That is the kind of person Chukwudi is,” the older Ngwu declared, lamenting that his nephew had become the victim of his own goodwill, “clearly cut between the devil and the deep blue sea at a time that preaching and trying to build peace in Igbo-Eze North without aligning was almost suicidal.”
Asked if the family had reported their misgivings over Chukwudi’s whereabouts to the police, Uncle Ngwu said, “not formally.”
“This is because given the story I have told you, we are yet to establish which of the two sides – the ‘Boys’ or security operatives – has struck the fear of God into him as to make him hide for so long for fear of coming to harm in the hands of any or both of them,” the older Ngwu added. “But we are reaching out to contacts in the police through our lawyers to try and establish Godwin’s state of health and mind at the moment. The purpose of this press briefing is simply to alert members of the public to our concerns and to plead that whoever knows Chukwudi’s whereabouts and is in a position to help him should kindly help keep him safe until this wind of insecurity in Nigeria, especially in the South East, has finally blown away.”
The Igbo-Eze North Divisional Police Officer (DPO), Mr. James Akoh could not be reached for comments, but police sources said they had “informally” heard about the young man’s “dilemma but cannot officially address it yet.
Authoritative sources told our correspondent at Ogrute, Enugu-Ezike, that after the December 2022 military raid on suspected UGM hideouts in Aguibeje, Alor-Agu and Imufu, in Igbo-Eze North and South LGAs respectively, Chukwudi Godwin Ngwu’s family house in Aguibeje became completely deserted after his aged mother, unable to withstand alleged clandestine movements around the house, possibly from security agents and the ‘Boys’, both seemingly angry at Ngwu’s ‘neutrality’, which was held as a ‘double- dealing’ offence against him by both sides, had to be moved to Lagos to live with her children in the city, to avoid any direct threat to her life in the village.
Chukwudi’s father, Chief Godwin Ngwu Snr had died shortly after his favourite son, the only one bearing his father’s first name, got missing, unable to bear the shock of what the old man saw as a ‘big’ misfortune upon his family.