By Steve Osuji
The pictures below capture the state secretariat and State House of Assembly areas of Owerri, Imo State.
At about 3.00 pm Monday, March 28, the city remained a ghost town.
Civil servants, students, bankers, businessmen, traders, transporters, nigh everyone stayed indoors every Monday, the first workday of the week till way into the evening when the city comes alive once again.
A once proudly beautiful city, the honeypot of Nigeria is beginning to reimagine and reconfigure herself.
The upcoming lifestyle and entertainment hub of the south is beginning to win her stripes as the civil consciousness outpost of Nigeria. For instance, even as majority stayed indoors peacefully without nary any form of coercion, by noon, it had been reported that one Divisional Police Headquarters in Obowo had come under vicious attack.
Hmmm. A knowing grunt and a return to business. It’s become one of those things, it’s become like the Monday sit at home; an emerging way of life for Ndigbo.
Billions are lost every Monday, the most important day of the workday, government and some lone voices admonish. Most of the people answer to this with studied silence. Without saying it, majority seem to respond (without saying so): “so what. What have we done with the billions we earned those Mondays we were out and about.” If we chose to sit at home everyday how does it trouble the world?
It’s no longer a big deal that Ndigbo sit at home, not only in Owerri, but across the cities of the southeast… Onitsha, Awka, Aba, Umuahia, Abakaliki, Enugu, Nnewi, Afikpo, etc. People can’t careless anymore.
But as the sun recedes to the west, the east reawakens with a fresh burst of epicurean energy! In Owerri, eateries, hotels, pubs, fun gardens, clubs groove into the night; quaffing, putting down peppered proteins and jigging to the beat that appeals to the waist – bongo!
In the unconscious of the city sits the the vicious politics of the day but hardly anyone discuss it.
Governments have shouted themselves hoarse, even threatening citizens to defy sit at home orders. But people just chuckle knowingly at the order the way people react to empty threats.
The new governor in Awka, Anambra State issued a directive that sit at home was over in his domain. He urged everyone, especially civil servants to resume life as usual. Report from Awka notes that while civil servants may have managed to report to work, most of the cities of Onitsha, Nnewi and Awka were ghost towns most of Monday.
This may have sent a message to Governor Chukwuma Soludo that not all matters are sorted with directives. How do you secure hundreds of schools, markets, banks and offices across your state from anonymous vandals and the threat of attacks from them. You need to assure them that the threat has been eliminated rather than bully the innocent citizenry.
Bottomline: it seems the Igbo of the southeast are becoming conscientised more than ever before. More and more people now act like a cuckolded man whose wife is cheating on but who has to suffer the burden of living under the same roof with her. Diffidence becomes him but he knows that someday he would be rid of the doggone woman.
My reading is that most Igbo, yes, MOST Igbo now want OUT. Yet, from a Nigerian entity that has whipped them with the koboko of unrequited live. And they believe that someday, somehow, they would have to achieve Biafra.
More and more believe it’s the way out!
And if it requires injurious civil action like sittingat home every other day, so be it. That is the the situation report from here.
▪︎Osuji is a newspaper columnist and public affairs analyst.