The Collateral Costs of South East Sit-at-Home Order

It no longer makes a headline that cities in and through South East States are dissevered from one another and from the national matrix on Mondays and on other days the leader of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) is to appear in court. The news that the South East cities are locked down and residents sit at home on such days is merely rhetorical. The aspect of this event that the media often find coverable is the formative proof that the order is alive and that Igbos are consequently gnashing. By focusing on the form-only aspect of the debate, ultimately, it seems that the media have wittingly or unwittingly kept the viands out of reach of concerned policy organs of government; and have by so doing localized the issue away from any form of national identification. This form of media approach to the issue has also foreclosed any forms of solitary engagement by the respective state governments.

The question, however, remains whether the unrelieved sit-at-home order of IPOB is truly a national issue or just a parish-pump Igbo affair? Why is the issue being so much delimited to a federally irrelevant magnitude? In ostensible terms, the median graphics have so far made it look exclusively for the Igbos; and in doing so, they have fashioned a sixth tense that federal offices and non-Igbo businesses in the Zone are economically insignificant. The media have also assumed that, at a distance of 564 kilometers from Enugu, Lagos is too far to be affected by events in Enugu; and at close to 1,072 kilometer from Awka, Sokoto is too detached from hindrances in the Anambra. Like a child being shielded by the parents from the ascendancies of bad boys and girls, governments of neighbouring Kogi, Rivers, Cross River, and Delta have thickly screened and immune their states from any bilateral identifications with the East, so much so that they believe that there is truly nothing nerve-racking about the whole situation. Consequently as the media have made it look, there is nothing that justifies keeping the whole country wide-awake over imminences in the South East. After all, if schools, hospitals, businesses, banks and federal offices are locked-down in the solitary east, what difference does that make in the compact west and north? The lockdown affects only nitpicking businesses, market traders and artisans, and not at all airborne superintendents and politically relevant and protected big-men. The Federal Government of Nigeria need not fret over the policy because, according to one analyst, the center would “not be affected by any lockdown in the South East and would not even bother as it is still Ndigbo that will bear the brunt”. Neighbouring state governments also need not worry so much because one man’s poison could, of essence, be another man’s meat, which manifests in the tune of arguments in some quarters that Asaba and Port Harcourt are already taking over the economy of the South East due to the sit-at-home order.

To face the reality, why are the media not focusing on the completeness of the story and not dragging the issue up to the national discourse table? Since the announcement of the Monday Sit-at-Home Order by IPOB on 9^th August  2021, the mass media have been awash with highlights of the irretrievable costs of the order on the South East. Both mainstream and online news media have, in sequestration, demonstrated how schools, businesses and others in the South East are groaning under the sit-at-home order. While this is not out of scope, the aslant media analysis tends to anemically support the ‘sole victim’ story of the IPOB order. The skewed focus of the media suggests a deliberate nullification of any satirist claims of those who think the federal government should propitiate.

While it is not contestable to posit that South East has suffered incalculable consequences since August last year, doing so should not prejudice the position of even-handed nationalists that the situation is infusing collateral damages in the country’s political and socioeconomic wellbeing. In a country that relies largely on importation, a Zone that takes monthly delivery of up to 60 percent of cargoes coming into Nigerian Ports (according to a record from the National Inland Waterways Authority) cannot be easily relegated. That the South East States are proximate and remote rotary gateways to most other states in the country should prove a point. That is, lockdowns in the South East indeed have a shrinking impact on both Nigeria’s national and sub-national economies. What sense does it then make for the media and the government to continue to uphold the feeling that Igbos are on their own as far as IPOD agitation is concerned? Who knows, the weakening socioeconomic situations in the country since last year might not be unconnected with the collateral effects of the regular lockdown – the same argument that can equally be posed for the persistent instability in the North East and some parts of North Central Zones of the country.

Shouldn’t the media and those in-charge of governing our public space be interested in nationally landscaping the debates on what constitutes the actual scale and solution to the sit-at-home order in the South East? Why is no one interested in upgrading the debate to a national scale, which is obviously the real essence of the call for a political solution to the current problem? Who knows, it is possible that the search for a lasting solution to our current unprepossessing socioeconomic conditions can be facilitated when zonal instability is viewed and discoursed at national level. In terms of the consequences of the IPOD sit-at-home order, this can be done by focusing on the collateral implications, instead of the media emphasis on the solitary costs of the lockdown on the South East alone. This is also not different from the persistent call for a political solution to the problem. History books have proven unequivocally that the ideologies of regional agitations, all over the world, are not judged by the law of right or wrong, but by sincere civil engagement and legitimate conviction. Such civil engagement should be initiated by the respective state governments, the outcome of which can thereafter be packaged and sold to the media and the central government as an important issue for national policy discourse.

Abel E. Ezeoha

Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike