IPOB SIT-AT-HOME ORDERS: EMANCIPATION OR EMASCULATION OF THE SOUTHEAST?
By: ONWUASOANYA FCC JONES
There are empty streets across the Southeast today, an almost total shutdown of economic and educational activities. Many of our children who are writing their Secondary School Certificate Examination are stranded at home, while their peers across the nation and parts of West Africa are in the examination hall sweating it out to write a formula that might determine the kind of future they would have. This near total shutdown of the entire Southeast is not as a result of a willing obedience to IPOB’s sit-at-home order or a demonstration of the people’s love or affiliation to the IPOB, but clear evidence of the pervasiveness of terror in our land.
If a poll is conducted today and the respondents are assured of their anonymity, you can be sure that more than 80% of Igbos living in Igbo land and other parts of Nigeria would vote for an abolition of sit-at-home orders as a strategy by the IPOB. This strategy has proven to be more inimical to Southeast’s economic and political aspirations than the purported adversarial policies of the Federal Government against the Southeast region.
Everyday there is a sit-at-home in the Southeast, the Southeast is bled of billions of Naira in our economy, dreams are upended and lives are lost. It is either some hoodlums hiding under a deceitful secessionist struggle mete terror to hapless citizens or doctors and other health workers in obedience to this illegal orders stay away from work, leading to avoidable deaths of many patients.
Also, people will not be able to leave their homes to go to hospitals when there is a health emergency while our children are denied the opportunity to go to school, or like it is the case today, thousands of school leavers would miss an important transitional examination.
In all of this, 99.9% of the victims are Igbos. While other parts of Nigeria move on with their lives and expand their economic activities, some people, in the guise of fighting for Igbo liberation continue to punish our people and take away the little advantage we have over our contemporaries. When they strike, they kill our brothers and sisters, when they loot, they loot our people’s hard-earned assets, and when they rape, they violate our beautiful daughters and sisters.
Sit-at-home had been used in the past as a civil disobedience strategy by icons of freedom fighting like Mahatma Gandhi of India who mobilised Indians to either stay out of work or sit-in at their work places in order to call attention to the need for Indians to be allowed to rule themselves. However, Gandhi and others who used this method only targeted those providing public services like in the transportation sector, civil service offices and other sectors that are controlled by the government, they never targeted private business owners and those who rely on daily wage earning to survive.
The idea of a sit-at-home was to cripple government activities and embarrass government authorities to appreciate the power of the masses. Unfortunately, what the IPOB does is in direct contrast to the Mahatma Gandhi style they are trying to copy, because unlike in Gandhi’s India, government activities go on across the Southeast with little or no disruption while private individuals are left bearing the brunt of this brutal strategy.
If the IPOB is observant enough, it must have realised that it is steadily losing support of the people of the Southeast. Millions of Southeast people are beginning to see them as enemies trying to stifle the economy of our people rather than the friends and liberators they initially tried to present themselves as.
If the IPOB does not change its strategies quickly, there would not be a need for the federal government to invest too much in trying to exterminate what remains of them, because the people of the Southeast are gradually rising up against them already.
ALA IGBO SHALL PREVAIL!
