WHY ANIOMA STATE WILL NOT BE CREATED

Basil Okoh

MaTaZ ArIsInG
Dallas, Texas

Ned Nwoko has not been able to do anything to advance the creation of Anioma state despite all the grandstanding and noise that suggest that he has great influence in both the executive branch and the legislature. He has not even been able to win the support of his own party APC at the local level and enlist it in the fight for Anioma state creation. Right now, at home, he has been alienated by the party at both the organizational and government levels. He has not won the endorsement for Anioma state creation from the Chairmen of the 9 LGA’s that make up the proposed Anioma state and neither has he won a consensus on Anioma from members of the House of Assembly of Delta state. They have yet to sign on to papers supporting creation of the state. Members of the House of Representatives from Delta state have not been mobilized for the cause of Anioma state creation. Ned Nwoko has only succeeded in drafting a bill for the creation of Anioma state and laying it on the Senate table. No other achievement has been made.

So those followers buzzing around him aimlessly like agitated flies should better know that no milestone has been achieved in the long road to creating Anioma state outside of the general debate for state creation and the public hearing. And these are general for all the states with bills for state creation. For all the public disturbance on Anioma, nothing is actually happening in the official circles.

And back home in Delta North, Ned Nwoko has no supporters or opinion leaders of any prominence to lend voice in support of his Anioma state creation gambit. All he has are social media rats scurrying around WhatsApp groups and singing his praises for gain. He has no prominent supporter whether King, musician, sportsman, banker, politician or technocrat backing his cause. Nothing in the real process of state creation is being done in any community in Anioma. It’s just all noise and bandying the name of President Ahmed Tinubu everywhere as having given him his commitment to create Anioma state. Name dropping should have better uses but he just carries the Anioma matter on his head like Atlas choosing to carry the world on his shoulders. The people of Delta North didn’t send him to the senate because of Anioma State or to take them to the Southeast. No community or group gave him the mandate to pursue the creation of Anioma state or to take them to the Southeast.

Ned Nwoko was elected to the senate by the people of Delta North to serve and represent them. He got to the senate and felt that he was bigger than the sum of the people of Delta North who elected him and decided to make himself their leader and not their representative. He, being a rich, brash philanderer and know-all, decided to lead them, without any discussion or their consent, out of Delta state and the South-South into Igbo land. But there are a thousand men and women in Anioma who are by far men and women of means than Ned Nwoko. They come with definable businesses and engagements and respect their people and would not insult them as Ned Nwoko is doing. Ned Nwoko in conceit, believes that he is now our master and is forcibly leading us to Igbo land that we didn’t tell him we want to belong to. Delta North has one of the highest literacy levels across Africa and it’s economy is rooted firmly among the highest states in Nigeria. You will definitely not find a beggar in Anioma and hardly can you confront people without skills.

We know that Ned Nwoko is taking the Anioma gambit far beyond his insatiable cravings for publicity, for showmanship and boundless showboating. Exhibitionism defines his very life and drives all his actions. To be noticed, to shine among others, to be in the media, photo-ops and be found among grand people and in grand places. Psychologists say it’s an expression of low self-esteem and a deep feeling of inferiority as the sufferer would do anything, take risks, spend so much money to be in the public consciousness all the time.

And his cravings to be on public show all the time has brought him into the conundrum of Anioma state creation. It’s obvious that Ned Nwoko embraced the idea of Anioma state creation as a means of upstaging his political competitors in the then PDP. He did not know a thing about Anioma state creation before getting into the Senate. In his unceasing restlessness even as senator, he got to know about the agitation for Anioma state creation and then embraced it as its champion. Before anyone could teach him the ropes, he had run to the media to announce his takeover of the fight for Anioma, without understanding the very historical issues in the agitation. And then he decided on his own to make Anioma people harlots and open to Igbo plunder.

He keeps doubling down on the false Igbo narrative of the origins of Anioma communities. He has rejected the facts and evidence presented to him on the origins of his own community, of even his own family but has instead embraced the false self-made narrative of Igbo origins. It is no longer in doubt that something is driving Ned Nwoko on the quest to make Anioma an Igbo enclave.

Because Ned Nwoko is bringing in the Southeast into Anioma matter under the pretext of Igbo exceptionalism, we must continue to insist that there is nothing like Igbo inventiveness or exceptionalism in Nigeria. Igboland has the highest population density in Africa and a poor agricultural land. As a result, so many of it’s people have to move out to earn livelihood elsewhere. The intense competition in such a challenging environment does not make them inventive or exceptional. The touted exceptionalism does not show in economic wellbeing, in sports, in literacy levels and certainly not in any development index or any areas of human endeavour. If they were, Igboland would be ahead of other states in economic wellbeing. Igbo exceptionalism is a false narrative and does not exist. And until we begin to see soaring export numbers, we will not believe in Igbo inventiveness. There is more indigenous manufacturing in Yoruba states than the entire Igbo land.

We should all understand that Ned Nwoko is not insisting on Igbo ancestry for Anioma people for nothing. Our people say there is a meaning to a cock crowing at midday. Ned Nwoko has an agenda that is not known, a pay point in this whole drama. We will all get to know in time, but before then, we must all unite to stop Ned Nwoko from taking Delta Nort to where we don’t know and don’t want. We elected him to serve us as senator but now he has assumed a position above us, he is now our master, taking us to wherever suits his fancy. It is as if we ourselves have been reduced to serve Nwoko’s interest. He is no longer our servant, the man we sent to the senate but our master.

The people of Anioma have been studiously ignoring Ned Nwoko and his band of restless Igbo expansionists. It is as if they know that the creation of Anioma state is not possible and therefore see Nwoko’s prancing around in the Senate and the media as mere theatre to humour the world and offend Anioma people. They believe that Nwoko’s antics is useless to the strategic interests of the people who sent him to the senate and at the appropriate time, he will be removed for good riddance. It is the reason why you don’t see any community activism on the creation of Anioma state. It is just Ned Nwoko and his band of street theatre groups.

Nwoko believes so much on the commitment of President Tinubu to create Anioma State as a token of goodwill to him. His naïveté shows when he speaks gushingly about the President’s avowal to create Anioma State “for me”. His naïveté is in the fact that Bola Tinubu is just a passing player in Nigerian politics and his influence is not deep and does not go beyond Lagos state and at best some areas of Yoruba land. Bola Tinubu has very little influence in national politics and he as president has no power to create a state. It is purely the business of the legislature and the people. Moreover, state creation is at the nerve centre of geopolitical bickering in Nigeria and Tinubu himself risks his political fortunes by immersing himself in the issues of state creation.

So close to an election in which Tinubu himself will be a contestant, he will not dare bring commotion to the polity, which the issues of state creation will definitely stir up. The northern establishment will not cede a new state to the south without the concession of a corresponding state created in the North. The commotion state creation politics can generate will cost Tinubu his re-election. State Creation will not bring any counterpart benefit to Tinubu or the APC. Pundits know that if Bola Tinubu facilitates the creation of Anioma state for the Southeast against the will of the Anioma people, he will get no votes from the Anioma territory in the coming presidential election. For Bola Tinubu, the creation of Anioma state is a zero sum game and so he should have no interests as there are no stakes.

So let Ned keep spending his and Ohaneze money in the forlorn hope that one day Anioma state will be created for Igbo domination and occupation. If he but knows the seething anger in Delta North against his provocations on Anioma state creation, he will do himself a world of good by not filing for a return to the senate. Anioma people are waiting for him to come back and ask for their votes and he will be made to explain to them how they became Igbo people. He will be so trounced and beaten in that election that he will wish he never heard the word Anioma in his life time.

He will learn the rewards for treachery, for betraying the sacred trust placed on him by electing him to the senate and thereafter going to the senate to sell his own people short to foreign interests. He will explain to Delta North if he was sent to the senate to remake Delta North into an Igbo enclave. It is unprecedented that an elected representative will go to parliament to represent the interest of another people, another territory that did not elect him. Ned Nwoko was not elected to the senate to represent Igbo but Delta North. He will be reminded how traitors historically always come to a bad end. Judas Iscariot was a good example. He sold his Master to the Sanhedrin Jews.

It is unprecedented that a politician will use foreign agents to subjugate and undermine his own people as Nwoko is using Igbo to undermine Anioma unity and sense of shared history.

@basilokoh

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