Why Igbo leaders can’t control pro-Biafra agitators- Okorie

United Progressives Party,UPP, presidential candidate in the last general elections,Chief Chekwas Okorie,in this interview, says worsening socio-economic situation in the South-East and South-South  is responsible for the strident calls for secession. Excerpts…


Okorie
What is your impression about the Biafra anniversary that turned bloody and the struggle for secession from Nigerian state?

The government we have today has an attitude towards the agitators for a separate state of Biafra which to my mind will not resolve the issues amicably. The attitude of the government is that there is no basis for dialogue. But the  advice that I have given over and over again is that there is need for dialogue, there is need to discuss. Many eminent Nigerians have  advocated for dialogue.

President Buhari has repeatedly said that the people who are agitating, most of them were not born during or before the war and, therefore, will not know what most of   those who participated on both sides suffered and  by his figures, Nigeria lost two million people.

I don’t know how he arrived at the two million to know which side lost more. And my attitude is that the fact that majority of these people were  not born is the more reason they should be brought to the negotiation table. Buhari does not need to be involved personally, he is the president of Nigeria.

There are so many agencies of government that can do that on their own or as a team. The office of the National Security Adviser,NSA, can handle this issue of dialogue, the Directorate of State Security can do  it; even the office of the Inspector General of Police can handle it. These are security agencies and departments of government that can handle this without direct involvement of the President and eventually advise the President on the best way to go.

These young men cannot understand. We their fathers and elders cannot sufficiently convince them and nobody in Nigeria can explain to them why their situation is this miserable, nobody can tell them why their condition, compared to their peers from other parts of the country, is widely different.

Nobody can tell them why a graduate will remain unemployed for several years and his counterpart from  another part of the country, especially  from the North, will have jobs waiting for him even before graduation and, by the time some of them eventually get a place, they are subordinates to people they graduated the same year with. Nobody can tell them why to gain admission into university that somebody with about 200 points at  University Matriculation Examination may not be considered to have earned enough to be admitted and another person from another part of the country with less than 100 points will gain admission.

What is the implication? The implication is that while he is still waiting to have that figure, that number that will admit him, that one that he is more brilliant than is ahead of him. There are so many things you can’t explain to these people and efforts have been made to restructure Nigeria, efforts have been made to remove some of the obnoxious policies but these have been restricted and so some of these people feel that if they confront government, they are dead, if they fail to confront government, they are dead.

So when you now sit them down and explain a few things to them and give them hope, perhaps their methods will be different, perhaps their attitude will be different and some of us who are their elders will also have a little peace of mind because, let nobody joke about it, most of us in our age and situation are under pressure too. We are even branded saboteurs, we are called names. If you go to social media, some of us are called names because the youths believe we have not done enough for them and we are asking government, ‘help us to help the country and also talk to these people’. We have been looking at a situation where government is looking for any way they can speak to leaders of   Boko Haram.

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