SOUTHEAST INSECURITY: ANY SECURITY INITIATIVE LED BY UZODIMMA WILL FAIL -ONWUASOANYA FCC JONES

To lead a successful initiative for the restoration of peace in any society, one must have the confidence of the people. The leader of such initiative must be someone whom the people believe in and can trust what he says. Security is a function of trust more than it is a function of arms and force.

The criminals destroying livelihoods in the Southeast are succeeding because they have been able to intimidate the people into shielding them from the authorities and those who have the legal mandate to use force to quell criminality have lost the trust of the people and are more feared than the criminals, because they have shown themselves, as being no better than the terrorists.

Igbos, especially, those of the Southeast have more confidence in the efforts of Governor Charles Soludo, and to some extent, those of the Peter Mbah and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi before him, but no one trusts Uzodimma, because he has always lied to the people, and left no one in doubt that he is a major beneficiary of the unfortunate situation in the Southeast.

Uzodimma is one governor who has blamed everyone else, but himself, and the real perpetrators of these violent breaches in the Southeast than anyone of the Southeast governors, and giving him any leading role in any purported onslaught against the criminal elements shows that the Southeast governors are merely playing politics with the security situation in the zone, rather than being committed to any agenda for the restoration of peace in the zone.

The recent meeting of the Southeast governors, where Uzodimma, a miscast, for the Southeast Governors’ Forum, spoke on behalf of the governors only goes to show the extent of ignorance or deliberate unseriousness by these governors to tackle the insidious threat to our peace and security in the Southeast.

Governor Uzodimma never had, nor has made any honest effort to gain the confidence of the people of Southeast. His grandstanding declarations of the Southeast governors’ acclaimed determination to reassert the political authority of the leaders in the zone is no better than clowning. At most, it makes a mess of what might be the genuine intentions of other Southeast governors, who might some level of legitimacy with their people.

Southeast governors must pursue individual programs that might get their various States working again, or they may risk losing the little gains they might have individually made, in ridding their States of criminality.

Everyone who is observant and has followed the history and trajectory of violent attacks in the Southeast since 2021, would not need to be told that beyond Uzodimma’s contentious emergence as governor, his mishandling of the security situation in Imo is responsible for the avoidable escalation of the situation.

A security taskforce commandeered by Uzodimma will fail woefully in garnering the required civilian cooperation and information in reining in the criminals and terrorists that have seemingly overwhelmed our conventional security architecture. This is mostly because the average person in Igbo land believes, wrongly or rightly, that Uzodimma knows more than he is ready to tell us about the security situation.

MAY ALA IGBO PREVAIL!