By Godwin Njoku
Fear and apprehension have gripped the South-east over the setting up of a security outfit, Eastern Security Network, ESN, by the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB.
Announcing the birth of the ESN, which personnel were seen displaying their strength and prowess in a video that has gone viral, IPOB’s Publicity Secretary, Emma Powerful said IPOB had become tired of waiting for the Governors of the South-east to set up a Security outfit. Powerful said IPOB could no longer wait while some killer herdsmen ravaged the South east, killing, maiming and raping women in their farmlands, thus, stopping them from going to their farms.
In deed, for inexplicable reasons, the South-east Governors have been unable to put their acts together to set up a security outfit. At a point, along with the Ohaneze, the Governors set up a Committee headed by Major General Obi Umahi, rtd, to fashion out modalities for a Security outfit for the region. But the Committee, because of the politics of a couple of Governors, never met for one day.
General Umahi is the elder brother to Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State, who is also the Chairman of the South-east Governors Forum.
Since then, the South-west has set up its own Regional Security outfit, the Amotekun, and the North, its Hisbah, popular as the Shariah Police.
But the setting up of the ESN has been received with mixed feelings. Not a few people think it is a private Army for IPOB Leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who lives in London. Others say it is the Biafran Army, an assumption Mr Powerful denies. When the group is ready to set up an army, he argues, it will be to public knowledge.
But ESN is not like Amotekun or Hisbah, or other security outfits set up by a couple of states. Those outfits were set up with the knowledge and backing of State Governments and other stakeholders after due consultations. But in the case of the ESN, there were no such consultations with anybody.
Distancing itself from the outfit, the Publicity Secretary of the Youth Wing of the Ohaneze Nd’Igbo, Osmond Nkeoma, said it would not work with the ESN, because nobody was consulted before it was set-up.
“Ohaneze will not recognize the outfit”, he said.
Others fear the ESN will be reduced to an outfit to oppress the people, and ask how it would operate without the express cooperation of the Police and State Governments in the zone. They think it is an invitation to anarchy, and worry that the Federal Government would clampdown on members, especially, as in the eyes of the Government, IPOB remains proscribed.
After watching the video of the IPOP-backed ESN, a Stakeholder remarked:
“The story of the video is that someone is raising a private army, and is purporting to be doing it on our behalf. The same individual holds everyone else in leadership in Igboland in total disdain, from Ohaneze to politicians. This is a powerful instrument in his hands, for oppressing all of us, even if he is not able to achieve his overall objective of carving out an entity that he would rule over with an iron fist.”
