Abia State Governor, Okezie Ikpeazu, has urged the federal government to urgently open talks with the indigenous people of Biafra, IPOB, and similar groups around the country, as a means of tackling the rising insecurity in Nigeria.
The governor said this on Sunday during an interview with the Channels Television’s programme, Politics Today.
“In the first place what is the genesis of the agitation in the South-east? Some people in the South-east feel unprotected the way things are going and they also feel that some criminal herders that have found their way into our forests were not adequately sanctioned according to the rule book of Nigeria, and that created a gap.
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“It is this gap that non-state actors are trying to fill, wrongly though,” the governor said when asked by the interviewer, Seun Okinbaloye, what he was doing about the IPOB’s sit-at-home order.
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“But you also notice that there is a perception problem here, a lot of people feel that something needs to happen about protecting farmlands, protecting the people in the forests, and if the security architecture, as presently constituted, has failed to do that, people will begin to seek help from all kinds of things.”
“The good place to start is to listen to the crux of their agitation, because some of the things they have mentioned is what is agitating the mind of the ordinary people in the South-east. So, what is wrong in listening? What is wrong in discussing the issues?
“If they say they want somebody in the Security Council, why can’t that happen?”
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When the Channels’ reporter asked Mr Ikpeazu how the Nigerian government could possibly hold talks with a group it had proscribed, Ikpeazu said: “You can proscribe an individual, you can proscribe a group, you can proscribe an organisation but it is difficult to proscribe an ideology,”
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