It was long foretold that someday the insecurity that had held Northern Nigeria hostage would make a disastrous landfall in the South East Zone.
Security intelligence had pointed to that inevitable scenario while warning of disaster if proactive steps were not taken to nip it in the bud.
Individuals and groups yelled and shouted in similar manner but, the governors of the region who are constitutionally empowered to secure life and property of their citizens looked the other way.
Sadly, that prediction has come to fulfilment today as shown by the recent alleged Fulani Herders massacre of defenceless innocent people in Ebonyi and Enugu States.
According to Media reports which relied on eye witness accounts, the invading marauders killed not less than twenty people in their first Ebonyi attack and not less than eight in a second provocative attack just last week.
For Enugu media reports claimed that not less than eight people were also gruesomely sent to their early graves.
The anger which enveloped the zone in the aftermath of those dastard attacks has been overwhelming. So many groups and individuals have spoken out angrily calling on the Federal Government to rein in the killer Herdsmen. Others have branded the attacks an open declaration of war against the people of the zone.
Unfortunately and most disturbingly amid the flaring tempers and palpable tension the five governors of the region are yet to say a word against the heinous crime as key leaders in the Zone
They have also sat and watched without any form of action to restore peoples’ confidence in their ability to guarantee security of life and property as enshrined in the 1999 constitution, as amended.
Rather than take decisive steps to protect peace loving people of the region, they have busied themselves flexing muscle with IPOB over whose brain child Eastern Security Network is.
This fiddling which can be likened to that of Nero, once the ruler of the famous Roman Empire, who sat idly by doing and saying nothing while his country burned, is completely unacceptable and condemnable.
South East Governors must stop their ongoing Ostrich gimmick on the issue of skyrocketing insecurity in the zone. They should stop playing hide and seek and confront, head-on, the security emergency before the zone becomes another theatre of war and killing field.
They must immediately put in place a security architecture similar to Amotekun which the South West governors packaged with the massive support of their people to checkmate insecurity in the zone.
We want to recall here that only a fortnight ago Chief Emeka Diwe, President of Association of South East Town Unions, ASETU, at an award ceremony organized for him by Imo Newspaper Editors and Columnists Forum, pointedly accused the governors of refusing to pass anti open grazing law.
And we ask why are the governors shying away from enacting legislations against open grazing which has led to the despoliation of almost the entire farm lands in the region?
Nobody is even talking about the unprecedented destruction of farm crops and in extreme cases as witnessed in Ebonyi and Enugu killing of landowners and forceful takeover of their lands, that are also directly linked to open grazing.
With the Federal Government seeming tacit support of the atrocious behaviour of the Herders, it should be crystal clear to those governing South East, respectively, that the only option open to them now is to look inward and quickly come up with security arrangement to safeguard the Igbo nation and its people.
We are not alarmists but the signs are very clear that the South East region has been pushed to the wall by alleged Fulani killers.
And except the governors push their selfish political interests aside and put on the toga of patriotism and love for their ancestry and act fast, the peoples’ ire may sooner or later overflow its bank like a river.
Of course, when a river over shoots its natural habitat it leaves massive destruction in its wake.
Therefore, for us this is the time to act and permanently fix escalating alleged Fulani Herdsmen bloodletting in Igbo land.
