Matters of Fact

By Frank Ofili

Governor Soludo of Anambra State has just demonstrated that the IPOB menace could have been resolved long time ago if the south-east leaders wanted to.

Apparently, most of them were closet IPOB supporters. They enabled it, until the chicken came home to roost.

And please, nobody should tell me that Mazi Nnandi Kanu never authorised Monday sit-at-home. If he didn’t, how come his name was invoked to suspend it?

Some of us kept saying it that the sit-at-home and the violence that attended it was never going to bode well for the siuth-east. Thank God reason has prevailed at last. Unfortunately, at a huge cost.

It is just like the mass kidnapping, terrorism and banditry currently going on in parts of the north. Everything indicates that some northern political establishment may be behind them. Like the IPOB violence in the south-east, it is never going to augur well in the long run for the north.

Like the political jiggery-pokery currently going on in the Senate over electronic transmission of election result. The senators are merely engaging in self-preservation antics – and by so doing postponing the inevitable.

At some point in time we must come round to what must be done. But this is topic for another day. If the Senators mean well for the country however, now is the time to be bold and heed the advice of former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger – that whatever must ultimately happen, had better happen now.

The argument of network deficiency in some parts of the country is simply defeatist. It is to admit the inability of government to solve a problem that is not complicated, a problem that can be addressed by simple scrupulous regulation.

Okay, alright, let us accept the network argument without conceding. Let us also accept without conceding that there are communities in Nigeria who live in caves, and so inaccessible to other humans. The question is, what is government doing about it? Or are we suggesting that these communities should remain in caves, inaccessible to networks and other humans in the 21st Century? How has INEC been accessing these communities?

Government exists to solve problems – real or imagined. It is a well known fact that a problem identified is half solved. Thank God this problem (of network deficiency) has been identified, government should now go ahead and solve it and save us this wash-wash argument. Mandatory Electronic Transmission of election result is the way to go.