An affiliate of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Njiko Igbo Forum, has alleged that the Federal Government (FG) is still at war with the Igbos in Nigeria.
Okechukwu Obioha, President of the Forum who disclosed this in a statement made available to newsmen on Thursday, said people of the South-East region would not be fazed by the palliative being rolled out by the Federal Government to cushion the effect of the petrol subsidy removal.
The Convener/Chairman, South-East Equity Group, SEEP, said insensitive and discriminatory policies of successive administrations remained a gross abuse on the psyche of the Igbo man in the country.
According to him, several years after the civil war, the people of the South-East were still being treated as the vanquished.
Obioha identified the abandonment of the Eastern rail corridor as proof that FG was not ready to factor Igbos into its development plans.
“There is no equity, justice and fairness.No amount of the so-called palliative from the Federal Government extended to the people of the South-East zone can assuage or compensate them enough, as long as the Eastern Corridors of the Railways remained recklessly abandoned.
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“From the days of Sure-P of the Obasanjo administration to the Buhari-led government, all other rail lines and even new ones, particularly that of the Katsina to Niger (another country) were constructed and made operational, except that of the Eastern Corridors running from Port-Harcourt to Enugu and then Makurdi – Maiduguri,” he said.
He said the situation became more insulting when FG pulled off the rails/slippers all through these corridors, leaving no sign or trace of a former rail line, except grasses and trees that have grown thereby.
“How else can this be explained except that the Federal government, by this obnoxious brazen dichotomy, is still at war with the Igbo of the South-East?” Obioha queried.
“The war is still on and as far as the average Igbo is concerned, the struggle to survive still continues unabated.
“There is nothing like palliative to the Vanquished Nigeria Igbo, but to the Nigeria Victor,” he added
Information Nigeria reports that in 2022, the government at the time, was left with no choice but to halt the ongoing construction of the Port Harcourt-Maiduguri Eastern Rail Line due to insecurity and incessant vandalism.
