By Felix Oguejiofor Abugu and Willy Chukwuafugo Eya
The first question we asked when the good news of the release of the 21 or so Iyionu-Aguibeje, Enugu-Ezike, Igbo-Eze North abduction victims broke late Tuesday, May 13 night, was whether they were released whole and entire and in good shape. We were never going to be able to tell the extent of their post-release psychological traumas, of course, but we were happy, even elated, to know that they all came out, hale and hearty, physically in good shape. We became even more convinced about their physical well-being when we saw the group photograph they took with the Local Government Chairman, Engr. Michael Uchenna Ogalla, on Wednesday, May 14 at the Ogrute police station, shortly after their release.
We commend Engr. Ogalla and his team and the security agencies for the expeditious release of the 21 abductees. While we are not in a position to say how their release was secured, we are not unmindful of the fact that a lot of effort must have gone into the processes leading to their eventual freedom. For that, we say bravo to Mayor Ogalla and team.
However, for us in AbeyaNews, what happened has called for a reappraisal of our attitude towards security matters in Igbo-Eze North. It is unfortunate that after almost two years of incident-free security environment in our LGA, we had to contend afresh with such a big security breach as the mass abduction of some members of a marriage party from a part of our town. But the question is, could this not have been prevented? Were we failed by our security system or did we fail ourselves?
Now let’s be clear about one thing: IGN’s security apparatus is intact and highly functional. Indeed, ours is still one of the nimblest and most mobile security outfits in the Nsukka cultural zone, if not in Enugu State as a whole. There is no doubt at all that our boys are very much alive to their responsibility. And we have, for instance, the last incident-free Christmas and Easter celebrations, including all the burials and marriage ceremonies that fell within these periods, as well as the recent Imufu ‘Omabe Return’, to back up our claim.
REVISITING THE IYIONU INCIDENT
The problem, however, is that we the people would appear to have developed a complacent attitude to security issues in our LGA, and the recent ugly incident may well be an ominous sign that the security situation in IGN is unraveling again. We seem to have forgotten all too soon where we were, in terms of the insecurity that ravaged our LGA, barely two years ago. If anything, we have become relaxed, unreasonably believing that insecurity is no longer an issue in IGN.
That would explain why two families moving dozens of people from Aji to Iyionu-Aguibeje for a marriage ceremony, did not consider it necessary to invite the local vigilantes to secure and protect the environment and people where the event was scheduled to take place. According to checks, the families involved, for whatever reasons but apparently because they didn’t want to pay any security levy, preferred to sneak the marriage party into and out of Aguibeje, cutting off all the fanfare that comes with marriages in Igbo-Eze North just so they wouldn’t pay any security level. This was like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face.
In Enugu-Ezike, we describe this type of fatalistic attitude to self-preservation as ‘ome m n’emegbu onwe ye’ (cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face). Please, note that on the same day the Iyionu abduction took place, there was another event, a burial, in the same Aguibeje, albeit in the heart of the community. When contacted, the young man who buried his wife that day disclosed that he had paid as little as N10k to mobilize the community’s vigilantes to his event. That is to say that the minimum amount a celebrant or chief mourner is expected to pay to engage members of the Aguibeje Neighbourhood Watch to secure a large-crowd event in the community is N10,000. And the families contracting a marriage in remote Iyionu-Aguibeje, which shares boundaries with security-challenged Kogi State communities, would rather not pay such an amount to secure the venue of the marriage ceremony? Is there any surprise, then, that, that particular incident was reportedly the most effortlessly executed criminal act by the kidnappers, who did not encounter any form of resistance from anywhere, far or near?
WHY THE WEDDING FAMILIES APPARENTLY SHOT THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT BY NEGLECTING THEIR SECURITY NEEDS
It is just possible that the decision of the Aji/Iyionu wedding families not to invite vigilantes to their ceremony so as not to pay any levy, was influenced by the bruising, we-versus-them social media attack on the apparently well-considered decision of the Igbo-Eze North Local Government Council to levy families burying their dead, or giving out their daughters in marriage or contracting same for their sons, for security purposes. According to the executive order earlier issued by the Council Chairman but now suspended, a flat rate of N50,000 apiece was to be paid by families across Igbo-Eze North, for burials and or marriages. N30,000 of that money was to be retained by the community through the Igwe to the Neighbourhood Watch security personnel for ‘logistics’ – fueling et al – while the remaining N20,000 was to be paid into the local government’s account as token IGR. The ‘IGR’ so collected was also to be built into the local government’s finance department’s sub-head on IGN’s security personnel (vigilantes’) salaries. But what was designed as a seasonal, non-regular tax was soon mischaracterized as “harsh tax” by some social media critics, who would appear to have deliberately misinformed the public about the levy, for whatever reasons.
Deploying what was evidently malicious propaganda, the critics, without pulling punches, attacked what was actually a well-thought-out security part-funding arrangement by the LGC, insistent on the government suspending the burial/marriage (Nri Order) tax. Miffed by what it perceived as the inciting tone of the writings, the government had to suspend the levy, leaving the communities to revert to the original arrangement whereby some of them paid as much as N70k or 50k or N30 or N20k, as the case may be, to their vigilantes to provide security at special events in the communities. It has since, however, set up a cultural committee to advise it appropriately on the matter.
Under that same old arrangement, a family holding a burial or marriage ceremony was also at liberty to choose a ceremony devoid of fanfare, in which case they would not pay any special ‘protection’ money to the vigilantes. On the contrary, by the suspended order by the LGC, it was compulsory for any large-crowd event in any community in Igbo-Eze North to be provided with a special security (vigilante) arrangement by their Neighbourhood Watch security outfit. Evidently, it was the choice of the cheaper, no-fanfare option by the Aji/Iyionu-Aguibeje wedding families that may have become their Achilles Heel, leading their reportedly effortless abduction by the heartless bandits roaming the nation’s forests.
It would appear that the anti-burial/marriage tax campaign was caught in the vortex of the acrimonious Igbo-Eze North bloc politics, a major disruptive factor in our sense of community and shared destiny. To read the comments and or listen to the commentaries, you would think the bitter attacks, the unsettling innuendoes were directed at never-do-well impostors from Mars come to impose “an atrocious, useless tax on the masses”, not a mere N20k seasonal, non-regular security levy raised for the all-important purpose of securing lives and property in IGN.
It is always as if there is a permanent disagreement, steeped in suspicion and unhealthy rivalry, between the political blocs, otherwise constituted by people of the same blood and culture. Scarily, our media culture seems to have solidified along this pattern of inter-bloc acrimony, often colouring the language of political and media discourse in favour of, or against, one bloc or the other, depending on who is where at any one point in time. This is a politico-socioeconomic development model IGN must avoid at all cost, a snake we must kill…
For us, therefore, the lesson from the Iyionu-Aguibeje abduction saga isn’t so much for the Aji/Iyionu-Aguibeje wedding families as it is for all media practitioners, especially social media citizen-journalists, in and or from Igbo-Eze North, who are, in themselves, society’s agenda-setters. That lesson is that a place wracked by underdevelopment and ignorance, such as ours, can ill-afford a media culture that preys on the vulnerabilities of the masses through creation of narratives that alienate them, both physically and psychologically, from the policies, programmes, decisions and actions of their government. A media culture more aligned to our development goals is one which prioritizes the need to make the people stay better informed and educated so they can make wiser decisions.
For that reason, any media culture that tends to drive any person or group to act quite unprofessionally, ignoring the ever lurking danger in a security-challenged environment like ours, because such a person is either ill-informed or corralled into such an unwholesome act by false media narratives, is simply not good enough for us. To that extent, those who mounted that vociferous anti-Nri Order tax social media campaign, which could possibly have influenced the Aji/Iyionu-Aguibeje wedding families’ decision to not invite the Aguibeje vigilantes to their marriage ceremony, even when they sorely needed their services, simply played bad politics. That is to say that those whose false claims on social media, directly or indirectly, contributed to making the wedding families shun the services of their local vigilantes, who should have secured the wedding party and venue, must, in a certain sense, bear responsibility for the Friday, May 9, 2025 abduction of 21 people (already released) at Iyionu-Aguibeje.
Time for IGN media practitioners to key into the principles of development journalism as the driving force behind their mass communications efforts, for the good of our development-needing people.
- Felix Oguejiofor Abugu and Willy Chukwuafugo Eya are Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of AbeyaNews online.
