Governor of Ebonyi State, who is also the Chairman of the South-East Governors Forum David Umahi, has described the agitations for Biafra as madness, saying that most elites in the region do not want it.
According to him, all they want is to be treated equally like other regions in the country.
“Every elite in the south-east is not desirous of Biafra. We don’t want Biafra. We only want to be treated equally like other regions in Nigeria,” Governor Umahi said Wednesday, on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
“So, this idea of Biafra, Biafra is madness”.
He decried the degeneration of what started as a cry against marginalisation into violence in the region, saying “you can never get a nation out of a nation by the kind of hate speeches being dished out and then from hate speeches to threats of killings and actual killings and formation of militant groups”.
“If you’re fighting to protect us so why are you killing us? We are the ones killing ourselves. Occasionally, people are imported from outside to do these killings but majorly, like in my state, all the people that we have caught, all came from the south-east”.
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Governor Umahi said governors of the region have continued to appeal to the agitators to bring their grievances forward, promising to provide solutions.
“Whatever is your problem, is it unemployment, you have nothing doing? We are going to leave every other thing to make sure you are empowered. The only thing is that when you are in the bush, we don’t have access to you. You have to come out of the bush and work with us to empower you.
“But when you say no, that you will go in the name of agitations to cause criminality, we will isolate you as a criminal and this is where we are and we are very serious about it”.
Speaking of the sit-at-home order, which he says is mostly issued by people in diaspora, and has crippled economic activity in the state, the governor lamented that the south-east people are complying only out of fear and not because they want to be obedient.
“If we had a policeman to everybody, nobody is going to obey any sit at home,” he said.
He, therefore, promised that governors from the region will continue doing what they can to safeguard the people.
“We are going to do what we have been doing to safeguard our people because we have gotten the confidence of our people.
“These people do not mean well for us and we cannot have Biafra by the way they are going about it”.
