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From Stanley Uzoaru, Owerri
For months, the farms in Owerri West, Owerri North, and Mbaitoli council areas, especially Ndegwu, Amakohia-Ubi, Irete, Orogwe, Avu, Nekede, and Ogbaku communities have been deserted.
Rows of cassava and yam have been untended to. Markets thinned out as prices doubled.
Farmers stopped going to their fields not because the soil was tired, but because fears grew louder. Abductions on the farms had replaced herdsmen’s attacks as the new threat. Women get raped while the men get wounded, killed, or abducted. The celebration that followed the end of open grazing was short-lived. A different kind of invasion had begun.
That silence may have finally been broken with a new tool in the fight against abduction. The Imo State Police Command, under the leadership of the state Commissioner of Police, Garba Bosso, has rolled out surveillance drones as part of a fresh push to reclaim rural communities from criminal gangs. Bosso explained that the aerial deployment is aimed at boosting intelligence gathering and tracking suspects across the state.
The drone itself came from an unlikely donor, a public-spirited resident of Ihiagwa Community in Owerri West Local Government Area.
“The surveillance drone will strengthen our intelligence gathering and support ongoing operations across Imo State,” the CP stated. “There will be no hiding place for criminals in Imo State.”
Bosso explained that the device will work hand-in-hand with vigilantes under the Imo State Security Organisation (ISSO). While ground teams comb the bush, the drone will monitor situations from above, mapping hideouts, tracking movement, and giving officers a view criminals cannot escape.
It’s a partnership the command is calling a model for community policing. One resident’s donation, they argue, could help secure thousands of farms.
Before the drones, survival meant waiting. Farmers would only go to their fields on set dates, and only if youths and vigilantes from the community could escort them. Even then, no one felt safe.
The impact spilled into Owerri markets. With fewer people farming, food supply dropped and prices of basic items doubled.
The tide began to turn when the police, working with sister agencies, said enough was enough. They launched intensive forest combings and the operations have already yielded results with suspects arrested, exhibits recovered, and victims rescued unhurt.
Senior officers like Mike Abattam and Olaniyi have been on the front lines, but it is CP Bosso who has often led the assaults himself. That visibility has mattered to rural communities who, hitherto, felt abandoned.
Now, with aerial surveillance added to boots on the ground, farmers say they feel something they hadn’t felt in a long time: motivation to return to their farms.
“Now, we can go to our farms knowing we’re being adequately guarded by the police and their teams”, a farmer said.
However, they have called for a continuous efforts, urging the police not to relent in their new style of safeguarding them.
“We wish this could be sustained, so that we would not abandon our farms again; they have made us abandon our farms while they occupied the farms. Let this bush combing be sustained. And we plead with our state governor and other wealthy sons and daughters to help acquire more drones to send the criminals out of our farms”, Mrs Ibeawuchi, a farmer pleaded.
The drone is not a cure-all. But in a state where forests have served as cover for abductors, having eyes above changes the calculation. Criminals who once operated with impunity now know they are being watched.
For the farmers of Owerri West and Owerri North and the environs, that shift is everything. It’s the difference between watching crops rot and planting the next season, between empty market stalls and full ones, between fear and a chance to work again.
CP Bosso’s message was blunt. The police, vigilantes and, now, technology are aligned. The farms are waiting. And, this time, the farmers believe they won’t be going back to the farms alone.
