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By Chinelo Obogo
Former aide to ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, Doyin Okupe, has urged the Federal Government to invite the Independent Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) to a peace meeting over the insecurity in the South East.
Okupe in a statement urged government to come to the realisation that IPOB had become an established “army of resistance” for the self-determination group in the South East and also accept that the Biafra ideology had come to stay.
He said the Anambra State elections was no doubt a security nightmare and a major cause for concern for many Nigerians. He said though it was self-evident that the major stakeholders of the IPOB movement were predominantly youths, adult also shared the concerns of these fighting youths even though may prefer a different approach to achieving the same goal.
Okupe urged the Federal Government to invite the leadership of IPOB to a peace meeting to hear them out.
“On the Anambra election, the police has deployed 34,000 officers and we do not know the numbers for the military and civil defence institutions. To the average citizens in Anambra, this militarisation and over policing though inevitable, can nevertheless be comforting. From my own projections nothing less than 50 per cent of normally voting population, purely out of fear and apprehension, will stay in their houses and avoid voting.
“If this happens, the election becomes substantially flawed because a major ingredient of democratic suffrage, “free and fair” will be absent. While one must of necessity concede to the Federal Government that it should not normally tolerate or succumb to internal threats to peace and good order, perhaps it’s now time to seek the seemingly elusive peace in the South East.
“I hasten to call on the Federal Government at this point of our national history to invite the leadership of IPOB to a peace meeting to listen to the complaints of the youths from the southeast and see how a true solution can be negotiated. I say this as someone who was part of government when Boko Haram was in its wake or infancy. The presumed might of the Federal Government made it looked preposterous for the government to call a rag tag group to a negotiating table. Now after more than 10 years, thousands of deaths, human tragedies and millions of internal human displacements, and with billions of dollars down the drain, I am convinced that it was indeed an error not to have negotiated for peace abinitio.”
