The trouble with Anambra!

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By Okoro Benedict Chinedum

Gov. Peter Obi of Anambra State

Anambra is presumed to be the unofficial capital of Igbo land; a melting point of all the progress and problems ravaging Igbo. Despite our avowed claims to ‘infinite’ wisdom as African Jews, Anambra has been reduced into a mockery, a mill where unholy grains are dished to us all. How Igbo capital has become a huge joke lies with our abysmal failure to discern self-preservation. 

The greatest orchestra that emerged in the second republic was the disappearance of a sitting governor in the land of the wise. The centre maintained a shrew silence, until the gods delivered their judgment. 

Nothing happened to those who staged this circus show. Achebe's lamentation on the Tom and Jerry show that played out in Anambra was apt. His rejection of national honour from that regime was to register his grouse to the appropriate quarter. He expressed worries that Anambra is a convergence of absurdities. 

Again, providence has placed Anambra governorship election as a prelude to 2015. The calculations, machinations and even hallucination in Anambra have reached a frightening height with two PDP camps laying claim to originality. The entire gambit is a prelude to 2015. 

Painfully, our 'elders' have begun snoring, when they are actually awake. Waking them would be a task; you can only wake a man who is sleeping, not one who is pretending to sleep. It is evident that we have lost in the previous republics given our self-inflicted individualism.

Our competitors have long since realized that fixing their region assisted them with better negotiation at the center. Still we are yet to discover that self-help collapsed with the Stone Age. 

A new jingle has emerged, 'Anambra is no go area'. Says who? If we do not check the eruptions in Anambra, we needn’t be told that it will determine our effusions about a common front and agenda. 

There is nothing sacred about what portends danger for the next generation. For Hugo Grotus, "A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason'.