Our Reporter, New York
US–based Nigerian physician and author, Dr. Osmund Ugochukwu Agbo, has said that the biggest problem the Igbo people have in Nigeria is their lack of political sophistication. The CEO of the Enugu Technology and Innovation Center made the remarks during an exclusive interview with Rudolf Okonkwo on 90MinutesAfrica on Sunday.
“One of biggest challenges we have in Igboland is for want of a better way to describe it, our lack of political sophistication.”
“We don’t seem to care to know about what is going on in our place,” the author said.
He accused the people of always wanting to externalise the blame for the wrong things happening in the region while ignoring the “fact that we don’t do our own part.”
“Our own part,” he said “is to put leaders on the spot so that they will realise they are answerable to the people who are now asking questions.”
He continued, “What it takes for the leaders to succeed in their impunity is the fact that the people just don’t show interest in governance. We come across like we simply don’t care.”
He cited the recently published report card on the performances of the South-East governors by Ikengaonline and the surprising fact that nobody talks about it despite the abysmal performance of the governors in all the sectors tested. “Our organization used a lot of resources and even collaborated with Dataphyte, a data management company, in order to properly evaluate the performance of the governors while in office. We were hoping that the findings would generate enough interest among our people to ask questions, but that was not the case. An opinion article I wrote about love and marriage, which was just that—an opinion, generated way more interest and was widely shared. That tells you how we have gotten our priorities twisted. I believe it was Edmond Burke who once said that what it takes for the evil men to come into the soceity and poison it, is for good men to sit back and watch. Our people need to wake up from their slumber and get involved”, he stated.
“The moment the political leaders start to notice that our people are listening and asking questions about the activities of the political actors , you’ll see that things will start to move in the positive direction in our place,” the co-publisher of the South-East-focused media outfit, Ikengaonline.com said.
The Attending Physician at the Department of Pulmonary/Critical Care, Memorial Hermann Hospital, Houston, Texas, also berated the governors across the five South-East states for failing to recognise local government autonomy and their treatment of the local councils like extensions of their government departments and ministries.
“They (South-East governors) basically put in their cronies. So most of the monies that are supposed to go to the local government, in one way or another, find their way back to the coffers of the governors,” he alleged.
Explaining the idea behind the founding of the media outfit Ikengaonline.com, Dr. Agbo said it is to act as a truly independent media organisation that tells the story of the South-East and ensures public accountability in governance across the region.
“We believe that most of the challenges we have in Igboland are attributable to bad governance,” the co-author of “Dis Life No Balance,” asserted.
“Though it’s not peculiar to the South-East but we always have a way of making everything worse. The governors in the region are acting like emperors. So we want to beam a searchlight on those in positions of public trust so that the public will be sensitised enough to ask questions and hopefully move up at least a tad, the needle of accountability .”
