This online poll is organized by the Inter-party Coalition of Nigeria (ICON) to gauge the political desires of the people of Enugu state.

Please choose your favourite amongst the candidates on the poll. The results will be declared after 30 days in April 2022.

https://forms.gle/j8W96N4XspjDXArd9

Enugwu!

I came to that city for the first time early this century. I would later settle briefly to work as a secondary school leaver.
It was during the infamous Chimaroke Nnamanị times.

Cultism. Killings. Blood.
Those ruled the airwaves and streets and narratives about Enugwu.

If it wasn't Chimaroke vs Fr Mbaka, it was Chimaroke vs anyone who dared to challenge him.
The physical environment disappointed me as it contradicted the picture I had formed of it reading about it in primary school textbooks, newspapers, and catholic magazines.

In fact, in our English language classes those days in the 1990s, the major address sample for our letter writing course was an Enugwu address:
Sacred Heart Church,
Ụwanị,
Enugwu.
The “Ụwanị” stuck permanently ever.
But above all, it stirred my mentation of Enugwu as an ideal city away from the trading, chaotic environment I had all along been used to.

Sadly, under Nnamanị, I did not see that Enugwu of the Eastern Region I had read. At nights, most of the wide streets of the elite Independence Layout remained thick dark, making me wonder what else makes a city without nightlife and nightlights.

Then came 2007.
Sullivan Chime.
By 2009, I lived to witness the Enugwu I had imagined and idealized. The entire landscape was receiving a transformation. Heaps of dirt began to disappear. Iron thrash bins were fixed into the concrete floors of the pedestrian lanes along the roads, plus the large, neat thrash bins kept at various dumpsites. Nightlife re-emerged vigorously in the areas I knew. Nightlights were a visual pleasure to behold even in Achara Layout. You could just decide to drive through the entire stretch of Ọkpara Avenue from Old Park to All Saints savoring the city's luminosity, fresh air, absolute serenity and security.
What of the famous monstrous Akwata leading to the Coal Camp that was nightmare both for car users and pedestrians? Sullivan made a miracle from it. Water gushed from taps and more pipes were vigorously laid for water reticulation of many areas.
One never knew when Sullivan was to carry out each of these things. All one saw was the project being carried out and finished within record time.
No nonsensical media hypes. No announcements. No bills. No billboards.
He even transformed his Udi area into a massive labyrinth of smooth, lovely roads that make everyone want to travel through it to get to his/her destination faster.
You see, if I was a PhD student of media studies, political science or anthropology, I'd have abandoned my project for the one with the title: “Government Without Media Use: The Sullivan Chime Administration of Enugwu State (2007—2015)”. But I am not.
Such was the glorious and reasonably livable Enugwu of late 2000s until mid-2010s, earning it “one of the 100 resilient cities in the world” at the time.
....

Then came the one they call Gburugburu.
2015.
2016.
2017.
2018.
2019.
One couldn't know where this Gburugburu stood: He wasn't advancing the good he met and wasn't creating anything better. All one heard was land sales, land grabs, land this, land that.
2020.
2021.
2022.
One couldn't see the much he's done in Enugwu city to maintain the international status of “one of the 100 resilient cities in the world” as a global firm had pronounced it.
Even in his Nsụka municipal area, much couldn't be felt as much was and is still felt in Udi and Nkanụ areas where his predecessors came from. The work that could have been done was swallowed up, for years, by the most stupid sobriquet of “ashụa azụọma” or “Nrashị” — a lazy, backward mercantilist philosophy sold to an unwary, unconscious and hungry crowd to keep them hoodwinked for a long time.

You drive through Enugwu today and you see it has lost all the glories Chime was building (true glories are always in the process of building). Even the untainted GRA is oozing from heaps of rubbish. All the highbrow areas are a mess, to say nothing of the Abakpa, Obiagu, Coal Camp areas.
Yet every idiot — male, female — is hanging a billboard celebrating this Gburugburu. If it was not for his 59th birthday, it was for his “good leadership.” If it was not for his political support (read: machination), it was for his attendance at a social function or even at opening a fuel station or house warming. If it was not at the entrance of the city, it was at heart of the city. The billboards bearing this Gburugburu's picture for useless praises and reasons are so innumerable but his good works in Enugwu are not. More shameful is that the sponsors of these billboards also attach their own pictures for reasons best known to them, competing to outdo each other in the undignified race for onye Gburugburu ga-enye attention.

Perhaps, Sullivan Chime understood what I thought: What would foreign visitors (white people) from Europe or America who frequently came to Enugwu say when they come and see these many billboards in a dirty city? What would be their rating of the people in general?
“These black monkeys,” they'd say in the secret of their cars and thoughts, “they never evolve.”
Sullivan Chime had some sense of shame as a human being. But you can't find that today. The sheer boldness of endorsing and accepting visual glories for doing nothing is a prime sign of absolute human shamelessness (both for the subject of the billboards and the sponsors of the billboards), to say nothing of administrative indignity.
Only the loss of human shame makes it possible for a man to be called mad.

After driving through Enugwu this Sunday when the roads are usually less crowded, I simply shouted “Tụfịakwa!” under my breath.

May 2023 come very fast!

Chijioke Ngobili