Following the unrelenting protests of pro-Biafran activists in parts of South-east and the South-south, the Imo State Governor and Chairman of the Progressives Governors’ Forum, Chief Rochas Okorocha, is currently arranging a crucial meeting with his colleagues in the South-East as well as other stakeholders in the zone to arrest the development.
The Governor, in a statement issued yesterday by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Sam Onwuemeodo, said the leadership of Ohaneze Ndi Igbo was also invited to the meeting billed for this weekend to talk and agree on how to check the activities of pro-Biafra groups in the area.
“The meeting is expected to take place this weekend in Owerri, the Imo State capital. Already the Governor has begun to make all the necessary contacts to ensure that all those expected to be at the meeting, would be in attendance,” Onwuemeodo said.
It will be recalled that Okorocha had earlier, while taking exception to the pro-Biafra violent protests in some of the South-East states and few other neighbouring states, disassociated the governors and leaders in the South-East states from the MASSOB protest, describing the whole exercise as “embarrassing, disturbing, counter-productive and to a large extent, distracting.”
Okorocha maintained his position that the pro-Biafra protests could not be in the interest of the South-east people as they were only sending wrong signals to the rest of Nigerians about the Igbos.
“It has become increasingly necessary for the governors in the zone, Ohaneze leaders and other stakeholders in the area to meet, to call a spade, a spade,” Okorocha said.
The APC bigwig further assured that, “at the end of the Owerri meeting, the governors and other leaders will take a common position and will also invite the leaders of the pro-Biafra groups for a meeting, to let them know the socio-economic and political implications of their activities, including their demand for sovereignty in a united Nigeria”.
He insisted that the governors and leaders in the zone could no longer sit and watch the whole situation degenerate, even as he also noted that the Igbos as a people cannot afford to have its own kind of Boko Haram.
The Governor wondered why the pro-Biafra apologists kept quiet all these years only to resume their protests and activities this time and few months after the new administration in the country came on board.
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