In this interview with National Assembly correspondents, the lawmaker representing Anambra Central Senatorial District in the 10th National Assembly, Senator Victor Umeh, bares his mind on the insecurity in the South East, the continued detention of IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu. He also raises concerns about the sustained marginalization of the South East in the railway modernisation programme. Excerpts:
The South East is regarded as the worst hit by the growing insecurity in the country. What is your take on this?
Well, in Nigeria today, insecurity is not just a South East problem, it’s a national problem. Insecurity has posed so many challenges to Nigeria as a nation across the geo-political zones. If you look at the past few years, you see that Nigeria has faced very tormentors and enormous security challenges, in the North East, in the North West, in the North Central, in the South East, it is the South West and the South South that may appear relatively less insecure, but there are incidents of insecurity across the whole country in the South West.
I remember when one church in Owo (Ondo State) was attacked and worshipers were all massacred there. It’s an insecurity problem. The same thing with other areas like in the Niger Delta where some soldiers were killed somewhere in Delta State.
The South East, you asked about, has faced resurgent security problems when Nnamdi Kanu was arrested and taken into custody by the Department of State Security Services.
All manners of gangs reared up in the South East and started waging war on the people using Nnamdi Kanu’s detention as an alibi for their criminal activities.
So kidnappings and killings came up, and there was the case of the Eastern Security Network which said they are freedom fighters.
In the North East, Boko Haram has stepped up its activities. In the North West, a group identified as Lakurawa terrorists came up and started doing what the ISWAP (Islamic State’s West Africa Province) and the Boko Haram group were doing in the North East. They started killing in the same manner, so that states like Zamfara, Kebbi, Niger, have been on that serious attack, including Katsina. All these things will give you a national outlook that the problem is not a South East problem.
It’s a nationwide problem. So, we in the National Assembly receive these reports from representatives of the people. The President and his security team have been working so hard, I must give them credit, trying to lower the tensions and then try to secure relative peace.
However, the spread of insecurity has worsened the economic activities in the country.
Agricultural activities have come to a halt in most Northern parts of Nigeria, and the country faced very acute food security problems. So, through our appropriations, like in 2024, we appropriated so much money, even in 2023, through our supplementary appropriations, we increased the budgets of the Armed Forces to help us combat this wave of insecurity across Nigeria. We did the same in 2024.
But this year alone, the budget allocation for the Armed Forces rose to N4.9 trillion. It goes to show you the amount of seriousness we attach to the security of lives and property in Nigeria.
Apart from that, we’ve just gone through the round of budget defense for the ministries and the agencies under them and we have come to the same conclusion.
But even at N4.9 trillion, our security people need to be funded more than N4.9 trillion because security is everything. Once you don’t have security, nothing will take place, including investments, attraction of foreign investments and even for us locally to be able to operate and be productive as to contribute to the gross domestic product of Nigeria, will be a mirage. People will not go to farm, people will be so unsafe, movements are restricted.
People don’t move around in Nigeria now for fear of their lives. But through the great efforts of our Nigerian Military Forces, they are coming up again and things are becoming under control.
The battle against insurgents, terrorists and bandits is being fought very fiercely now unlike last year and 2023, when there was a complete breakdown. We’re beginning to see a more secure Nigeria now. And we believe that what we should do is to support the military and the police to be at their best to be able to contain these criminalities going on in Nigeria.
Now coming to the South East, we have a peculiar situation where Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra) has remained in detention. And people who kill people in the South East always say that Nnamdi Kanu must be released.
It got to a point where the Senators from the South East gathered themselves under our Chairman, South East Senators’ Caucus, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe. We all went to see the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Chief Lateef Fagbemi. We met him in the office, and then sought an audience with him with a prepared text and asked him to help us get Nnamdi Kanu released from detention.
“If they had released him then, it could have isolated the criminals in the South East. Nobody would be saying that they’re killing because they are freedom fighters or whatever, because of the continued detention of Nnamdi Kanu”
Since the courts have pronounced that he should be released- from the High Court, and Court of Appeal, until they got to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court now ordered retrial and things like that.
If they had released him then, it could have isolated the criminals in the South East. Nobody would be saying that they’re killing because they are freedom fighters or whatever, because of the continued detention of Nnamdi Kanu. We met with him, and pleaded with him to help the South East improve on its security by ensuring an early release or immediate release of Nnamdi Kanu from detention. So we can now deal with criminals who are on the prowl in the South East. We had that meeting with him, and he promised to convey our request to the President, because the President is the Commander-in-Chief.
Later on, Abaribe and I sought and obtained an appointment to meet with the National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu. We were with him in his office for nearly two and a half hours, discussing this matter, asking him to get the government to release Nnamdi Kanu. When Nnamdi Kanu is released from detention, the South East security problem will be isolated, so that we will now know who the criminals are, and go after them.
Now that the whole place is in confusion, that there’s a war of freedom being fought by people who you cannot even identify. Let us deal with this one, and get him released, so that we’ll focus on the other people, killing and annihilating our people. We pleaded with him after that discussion for nearly two and a half hours and he agreed that he would continue looking at the problem to see how it can be resolved. That’s the situation.
Otherwise, I believe that an early release of Nnamdi Kanu would have addressed the insecurity in the South East to a great extent. It may not eliminate it finally, but it will help a great deal. So that everybody will become a neighborhood security watch agent.
The people of the South East for decades have cried out over being marginalised and not included in the development agenda of the country by successive governments. They have raised the issue of being excluded from the ongoing construction of standard rail lines and gas pipelines across the country. Are you comfortable with this development?
Well, the marginalisation is not limited to rail lines and the gas pipeline. There is discrimination against the youths of this zone in getting appointments and employment into government agencies. It’s a major source of concern.
The youths are the drivers of this agitation now, not the elderly people. Once they go to look for opportunities in government, employment in government agencies and they don’t get recruited, they join the struggle for emancipation of the zone.
So it helps to bridge the insecurity. But if you open the doors to the use of the zone, you want to employ people in whatever agency of government that is recruiting and you absorb them, you will see that they’re not joining any of these non-state actors.
The youths of today have become more sophisticated than the youths of yesterday. They are very internet and ICT savvy, they’re able to have access to information, and they know what is happening. If you now open the doors to the use of the South East zone in recruitments into the Armed Forces, they recruit them into Armed Forces sometimes people per state, but behind that more happen. But they receive the very least number of people being recruited in all agencies of government.
If improvements are witnessed in that regard, in employment of the youths they will become less restive and they will not take to crime and all kinds of insurrection activities. Then you come to the infrastructure area. It still beats my imagination, how the country will develop a railway modernisation programme and since they started it many years ago, the Eastern Rail Line, which goes through the South East has been abandoned and neglected.
The Eastern Rail Line runs from Port Harcourt to Aba, through Enugu to Makurdi through Nasarawa, through Kaduna to Jos to Bauchi to Maiduguri.
That is the Eastern Rail Line, and is the oldest and longest rail line in Nigeria built by the colonial administration. But when they started the programme to modernise the Nigeria Rail Line, they borrowed $6.8 billion from China. The rail lines chosen to be built excluded the Eastern Rail Line. We now have Lagos to Ibadan completed, we have Abuja to Kaduna completed, and we have Kaduna to Kano, ongoing and from Kano to Maradi in Niger Republic ongoing.
All these are standard gauge rail and that is the essence of modernisation because what we had in the colonial days were narrow gauge tracks. So the modernisation they started in this revolution is through the standard gauge rail line.
“There is discrimination against the youths of this zone in getting appointments and employment into government agencies. It’s a major source of concern”
Lagos to Ibadan is standard gauge rail line, Abuja to Kaduna is standard gauge rail line, Abuja to Kaduna is standard gauge rail line, Ajaokuta to Itakpe standard gauge rail line, Itakpe to Warri standard gauge rail line. These are being operated with modern coaches the way you have them in Europe, America and Canada.
So the Eastern Rail Line has remained the way it is. Even at that, from Aba to Maiduguri, is completely deserted. From Aba to Umuahia, Umuahia to Enugu, Enugu to Makurdi, Makurdi to Kafachan, Kafachan to Jos, Jos to Maiduguri no train has run through these tracks in upwards of 30 years. The tracks are being removed by criminals because no train has run through those tracks in so many years. Trees grow on the tracks; thieves remove the iron and everything on that track till date. You can see the level of neglect on that zone while the other zones have been serviced with modern tracks.
That was the reason for me bringing a motion in 2018 when I first went to the Senate, for the inclusion of the Eastern Rail Line in the railway modernisation programme of the Federal Government of Nigeria.
The motion sailed through with unanimous support. Even people from the North Central like Makurdi also brought prayers to extend the railway line to the hinterlands. The government has continued to proceed as if those prayers were not approved by the Senate in 2018. When I came back to the Senate in 2023, I started with the same push. I sponsored a motion again, precisely on November 23, 2023, that the Eastern Rail Line should be built with standard gauge tracks.
What is your take on the Anambra governorship election slated for November this year and what is your assessment of the incumbent Governor, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo?
You know, no government can do all things essentially and because I have been part of the creation of leadership in that state in the past 23 years, I’m in a position to know if the state is making progress, and I know that we have had governors within this period, everybody has done his own bid and moved and we have somebody on the side of our process, who must have done it.
We have somebody in the saddle now, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, I was part of the process of getting him into office and becoming governor. In terms of assessment, it’s always good to leave the citizens to assess the performance of their leaders. It will not come from mouths like mine, who is a major stakeholder in the way you have described it, because anything I say will be seen to be politicised.
I don’t play politics with the development of my state. We’ve had challenges in security in the state and we were all anxious and worried but in the past week or two there appears to be renewed effort on the part of the governor and his team to tackle insecurity in the state. It got flat and terrible that everybody ran away from the state.
But from what I’m seeing now, there is a renewed effort to fight criminality, bad people all over the place. And the story I told you about the clamour for release of Nnamdi Kanu that helped to degenerate into serious insecurity in the South East, affected everywhere.
But from what we are seeing, if the governor maintains it this way and from what I’m seeing on a daily basis now in the past one week, I’m sure the state will recover its sanity in the area of security.
