The recent launch of a not-for-profit organisation, the Peace in South East Project (PISE-P) by the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, with the objective of restoring law and order in the Southeast zone of the country is being taken with a pinch of salt in some quarters. In this report, ONYEDIKA AGBEDO dissects the issues that may bug the initiative, pointing out how it can succeed to the benefit of the people of the zone and the country as a whole.

The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, has since assumption of office cried out against the negative impact of the insecurity in the Southeast geo-political zone of the country on the economy of the area. He has been very particular about the sit-at-home order by the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), which cripples businesses every Monday in the region and has led to the killing of a lot of people, who dared to resist the order, and destruction of properties worth billions of naira.

As at the middle of October last, Kalu put losses incurred in the transportation sector of the zone alone, every day the residents observe the sit-at-home day order, at between N10 billion and N13 billion.

Thus, his launch of a not-for-profit organisation, the Peace in South East Project (PISE-P), on December 29, 2023, as an intervention strategy with a focus on the use of non-kinetic means to address the security challenges in the Southeast zone did not come as a surprise to many observers. PISE-P’s eight pillars include education, agriculture, commerce/industry, infrastructural development, culture and tourism, sports/entertainment, governance/leadership and reconciliation/rehabilitation/reintegration. Few days after the launch at a colourful ceremony in Bende, Abia State, Kalu followed up with the launch of the “Food for Peace” project where he distributed over 6,000 bags of rice and beans to his constituents and people from other parts of Southeast. The organisation has also gone further to unveil a six-month action plan geared towards implementing its eight pillars of thematic focus to bring about peace in the region.

A statement issued last Sunday by the Chief Press Secretary to the Deputy Speaker, Levinus Nwabughiogu, explained: “We already have what we call our six-month strategic plan, our operational plan that will be addressing socio-economic challenges, enhancing security and peace building, stakeholder engagement, strategic implementation, resource management, monitoring and evaluation, communication and awareness – all these things have been done by experts and we are looking at achieving and promoting Sustainable Development Goals.

“We’ll look at conflict integration and peace building. We are going to be looking at enhancing access to education and healthcare. We are going to look at infrastructural development, empowerment and capacity building, community engagement and participation as well as sustainable peace and stability. We will look at business development; the number of new businesses established or supported; the number of businesses we can bring back to the Southeast through our advocacy.”

However, Kalu’s step since the birth of the organisation has began to create doubts in the minds of some critical observers and stakeholders. For instance, the IPOB in a recent statement described the PISE-P initiative as a political gimmick. The separatist group cautioned him to stop using the ordeal of its leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, and the insecurity in the South-East to pursue his political interest.

The statement read in part: “The attention of the IPOB ably led by our supreme leader Mazi Nnamdi Kanu has been drawn to the continuous and frequent use of IPOB and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s ordeal by the Deputy Speaker, House of Representatives, Hon. Benjamin Kalu, to pursue his political interest.

“He should stop deceiving the public. We advise Hon. Benjamin Kalu to refrain from using IPOB and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s political persecution for his selfish political interest. We have gone past the stage of political games and gimmicks.

“Hon. Benjamin Kalu has constantly been on the print and social media claiming to be working hard for the release of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. “IPOB, ESN and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu have become a daily song for the APC stooges and political jobbers who do not have any genuine interest in IPOB struggle nor on the unconditional release of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu from Federal Government’s persecution and illegal detention. Hon. Kalu has found something of relevance to keep making headlines on the pages of Nigerian newspapers.

“We wish to let him know that we are aware of his antics and gimmicks towards Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB.

“It is pathetic that some self-serving Igbo politicians are bent on destroying IPOB and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, while other politicians from other zones are empowering their political agitation groups.  If not for IPOB, ESN and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, many South-Eastern villages would have been occupied by terrorists.” IPOB said the Deputy Speaker and his allies should be ignored, adding that discerning minds already know their mission.

“Ndigbo and the public should ignore Benjamin Kalu and co. They cannot deceive the intelligent men and women in IPOB and Biafrans in general.  We know their plans, and they will face the consequences of their actions when the right time comes,” the group added.

Is the deputy speaker pursuing a political agenda indeed? Former presidential aspirant and chieftain of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Chekwas Okorie, thinks otherwise. He believes that Kalu should be commended rather than being vilified for taking the bold initiative towards restoring peace in the Southeast. While advising the deputy speaker not to abandon the peace project because of the dissenting voices from within the region, he urged him to rather widen the scope of those to execute the project.

His words: “I commend that initiative very well. Anything that any person who is in a position of authority can use that position to contribute to peace making anywhere in Nigeria, especially the South East where there is so much need for it, must be commended for the good intentions. Whether it will have a wide support is dependent on those who initiated it, like the deputy speaker himself, and the people he has called together to help him promote and manage it.

“You see, being a member of the APC and deputy speaker at that, the only problem he may have is being able to differentiate partisan political motives from the good intention of bringing peace to the Southeast that is made up of both politicians and non-politicians. That is why my advice to him is having initiated something that is laudable by my own assessment, he should widen the scope of people to promote and canvass that initiative.

“Relating with the governors of the Southeast with regard to that is a good approach. But then we have a fundamental problem in the Southeast among our governors and not just this set of governors; it has always been there. The supremacy struggle on who is superior to the other has always dogged these governors from having a workable sustainable synergy to build anything in the Southeast whether in the area of security, economy, etc. The South West has an economic blueprint and they are following it. Ours does not go beyond the paper it is written on. So, he may wish to look beyond the governors and then try and disabuse the suspicion of politicians of taking advantage of that initiative to promote a particular party in the Southeast and by extension promote his own future ambition. I can see that even within his own party, the APC, there are people who are already suspicious of his motives, which is very unfortunate. But since he has started, he should not surrender. He has started a good thing. All he needs to do is to have his ears on the ground, try and find out where there are fears, allay those fears and move ahead.”

Okorie, who spoke with The Guardian in an interview, said the IPOB has no justification to rain verbal attacks on Kalu, saying he has not seen anything he did to deserve that.

He said: “I have read one of his statements where he claimed some of them had been working hard behind the scene to see Nnamdi Kanu released. But sometimes, your good intentions can be misinterpreted. So, I was shocked to read a statement by the leaders of IPOB accusing him of using the matter of Nnamdi Kanu for political advantage. That was why I put my earlier response the way I put it. The comment he made that he is in support of having Nnamdi Kanu released and that they are working behind the scene to achieve that has been misunderstood by the IPOB and it is disturbing. I don’t have the information they have; I don’t know how they think that he is doing that. They have even gone further to accuse him of working against the release of Kanu and I have not seen anything that he has said or done that points in that direction.

“Let me use this opportunity to say that all of us need to rally round this young man. And in saying so, I mean that party affiliations should be put aside. I am in APGA. In 2017, a bill for the establishment of a South East Development Commission was shot down in both the Senate and House of Reps. That was because all the other lawmakers, except the Igbo people, said that the Southeast should benefit from a commission that the Federal Government will have to contribute money to develop the area like they are doing in other commissions. Now, it is this Benjamin Kalu that raked up this bill, re-presented it, did the right lobbying which perhaps the initial sponsor didn’t have the outreach to do during his time and the bill was passed. The bill is now awaiting Senate’s concurrence and once the Senate concurs, which I am positive will happen, I don’t see the President hesitating to assent to it.

“What does that mean? It means that for the first time since 53 years the war ended, we now have a body where the Federal Government will commit money to address devastations in the Southeast arising from the civil war. And this is the first time the so-called ‘Three R’ (Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Reconciliation) will now be given expression. Our people are not even talking about this; they don’t seem to understand the importance of that commission. So, if somebody can do all of this along with his Southeast colleagues, I don’t think such a man should be discouraged. He is too young; he may not have a thick skin like some of us to withstand being misunderstood in spite of his good intentions. So, I want our people to identify somebody who is doing something for the general good and give the person encouragement.”

Okorie explained further: “I have been a victim of those kinds of things. That Igbo people don’t have a political party of note that they can use to engage the rest of Nigeria was not because somebody did not have the initiative to bring one about. Was it Hausa or Yoruba that destroyed APGA? Was it not the same Igbo people? So, we must learn to defend and promote what is good for us.”

On how the Federal Government can support the PISE-P initiative and resolve the restiveness in the Southeast, which has in actual sense pushed the Southeast backward in all facets of life, Okorie said the government should speed up the issue of the South East Development Commission and bring it into existence.

“We need it now because it will also help to increase development in the region and also reduce unemployment. That one is already at their doorstep. “Then the other thing that has been a major problem is the militarisation of the Southeast. The people feel that their place is under siege. What we are experiencing in the Southeast is more like an occupation army and it is so frustrating. Instead of seeing them as providing security, they see them as extortionists. And nobody likes to be unduly taxed.

“So, what I will ask the Federal Government to do, which I had suggested before, is to in the interim direct the Inspector General of Police (IGP) or the Police Service Commission, whichever has that responsibility, to redeploy all police operatives from the lowest rank to the DPO level to their states and local councils of origin. As soon as you do this, you will see that the local communities will begin to have more confidence in the police whose language they can understand and will be providing intelligence to ferret out these criminals that are lurking in our communities. We are not getting the full benefit of the people we are training in the Police Colleges because of this method of posting people to wrong places. So, that can be corrected immediately.

“Finally, the President should look into the issue of restructuring because that is at the core of everything I have said,” he noted. The Programme Manager, West African Network for Peace Building (WANEP), Nigeria, Mr. Kevin Abonyi, also commended the peace initiative by the deputy speaker but urged him to reshape the process.

He said: “It is a laudable move but the process is what I think they need to reshape. Looking at the non-kinetic approach that he preached during the unveiling of the peace initiative, he looked at education, agriculture, sports and other entertainment programmes. I looked at it and was asking myself if it won’t be the same political way of doing things in this country. They have already started sharing all those things that they normally share during campaigns and you and I know that when it goes that way, the first thing to ask is how sustainable it is. So, what is the sustainability plan for such activity or is it just a one-off programme? If it is a one-off programme, I don’t think it will yield the much desired fruit. But if there is a need assessment in the process for them to determine what exactly people need, then it can yield the desired result. Do they just want to distribute motorcycles or rice so that there will be peace or are they addressing all the Maslows Hierarchy of Needs in the process. It is when you address all those needs that people can listen to you. So, I’m thinking that they should employ other strategies to get what they really want.

“Such strategies will involve the use of dialogue. The use of dialogue helps in building peace. It also helps to build the confidence of the people in the process. So, they should provide platforms for people to share their concerns about certain issues and then together they will come up with solutions. Most often, why such programmes don’t last is that after take off, they don’t trickle down to people that need to be reached. But if it is a community dialogue, all stakeholders will come together to share their views, fears and proffer solutions that will come from the people not what the government thinks is right.

“Now, if you ask most of the people that are agitating, I don’t think their problem is food. They want to be heard; they want to be carried along. So, there is a need to discuss with those people who are agitating and find out why they are agitating in the first place.”

Abonyi said the discussion should take a bottom-top approach. According to him, it should start from the community level, then move to the local council, state and federal levels.

“All those people doing whatever they are doing to disturb the peace of the region live in our communities. The people know them. So, if you come from the federal level there won’t be trust. If you invite people for a meeting now between them and a federal delegation, not all of them will come. But if you are starting the process from the grassroots, because that is where all the killings and kidnapping are taking place, there will be trust. When we understand ourselves first as a people and now know what we want and how we want it, we can talk of engaging the Federal Government. And if you are engaging the Federal Government, there will be a platform and a defined agenda you are taking to the government. As it is today, if you ask the cause of the agitation in the Southeast, people will come up with different opinions. And you notice that they have introduced criminality into the agitation and because of that, the government will not even be willing to listen to any agitator. But if there is a communal effort where the people understand themselves and begin to restore all the peace mechanisms within our communities, there will be that element of trust,” he added.

Abonyi noted that if the promoters of PISE-P want to have a structure that would drive the process, it would encompass everybody in the community.

“This will include traditional rulers, youth leaders, women leaders and both formal and informal security actors. If you have such structure, each segment of the community is represented. So, when any decision is reached, such a decision will trickle down to every member of the community. If you involve the traditional rulers alone, some of them don’t even have control over the people behind the criminalities in the region,” he added.

Despite the misgivings being expressed in some quarters about the initiative, Kalu has declared that there is no going back on his peace agenda.
PISE-P Media Team, in a statement last Wednesday, titled ‘Disgruntled Politicians Out to Frustrate PISE-P, Malign Kalu’, disclosed that it had “credible intelligence detailing the clandestine moves of some disgruntled politicians who are inclined to frustrate the gains of the recently unveiled PISE-P.”

The organisation noted: “Those threatened by Kalu’s audacity to fight for what is right are intimidated and trying to spring up the old habits they are known for.

“But we assure them that this effort to discredit the work towards the peace of the Southeast, engineered by some elements in the leadership of the zone who felt left out in the peace solution agenda must fail.

“Peace in Southeast has come to stay. We say no to the spilling of the blood of our brothers on the streets. We say yes to non-kinetic approach to resolving of issues. We say no more guns in the Southeast; those against us are saying yes to guns and yes to more blood, but for how long? The time to stop is now so that we can revive our economy.

“Merchants of threats and fear market violence and lies but we offer peace that will meet all our expectations. We can’t fight but we can make use of the table to achieve what guns have failed to achieve. Our approach is cheaper. It worked in other parts of the country and is still working. We will make it work and the government is listening more than ever before.”

This declaration underscores the deputy speaker’s determination to forge ahead with the project amid current challenges. Whether he will overcome the bumps on the road to restoring sanity and order in the Southeast and shout Eureka in the end remains to be seen.