Today, Monday, March 10, 2014, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan breaks yet another jinx in the South East and is by so doing, pulling himself and his political prospects deeper and more firmly into the hearts and souls of the illustrious and industrious people of the area. He is expected to flag off the construction of the Second Niger Bridge between Delta and Anambra states, and would by that fact, not only open up a major link from the western and eastern parts of the country but also bring a huge relief in the lives of a suffocating people.

This act would be a bigger replica of an act the president performed when on May 16, last year, he commissioned the Akanu Ibiam International Airport at Emene, Enugu. Both acts would have impacts that resonate well above and beyond what they look like on the surface. In May last year, President Jonathan broke an evil conspiracy, which successive leaders of Nigeria had dubiously erected against people of the South East – and to a large extent – the South South. By commissioning the international airport at Enugu, the president ended the unwritten embargo that had been placed on the people of the South East that none should travel outside the shores of Nigeria from their land. In other words, since the aircraft that fled General Ojukwu and other top Biafran military and civilian leaders out of the Biafran enclave from Uli Airport into exile in January of 1970, no other aircraft had flown in or out or had been permitted out from Igboland out of Nigeria. President Jonathan changed all that with one wave of his executive hand.

It had never mattered that Ndigbo are one of the most travelled people on earth, a policy enacted after the civil war by military leaders, who had declared that there were neither victors nor vanquished in the civil war, and kept tightly in leash through the conspiracy of all regimes – civil and military ever since – ensured that nothing would happen in Igbo land that would ‘expose’ them to the world. There would be no international airports, no power stations, no seaports, no major federal infrastructures like good roads and water links – in fact, it was resolved that for 50 years or more, Ndigbo would be kept in socio-economic and psychological bondage. The policy was not only implemented in all the sectors with gusto but was often executed with such wickedness and callousness that beggared human understanding, even to the extent that some leaders allowed the economy of the entire country to suffer obviously, if only to ensure that Ndigbo were kept in the prescribed doldrums. Some of the aspects of life were targeted more prominently, especially by the more vicious among the leaders. It took the arrival of an Air Vice Marshal Canice Umenwaliri, as the Communications Minister under the short-lived post-Abacha regime of Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar, for the entire South East and large section of the South East to be put on talking terms with the out-side world when Umenwaliri hooked it up to the world by connecting the people to a digital telephone network. Before then, the whole of the South East and Midwest had been placed on an archaic single analogue exchange (with the limited exception of Enugu, which Mr. Austin Otiji, as the NITEL boss, had squeezed out of the authorities) while other parts of the country, which hardly needed it were enjoying the copious benefits of digital telephone. It had meant that when a businessman at Aba, Calabar, Owerri or Onitsha needed to make an international call to his many partners outside Nigeria, he had to travel to Lagos or Kaduna to make the call. It took the dogged determination of Umenwaliri to compel the head of state to allow him digitalise communications in the South East and South-South, thereby breaking that significant jinx. Before Jonathan ‘struck’ in May last year with an international airport at Enugu, every Igbo person, who needed to travel abroad had to travel to Lagos, Abuja or Kano; it is no wonder today that the Ethiopian Airlines, which flies in and out of Enugu, is said to be fully booked for months on end. Even though the people look forward to having many more international airlines, operating from Enugu, what is already happening has become a soothing balm on peoples’ hearts. And with the obvious determination of the Jonathan administration to do what is right for all the people of Nigeria, it would not be long before the Enugu airport proves to be the most profitable and the most patronised in the country. If opening the airport, which caters mostly to the privileged members of the society was so much hailed, one wonders what would be happening in the minds of the people over the relief, which is on the way over the flag-off of the construction of the Second Niger Bridge, which will take place today and which the president has assured would result in the no-stop work of the bridge till it is completed. The current suffering, which Nigerians have been subjected to with the use of the current narrow bridge that was opened in December 1965, as one of the last acts of Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, on earth (he was killed during the first ever military coup on January 15, 1966), has been unimaginable. It is really heart-rending to recall many personal experiences, which I have had on that bridge but which pale into insignificance when compared to the harrowing experiences of Nigerians, who are compelled to use the bridge on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, as their socio-economic routines demand. There have been instances of people dying while stranded for hours, if not days, on the bridge. Women are said to have given birth there. Just as many frail hearts have been broken on that bridge, huge sums of fortunes have been lost or wasted. To make matters worse, there are hardly any detour alternatives for those who need to use that old bridge that sits across Asaba and Onitsha. Onitsha, the erstwhile commercial headquarter of Nigeria, has become manifestly diminished by the inconveniences, which the old dysfunctional bridge has continued to pose both to its inhabitants and those who patronise the activities there. The tension, the anger and dislocating frustration, which have become the second nature of Onitsha can easily be traced to the frustration, which the life on the bridge engenders. And yet, nobody was prepared to take action.

For years on end, the people were deceived with fake and fancy stories about the intention of the successive federal governments to build a second and even a third bridge to relieve the people from their plight. All manners of lies, fake promises and subterfuge have been erected by previous administrations, merely to keep the people in the dark over what was a deliberate diabolical policy of the central government against its own people. That it did not matter to the successive governments at the centre that the condition of the Niger bridge gateway, which equally serves other parts of the country beyond the South East people that are being punished for Biafra, has been equally constituting great inconveniences to those other Nigerians, who were not also “guilty” of the civil war, simply gives an inkling into the callous mindset of those who have been governing Nigeria and who lined up the other day to receive Centenary honours for their ‘great deeds in leadership’.

To make matters even worse, there have been those who had rubbed the fact of their being a defeated people into the face of Igbo people. In May 2007, and only a few days before he left office, President Obasanjo made a show of commissioning the flag-off of the construction of the Second Niger Bridge at the Asaba end. The outgoing governor of Delta State, Ibori, and the incoming short-lived governor of Anambra State, Andy Uba, were accomplices and participants to that fraud with which Obasanjo rubbed insult into the injury of the people over whose defeat in the civil war he had never stopped gloating. The people were expectant that their plight would soon be over until Governor Peter Obi later alerted the nation that there was neither a contract nor a plan for the bridge; in other words, Obasanjo had led the people through another episode of frustrating deceit. With the coming of President Jonathan and in spite of the huge opposition, which he has been facing by those who are against him because he is bent on fulfilling his promises to liberate all parts of Nigeria from the bondage under which they had been placed by their leaders, things are becoming remarkably different. He has it clearly seems – to have distanced himself from the wicked policies of his predecessors, which have kept Ndigbo under into a pressure cooker. And why not; for while campaigning in 2011, Jonathan had told Igbo voters that “I am one of you”. With what is happening today, there are few remaining doubts that he is not going back on those words, as it seems that for him the responsibility of building the Second Niger Bridge does not only have a political ramification for him; it seems to have a spiritual one too. At Onitsha in August 2012, I was present when he addressed some members of Anambra political elite, after commissioning the Onitsha River Port and the start of oil explorations at Aguleri. President Jonathan spoke emotionally about the fate of the Niger Bridge. He recalled that the first Niger Bridge was conceived and built by President Nnamdi Azikiwe as the (ceremonial) first president of Nigeria and that it was built with five million pounds then. He vowed that it was incumbent on him, as someone who had been given the name of “Azikiwe” by his grandfather, to build the second Niger Bridge, for what it means to the people both on the practical and psychological levels. He further vowed that if he did not embark on building that bridge before leaving office, he would go on exile.

Since that pledge, those who understand the way governments work as well as those who are aware that the Executive Presidency of Nigeria has been constitutionally erected, as one of the most powerful in the world, became aware that the president could not have spoken in vain in that regard. Those who reason became aware that for the Second Niger Bridge, hope had risen for the first time. The fact that the president is finally flagging it off today is the coming to age of that risen hope. It is clear that before today, a lot of clean water had run under the bridge. A lot of preliminary work was said to have been done both by the giant Julius Berger, Nigeria’s famous bridge builders, to mobilise its equipment and personnel to the site. A lot much more has happened at the level of sourcing for the funds in order to ensure that once the project starts, it will not stop till it reaches its completion. The fact that the president is coming to flag it off personally shows that not only is he committed to all the promises he had made about the bridge, there is the unspoken fact that all the funds for that bridge are intact.

When President Jonathan commissions the start-off of the bridge, he will have kept most of his promises to the people of the South East, who are not used to asking for mere hand-outs. The South Easterners, who consider themselves very able at every point, merely demand to be shown the fishponds and the roads to them. They can do all the fishing by themselves. That is why the bridge, the airport and reconstruction of their federal roads and infrastructures, which the federal government is embarking upon under the Jonathan administration, are very welcome and heart-warming to the people. That President Jonathan has become a dear friend and kinsman of the South East is becoming very obvious by the day. It will show more amply in 2015 by which time it will be obvious that he has earned that friendship and brotherhood on concrete platforms, not platitudes.

•This piece by Uche Ezechukwu (shown in photo) originally appeared in his column “Capital Matters” in today’s edition of Daily Sun under the title “Niger Bridge: Another jinx broken!” Ezechukwu can be reached via 08036223337 and onukwube1@yahoo.com

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