Otti, or Nothing

Why Abia Will Not Let Him Go

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“You should weep no more; help is here.” – Alex Otti, inaugural address, Umuahia, 29 May 2023

“To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” – Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 1865

“Salus populi suprema lex esto.” – Cicero, De Legibus: let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.

For some weeks now I have been in Abia, and I have gone about the state the way a man goes about his own compound when he wants to learn what the rooms are saying: unannounced, unhurried, with no one walking ahead of me to clear the way. I have sat in bukkas over pepper soup and cold drinks, in hotel lobbies where people wait for others and say more than they intend, and in the public spaces where a town does its talking when it believes nobody important is listening. I have taken kekes and bikes on purpose, though a car would have been kinder to my back. A keke is a confessional with a roof and no priest. Strangers who would hand a reporter a careful answer will hand a fellow passenger the truth, because truth costs nothing between two people squeezed against the same rail who will never meet again.