By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
It is the twentieth day of March in the year 2026, and I write to you from a veranda in Umuahia where the morning air should have been thick with the sacred stillness of abandonment.
In the old dispensation, this hour offered only the distant bark of a hungry dog, the shuffle of a pensioner’s slippers heading nowhere, and wind rustling through factory gates that had not seen a worker since the last millennium. But this morning, the air is polluted – with fresh paint, the roar of turbines, the clatter of cranes, and the unbearable noise of people walking with purpose to places of work.
You have taken our beloved Industrial Cemetery – that sprawling, poetic graveyard of dreams where we held annual requiems for the Eastern Nigerian Dream – and turned it into a construction site. You are not merely disturbing the dead; you are resurrecting them. And resurrection, in our political tradition, is the most antisocial act a governor can commit.
For twenty-four years – from the dawn of this Fourth Republic until you decided that corpses should work – we carefully curated our industrial ruins as museums of “What Could Have Been,” open to the public for the price of a vote each election cycle. The factories along the Aba – Port Harcourt expressway were never…
