Nwifuru and Ebonyi’s Amasiri-Oso-Edda feud

Police later found his motorcycle and a trail of his blood.

Less than two weeks ago, Edda people issued a statement pointing out that the same attackers from Amasiri were planning an attack on the Nigerian Army in their town, enforcing the curfew, and also hatching another plan on Edda to make it look like the soldiers attacked and killed Edda people.

The day after that revelation, the Amasiri attackers in hiding admitted in their voice messages shared on a WhatsApp group of the town that has 965 members that they actually planned such an attack. Without remorse, their messages spoken in the Amasiri dialect, where many of the speakers addressed their audience as ‘Amasiri people’, admitted that their surprise is how the plan leaked to the public, not that they have any qualms. We have over 75 voice messages spoken in the Amasiri dialect, where many of them owned up to taking part in the past attacks on Edda and vowing to attack again. The security system has more.

Moreover, Amasiri has a creed of bloodshed against their neighbours codified in a book - A Compendium of Amasiri, People and Culture, written by two Amasiri sons, where they challenged their people on Page 148 to wage bloody wars against all their neighbours over land. Those neighbours are Edda, Okposi, Afikpo, Ibii, and Akpoha.

The WhatsApp group of close to 1,000 members has, over time, served as the platform to aggregate, plan, execute, and fund wars on all Amasiri neighbours.

All this evidence, just a tip of the iceberg, are proofs of community complicity that Amasiri is grossly responsible as a town for the attacks and bloodshed.

The government is full of ears and hears everything that goes on. It only doesn’t act for some reasons, but not because it doesn’t have enough information to do so.

So, Nwifuru moving against Amasiri as a clan was justified because he had all the security intel on his desk, just like the governors before him.

Before he declared a state of emergency in Amasiri with the attendant actions, the governor didn’t act in arbitrariness. The pronouncements he made on January 31 and later on February 1 said that the steps taken against Amasiri were a collective decision of the state Security Council. The council is made up of the leaders of the Nigeria Police, the DSS, Civil Defence, all the LGA chairmen, and some key members of the cabinet.

Nwifuru announced that after a meeting of this council, the body advised the government to take the steps and measures to ensure there will be no time for escalation of tension through possible reprisal attacks.

No reasonable leader would face such a situation and not take the directive of the Security Council, and rather wait for the peace to completely collapse.

The mandate of a governor includes arresting a dire security threat instead of waiting for it to escalate. Nwifuru said that what Amasiri did was like challenging the government, and he needed to show them that there is a government that would not watch them descend into anarchy.

He repeated that he had warned Amasiri and Edda against any violence and needed to use the town as a sample to any other community that may act out such shocking impunity to attack other communities, burn their homes, kill as many as they want repeatedly.

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Nwifuru repeatedly said his actions were against Amasiri because he had more than enough proof that the killings of January 29 and those of the past were sponsored by the Amasiri leadership, funded by the people, and executed by the town. It wasn’t an isolated case of where some individuals in a town did that. All the pity-party sentiments, including fabricated ones that so many people have been dying in the town since the clampdown, are deliberate distractions. Emma Anya should tell Nigerians if the families of the people whose members were killed or missing and whose heads were chopped are rejoicing.

The author sounded like the lives and peace of the Amasiri people matter more than those of their victims. That is simply callous. In his thesis, there was no remorse or word of condemnation of the incident, no sympathy for the Edda victims, but he whipped up sentiments to pillory Nwifuru for acting decisively. To make him feel happy, Nwifuru should be cheering on Amasiri in the repeated killings and plead helplessness. That is not how leadership is delivered.

Anya should rather be applauding Nwifuru for taking an action that saved his community from an untoward backlash because Edda was possibly no longer willing to take one more bloodshed from Aamsiri this time.

In any case, calling it a feud between Amasiri and Oso Edda is deliberately deceptive. If it is about Oso Edda, then it should be about Ndukwe Amasiri, but that is not right. Since the entire Amasiri of two communities and five villages banded to levy constant and relentless wars on Edda of 11 communities, 72 villages, and a full LGA, that shocking tradition of bellicosity should be situated properly. Amasiri attacks Edda, not Oso Edda.

•Emewu, Edda indigene and journalist wrote from Lagos.