Category: Southeast report

Three decades of siblings agony ends as a psychiatric patient mother returns to their Anambra State home, reports NWANOSIKE ONU, with additional writing by OGOCHUKWU IKEJE

It would have been agonising enough if she were gone for six months or one year. But Mrs Rose Anene left their Anambra State home 32 years ago when the oldest of her four sons, Chukwudi, was just six years. She left home after suffering a bout of depression and complaining that she was feeling odd and wanted to return to her maiden home. She hails from Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, but got married to Mr Augustine Anene from Umudioka Awka, Anambra State.

For those 32 years her four young boys and their only sister suffered untold hardship. They had no motherly care and guidance, and grew up with the scar, shedding tears from time to time. They did not know their mother’s whereabouts, and could not say whether she was alive or dead. The trauma was devastating. Their upbringing fell to Mrs Felicia Okechukwu who was a co-wife to their mother at the time.

When Mrs Anene told her husband that she could not understand how she was feeling and that she wanted to return to her parent’s home, Mr Anene took her to Aba, Abia State, thinking a change of scene would do the trick. It did not. She kept clamouring to go home. Eventually, her wish was granted but it was learnt that she soon left for an unknown destination. Mr Anene died about two years after the Aba trip.

How Mrs Anene fared everyday since her disappearance remains a secret only time may reveal but it seems she ended up in Lagos State at some point from where she was moved in 2004 to a mental facility in Anambra and from there to the Home for the Mentally Challenged set up in 2014 by the Caring Family Enhancement Initiative (CAFÉ) run by wife of the state governor Mrs Ebelechukwu Obiano.

Mrs Obiano facilitated Mrs Anene’s discovery and reintegration with her family, a development which brought back memories and tears in the Anene home. It was also the highpoint of the 2018 International Women’s Day celebrations held at the Home for Mentally Challenged, Nteje in Oyi Local Government Area, Anambra State.

CAFÉ, a non-governmental organization (NGO), was established and managed in collaboration with the state Ministry of Social Welfare, Children and Women Affairs.   The local government chairman of Awka South Local Government Area, Leo Nwuba was moved to tears as Mrs Anene saw her children once again. He said he would make sure the woman was reintegrated into the system and also not suffer any form of stigmatisation.

Mrs Anene’s only daughter, 42-year-old Mrs Ifeyinwa Uzozie got emotional when she saw her mother again, telling the crowd how difficult it was growing up without the presence of a mother.

The first son of the woman, Chukwudi Anene who was only six years old when his mother left the house, said in tears that it was regrettable that their father was not alive to witness such a remarkable event

He said the family would always be grateful to Mrs Ebelechukwu Obiano for being there for the helpless in the society, adding that the family had given up on their mother before now.

During the celebration of the woman in Anambra on the International Women’s Day in the state, Chief Mrs Ebelechukwu Obiano discharged 12 inmates made up of eight women and four men at the mental home. The governor’s wife expressed delight that the Home was fast realising its objective with the recovery and discharge of more inmates.

She said, “By treating and reuniting estranged member of a family, we stop the incidence of trauma and ambivalent relationship between them and restore the fabric of the family and by extension that of the larger society.

“We feel highly elated at the landmark achievement of reuniting twelve of our inmates with their families, especially our dear sister-Rose, who is going back home after 35 years of estrangement due to ill-health.”

“Since the inception of this 77-bed facility in September 2014, we have made tremendous progress treating and rehabilitating over 62 inmates who come from different states in Nigeria including Abia, Ebonyi, Edo, Oyo Anambra, etc.”

She thanked her husband, the Governor, Chief Willie Obiano, for donating his monthly salary to support the inmates, and called on others to do same to ensure that the good work was sustained. Mrs Obiano further revealed that the NGO (CAFE) gives the inmates proper post recovery rehabilitation by making sure they were meaningfully engaged when they leave the home.

She highlighted other projects of CAFÉ which had touched many lives positively across Anambra communities like the eleven houses built for indigent widows, twelve toilets to promote hygiene in rural markets, the training and empowerment of over 3200 women, as well as free cleft lip surgeries for 45 children.

Speaking with the Nation, the Commissioner for Women’s Affairs Social Welfare and Children, Dr. Victoria Chikwelu, recounted the efforts and commitment of the wife of the Governor in setting up the home for mentally challenged which she noted had saved many lives.

She disclosed that Mrs Anene was formerly identified as Yoruba in the home, because she spoke only Yoruba with the First Lady, until recently when she recovered and started speaking Igbo.

She said that the recovery and remembrance of the husband’s village in Awka by Mrs. Anene happened to the amazement of the officials whom she led to meet her family.

For Mrs Felicia Okechukwu, a co-wife of the woman, the problem started like a movie in Africa Magic.

“At that time, she started complaining to the husband that she was feeling somehow, that she wanted to go to her place in the west”

“The husband then took her to Aba where they stayed for some time and it was noticed that the demand to go to her place did not subside and the husband and three other family members took her to her place and we later heard she ran away from there,” Mrs Okechukwu said.

Azubuike, Mrs Anene’s second son, told the Nation   that previous efforts to trace their mother when they grew up proved abortive as nobody knew her whereabouts.

He thanked Obiano’s wife for wiping their tears by treating and reuniting them with their mother, while praying that God would continue to bless her.

Not only that Obiano’s wife was instrumental to Mrs Anene’s healing, she equally presented her with a sewing machine, wrappers and a sum of money.

 

For some obvious reasons, the suburbs and satellite communities often bear the heaviest brunt of internal migration as thousands from rural areas continue to swarm cities in search of better opportunities. Such migratory pattern inevitably swells the population of these locations and puts an increasing pressure on public utilities, making such places seem, more or less, like the fabled poor cousins of their more swanky urban neighbours. The influx to the outer fringes of cities is mostly driven by practical consideration than anything else. For the average home-seeker on a low income bracket, aesthetics is hardly ever a priority subject; what matters, apparently, is the knock-down property rates on offer.

With crumbling tenements and overstretched facilities, suburban and satellite communities are usually not the poster images of cities that authorities crave. Yet, the reality is that the majority of cities’ population live in these areas. Also, their typically large population implies an inherently massive voting bloc which politicians can only ignore at their peril. This is a fairly familiar experience for most cities of which Enugu is not an exception.

So why does giving such areas the necessary makeover they deserve always seems like a near impossible task in the light of these facts? The answers are merely conjectural. However, besides being a task that simply overwhelms, the sheer scale of the projects needed to create any tangible impact might make social interventions in these places barely noticeable.

But sometimes, it’s simply a question of a failure to sufficiently muster the political will. To a large extent, the condition of slum settlements is often a bitter highlight of the chasm between rhetoric and action.

The paradox of satellite communities – the notion that they are places politicians visit only during election campaigns – has lately experienced a paradigm shift in Enugu with some ambitious urban renewal projects launched across many such neighbourhoods by the state’s helmsman, Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi. The governor’s intervention offers a glimpse of the sort of incremental turnaround that would have occurred in blighted communities had they been over the past years given the kind of attention the Ugwuanyi administration has devoted to their upgrade.

There are a number of such neighbourhoods in Enugu metropolis and they all bear visible vestiges of decades-old neglect: A prominent locale in this infamous club is Abakpa-Nike, an urban-sprawl-gone-awry in the Enugu East Local Government Area and home to an estimated five hundred thousand residents, roughly one-third of the capital’s entire population. This

community over the years earned a reputation which was more or less a byword for squalid living condition and it’s not difficult to see why: overcrowded buildings, deplorable state of connecting roads and scant regard for physical planning rules.

But thanks to the new resolve to give the requisite attention to areas long overlooked in past development plans, Abakpa-Nike is experiencing an unusual facelift. Potable water which residents once accessed only via commercial vendors now flows in parts of this sprawling community. This is in addition to the series of ongoing infrastructure upgrade meant to rehabilitate and open up link roads in Abakpa. The state government last year awarded

contract for the construction of five roads in the area comprising Edward Nnaji street-Ogwuagor road; Amaetiti street-Ugboye Abakpa-Nike road, and Abakpa-Nike market road.

This drive is unlike the tokenism which residents of fringe communities had lived with for decades. The current experience is rooted in deep planning, not the perfunctory gestures of the past that lacked conviction and were barely sustainable. The intervention, as conceived presently, comes with a clear social and economic development plan that incorporates the state government’s immediate, short and long term goals. For instance, the extension of pipe-borne water into parts of Abakpa-Nike arose out of the state’s water board’s expansion of its capacity from 4,000 cubic metres to 18,000 cubic metres. The goal is to achieve 40,000 cubic metres by year end and extend water supply to all parts of Abakpa and indeed every neighbourhood in Enugu metropolis and substantially cover other parts of the state.

The renewed vigour is consistent with Ugwuanyi’s often-stated vision to implement an even spread of infrastructural projects to give rural residents a high self-esteem, banish feelings of alienation and create new cities to reduce the current pressure on the state capital.

“We will continue to direct our policies and projects towards these locations because that is

where most of our people reside,” the governor said at the flag-off of a road rehabilitation project at Ngenevu, a high-density suburb straddling the foot of hills across which lies an abandoned coal mine.

This declaration is as much driven by belief in the public good as it is by the knowledge that an improved living condition is an incentive for payment of taxes. Such conviction is at the heart of the N5m-project-for-every-community initiative, a grassroots development programme conceived by the Ugwuanyi administration to ensure government presence in the 450 autonomous communities in the state.

“This is a special development that has never happened in Enugu State,” the chairman of the Enugu State Traditional Rulers Council, HRH Igwe Lawrence Agubuzu, had said of the programme that gives community leaders and residents the latitude to select a project to be sited in their communities and fund same with the money released by the state.

As urban renewal projects extend to more communities like Iva Valley and Ugwuaji that had long lived with similarly bitter tales, cynicism which was once the default mode for residents is gradually giving way to optimism and a rekindling of a new social consciousness.

This has, not surprisingly, bred a robust engagement between the government and the people whom the governor never fails to acknowledge as the “true heroes of democracy” So it is in some sense an implicit affirmation of the social contract and an understanding that governments should be obligated to always act in the people’s interest. Such mindset feeds the democratic culture. And it’s just as well that has, along with an unrelenting commitment to an inclusive ideal, surely taken firm roots in Enugu State. There could indeed be no better response to cynicism than good governance a point sufficiently proven by Governor Ugwuanyi.

 

• Ani, a former editor of ThisDay, The Saturday Newspaper, and later Saturday Telegraph, sent this piece from Enugu

The Abia State government has flagged off a free school feeding programme for all primary school pupils in the state. The lunch programme was initially launched in the state in 2016 to cover primary 1 to 3 pupils, making Abia the first state in the federation to do so before now extending it to cover primary 4 to 6.

Flagging off the programme for primary 4 to 6 at Ubakala Central School in Umuahia South Local Government Area, Dr Ikpeazu commended the federal government for looking the way of vulnerable pupils and creating a platform to feed primary school pupils from 1 to 3.

He said that his government is desirous of ensuring that pupils focus their attention on learning, pointing out that there is a relationship between well fed pupils and the capacity to learn while hungry pupils find it difficult to concentrate.

According to him, it is imperative to mainstream school feeding as a policy of his government, pointing out that the government opened up warehouses in the 3 senatorial zones where food items can be donated for the programme.

He thanked the wife of the governor Mrs Nkechi Ikpeazu and her team for sustaining the programme, noting that the programme has moved school enrolment from 100,000 to over 300,000.

The governor called on well-meaning Abians to donate towards the programme.

The wife of the Governor, Deaconess Ikpeazu whose office is coordinating the programme expressed happiness with the development recorded and thanked all those who have supported the programme so far.

Earlier, the Programme Coordinator of the Abia Schools free meal programme, Elder Emeka Ahuruonye who disclosed that the programme is designed to reduce hunger and enhance academic performance revealed that Abia is the only state where all pupils in primary schools are served free lunch and lauded the tireless effort of Deaconess Ikpeazu towards the success of the programme.

Also the focal person of the Abia Social Re-investment Programme, Mr Chinenye Nwogu made public that the state expends the sum of N176 m monthly in feeding over 300,000 primary school pupils, adding that the programme has impacted positively on the vulnerable in society.