The creation of Akwa Ibom State by the administration of former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, was the culmination of a struggle that spanned more than four decades.
The first agitation for a state for the people of today’s Akwa Ibom was made by the Ibibio Union, a socio-cultural organization, as far back as the late 1940s. The efforts of the founding fathers, though did not yield the required fruits at that time, kick-started a struggle that outlived them. A semblance of the wish of the people came in 1967, when General Yakubu Gowon created 12 states more as a strategy to kill the birth of Biafra, than to satisfy the yearnings of any section of the country for states.
South Eastern State, one of the three states created from the then Eastern Region, comprised the Ibibio, Annang, Eket, Oron, Efik and the former Ogoja. The state was not exactly what the people of the present Akwa Ibom wanted, but it was a step in the right direction, all the same
When the late General Murtala Mohammed created seven more states in 1976 to bring the total number of states in the country to 19, he merely changed the name of South Eastern State to Cross River State, which did not necessarily address the need of the people of the area that would later be referred to as Cross River Mainland, which comprised what is today the three senatorial districts of Akwa Ibom North, Akwa Ibom North East and Akwa Ibom South.
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the demand for a state for the area that was covered by the Ibibio Union was kept in abeyance during the brief period of civilian rule that lasted from October 1, 1979 to December 31, 1983. Looking back now, it is perhaps appropriate to say that it was divinely ordained that the demand for a state for the people of the area would only be met by a military administration.
The people resumed their demand when they submitted a memorandum to the military administration of General Muhammadu Buhari, which probably did not have time to carry out such an exercise before it was changed by Babangida.
The opportunity to reignite the struggle and agitation for a state came in 1986, when Babangida set up the Political Bureau to determine the type of government that was best for the country.
The rest, as they say, is now history. But it is worth recalling that Cross River Mainland erupted in wild celebrations in the afternoon of Wednesday, September 23, 1987, when news filled the airwaves announcing the creation of Akwa Ibom as Nigeria’s 21st state. The people of the present Katsina State shared the same fortune on the same day.
Twenty-eight years down the road, Akwa Ibom has lived up to its sobriquet of Land of Promise, a state that offers hope and presents opportunities for its people to excel; a state that has created the needed conducive environment for visitors to live and do business. From the perspective of physical development, it would take somebody who was in Uyo after it became a state capital in 1987 to appreciate the transformation that has taken place in the last 28 years, a transformation that has been more significant than what has taken place in many states that were created much earlier.
The free and compulsory education policy of the administration of former governor, Obong Godswill Akpabio, has ensured that the state is no longer synonymous with production of domestic servants. In different tertiary institutions within and outside the country today, indigenes are studying hard to obliterate the state’s inglorious past as an enclave of backwardness, illiteracy and poverty.
I assume that the present administration of Governor Udom Emmanuel, not being that of an opposition party, is continuing with the policies of its predecessor in creating opportunities for the youth of the state to realize their full potential. For instance, the previous government had in place a programme for equipping the state’s indigenes in the Nigerian Law School with laptops, apart from bursary, and also paying the tuition for medical students in Nigerian and foreign institutions. The administration of Obong Victor Attah had a programme for the training of students from the state in information communication technology in the United States and Canada.
These are the people that will return to follow in the footsteps of those who, by their successes in their chosen fields, have remained shinning lights, contributing to the development of the state in particular and the country in general. They will replicate the successes of Akwa Ibomites like Edet Amana, patriarch of the Amana dynasty and Don Etiebet, who have distinguished themselves in the area of information communication technology, an area in which they have made immense contributions.
They will seek to prove that the successes of legal giants like Paul Usoro and Assam Assam, former Nigerian ambassador to Russia, both senior advocates of Nigeria and Udoma Udo Udoma, a lawyer, senator in the First Senate of the Fourth Republic and current chairman of Union Bank, are no flukes.
Special mention must be made of Obong Attah. An architect of international acclaim, Attah’s imprint can be found in prominent structures around the country. But that is not what makes him or his contributions unique.
As governor, Attah single handedly fought for the scrapping of the obnoxious onshore-offshore dichotomy that threatened the very existence of the state during the Obasanjo era, after the Supreme Court had curiously re-introduced a policy that the Babangida administration had abolished. The state owes its financial buoyancy today to the effort of Attah in ensuring that it got what rightly belongs to it as revenue from derivation as an oil bearing state.
There is something of a consensus among the people of Akwa Ibom that the time has come to make the state fulfill the dream of their forefathers. Governor Emmanuel’s recent trip to the United States where he met the state’s indigenes was presumably for the purpose of selling the state to its people and making them understand that the state will be what they want it to be only when they show more than a passing interest in what is happening at home.
- Umoren lives in Port Harcourt
