Ahead of today’s expanded security meeting between the Service Chiefs and Southeast governors on the deteriorating situation in the region, an Igbo group, Eastern Consultative Assembly (ECA), has urged the Federal Government to address the root causes of the agitations, if it desires to tackle the crisis in the region.

ECA also urged the Federal Government to stop treating only the symptoms, which it said include secession agitation and the resultant sit-at-home, and tackle the main issues.

It noted that without addressing the root cause, no form of military deployment would stop the crisis in the region.

According to the group, the feeling of rejection, occasioned by deliberate marginalisation and oppression of the region since 1970, birthed the agitation, which resulted in the insecurity and the sit-at-home order.

In a statement yesterday by its Secretary, Elder Eliot Ugochukwu-Uko, ECA regretted that the Federal Government and Southeast governors, in the past 24 years, when the agitation started through Ralph Uwazuruike, ignored the root cause of the problem while addressing only the symptomatic agitations.

The group said some of the root causes of the agitations include the alleged obvious and deliberate decision by the Federal Government of denying the Southeast, since the end of the civil war in 1970, needed and critical infrastructure, such as a functional international airport with a cargo wing, a functioning sea port, railway services, including development of the East-West rail link from Port Harcourt through Aba, Onitsha, Benin, Lagos to Cotonou, Accra, among others).

It also said the Southeast needed a dry port at Aba, an export processing centre at the Ninth Mile corner in Enugu, electricity generation that would bolster industrialization and a good road network.

ECA also made a case for an end to the painful feeling of alienation that makes it difficult for youths in the region to have a sense of belonging in the country.

The group said the unitary structure, the alleged oppression of some sections and the winner-takes-all disposition of the central government would continue to make people of the Southeast to feel like spectators in the Nigerian enterprise.

It said this would in turn inspire the fears that fuel the agitation.

The group noted that believers in the agitators’ gospel of secession grew into millions over the years because the root causes of their grievances had not been addressed by any administration. (The Nation)