The continued insistence on the ritualised Monday sit-at-home in Anambra State has moved beyond protest, beyond symbolism, and certainly beyond reason. What remains is an empty, self-inflicted paralysis: an exercise in economic self-harm sustained by habit, fear, and intellectual laziness. It is neither resistance nor strategy; it is stagnation dressed up as purpose.
Governor Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo’s decisive action against this farce deserves not just commendation but emphatic support. By keeping the affected market closed until next Monday, the Governor has drawn a firm line between legitimate civic expression and outright economic sabotage. This is not an emotional response; it is a calculated governance decision rooted in logic, history, and an understanding of how economies actually function.
Let us be honest, if only for a moment: what exactly is the sit-at-home achieving? No concessions secured. No coherent demands met. No strategic leverage gained. Year after year, the same script; markets shuttered, streets emptied, fear recycled, while the supposed beneficiaries grow poorer and the state bleeds revenue. To call this “sacrifice” is generous; to call it “strategy” is dishonest.
Leadership requires the courage to say what others will not: you cannot repeatedly shut down your own economy and expect progress. No society in history has ever prospered by voluntarily switching itself off one day every week while its peers surge ahead. Nigeria’s GDP grows on Mondays. Lagos thrives on Mondays. Kano hums on Mondays. Yet Anambra, once the commercial nerve centre of the country; is expected to applaud its own immobilisation as ideological purity. That is not resistance; that is regression.
There was a time when this argument would have sounded absurd. Over 40% of imported goods into Nigeria once passed through Onitsha, feeding markets across the federation and beyond; Lagos, Cameroon, and multiple West African trade routes. Mondays were not days of silence; they were days of scale. Onitsha was not a ghost town; it was a logistical engine. To deliberately suffocate such a system on a weekly basis is not principled: it is reckless.
Those few traders who still choose to participate in this charade must understand that the world has moved on, and so has the Anambra State Government. Prof. Soludo has made it clear that governance will no longer indulge economic hostage-taking cloaked in sentiment. By temporarily shutting markets to enforce discipline, the government is saying, in plain terms: if you will not protect the collective economy, the state will.
This is what leadership looks like when it refuses to be bullied by incoherence. Leadership is not about indulging every loud position; it is about defending the silent majority whose livelihoods are destroyed by these Monday shutdowns; the transporters, apprentices, artisans, daily traders, and families who pay the real price for this nonsense.
The sit-at-home has become a retrogressive ritual with no destination. It answers no urgent question, advances no credible cause, and solves no real problem. Its only measurable outcome is economic loss; weekly, predictable, and cumulative.
Prof. Soludo’s action is therefore not just justified; it is overdue. It signals a reset: Anambra will be governed as a serious economic entity, not as a theatre for performative disruption. The message is unambiguous: economic sabotage, whatever language it hides behind, is no longer acceptable in Anambra State.
This is not tyranny.
This is not insensitivity.
This is leadership reclaiming reason from ritual.
And Ndi Anambra will be better for it.
