REJOINDER: ALEX OTTI – WHEN LEADERS WALK INTO THE FIRE: THE SOKOTO DECLARATION AND THE REBIRTH OF THE IGBO CONSCIENCE
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
I have read, with deep humility and a heavy heart, the feedback that has trailed my recent essay on Governor Alex Otti’s visit to Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. I see the names of those who have written—men of stature, intellect, and profound accomplishment. I see the raw pain in the words of my brother and friend, C. Don Adinuba, who speaks of an Ihiala he has not been able to visit in four years. I hear the anger of those who feel that any engagement with Nnamdi Kanu is a gratuitous insult to the memory of the dead and the livelihoods destroyed. To these critics, many of whom are my friends and mentors from Ndigbo Lagos and beyond, I want to say this clearly: I do not dismiss your pain. I do not trivialize your anger. It is valid, it is righteous, and it is earned. The carnage in Igboland is real, the economic strangulation is real, and the fear that has turned our vibrant homeland into a graveyard of ghosts on Mondays is a tragedy that will haunt us for generations.
But let us be honest with ourselves, for Ihiala is not alone in this darkness. From Orsu to Lilu, from Ukpor to Eha-Amufu, from Uli to the forests of Okigwe, Ngor Okpaala, entire communities have become ghost towns where the Monday we once knew as the start of a productive week has become a day of fear and locked doors. Do not think I write this from a place of comfort or ignorance, for I have tasted this bitterness personally. During the funeral of my late father, I came face-to-face with the excesses of these unguarded and misdirected youths, seeing the fear in the eyes of my kinsmen and feeling the humiliation of being a stranger in my own land, dictated to by boys who should be in school or learning a trade. We are all victims—every Igbo man who cannot travel home freely, every mother whose son has not returned—but I ask you this: does a victim mentality resolve the crisis, and does sitting in Lagos, Abuja or elsewhere venting our anger change the reality in Orsu?
It is precisely because of this carnage, and precisely because our land is bleeding, that I support Governor Otti’s visit, for we must recognize that we are living through a profound crisis of leadership that predates the current agitation. If we cast our gaze back to the turn of the millennium, since the dawn of the Fourth Republic in 1999, Nigeria has witnessed a slow, agonizing erosion of consequential leadership, a scarcity of men and women who possess the moral imagination to transcend the transactional nature of our politics. We have had rulers, administrators, and politicians in abundance, but we have suffered a famine of true leadership—the kind that does not merely occupy a seat but occupies the arena, absorbing the shocks of history to redirect the trajectory of a people. This vacuum, this quarter-century interregnum of quality engagement, created the hollow spaces where anger could fester and where non-state actors could rise to claim a legitimacy that the state had forfeited through negligence and distance.
Governor Otti’s movement towards that prison cell in Sokoto must be viewed through this historical lens, not merely as a political maneuver or PR stunt but as a restoration of the ancient duty of the shepherd who does not flee when the wolf appears but walks into the thicket. Across history, the leaders who have shaped the destiny of nations are not those who stayed within the safe confines of protocol and popularity, but those who dared to engage with the uncomfortable, the radical, and the seemingly unforgivable. We see echoes of this in the moral calculus of Nelson Mandela, who, while still vilified as a terrorist by the state, understood that the path to a free South Africa required engaging the very regime that imprisoned him, just as it required F.W. de Klerk to break the taboos of his own tribe to walk across the aisle.
It is a terrifying loneliness to be the first to break the seal of silence, to step out of the echo chamber of elite consensus and confront the raw, volatile reality of the street.
For too long, the Nigerian political elite, particularly in the South East, has operated under a doctrine of avoidance, believing that if they ignored the agitation, it would wither, or if they applied enough force, it would break. This approach ignores the fundamental lesson of insurgency and civil unrest: that you cannot kill an idea with a bullet, and you cannot arrest a sentiment with handcuffs. By refusing to engage, our leadership class created a chasm between the governed and the governors, a disconnect so profound that the voice of a man in a prison cell began to carry more weight than the decrees of elected officials. Otti is currently filling this vacuum by recognizing that leadership is not about preserving one’s dignity in the eyes of one’s peers, but about risking one’s reputation to secure the survival of one’s people. He is acting as a disruptor in a system that has grown comfortable with dysfunction, challenging the lethargy that has allowed the security situation to metastasize into a monster that threatens to consume us all.
We must understand that the “unknown gunman” and the chaotic elements ravaging our land are symptoms of a broken social contract, a breakdown that occurred because those who were meant to lead retreated into the fortresses of Abuja and Lagos and other diasporic communities, leaving the Village public square open to demagogues and nihilists. The scarcity of leadership since 2000 has been characterized by a refusal to look the problem in the eye, a preference for issuing press releases condemning violence while refusing to engage with the root causes of that violence. Otti is breaking this pattern by engaging the very symbol of the agitation, understanding that in statecraft, legitimacy is the currency of peace, and by securing the endorsement of the detained leader, he is effectively reclaiming the moral authority that the state had lost. This is the burden of consequential leadership: to walk into the fire not because it is safe, but because the alternative is to let the house burn down while we argue over who lit the match.
Furthermore, we must draw parallels from other nations that have walked back from the brink of disintegration, observing that peace was never achieved by the rigid application of law and order alone, but by the audacious application of political empathy. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland was not signed because the IRA was defeated militarily, but because brave men dared to talk to those with blood on their hands, recognizing that the future could not be held hostage by the past. Governor Otti is attempting to operationalize this level of high-stakes diplomacy, understanding that the boy in the bush holding an AK-47 will not listen to a sermon on civic duty, but he might listen to a directive from the man he considers his leader. By bridging this gap, Otti is not validating the crime; he is validating the humanity of the region and asserting that the solution to our pain lies within us, not in the barrel of a gun or the indifference of the federal government.
This brings me to the uncomfortable truth that our elite class has failed to provide a counter-narrative to the agitation, preferring to analyze the tragedy from the safety of anger and distance rather than providing the stewardship required to fix it. We have allowed a gap to widen between the “Big Men” in the city and the “Small Boys” in the village, a gap filled by anger, cultism, and misinformation. I still travel and crisscross Igboland by road, engaging directly with the people at the parks and markets, and it is not easy to understand, sitting in the comfort of a Lagos or Abuja duplex, the level of poverty and disconnect that breeds this agitation. These boys are not just mad; they are hungry, hopeless, and feel abandoned by an elite class that only comes home to flash wealth during Christmas.The absence of genuine, touchable, relatable leadership for over two decades has radicalized a generation, and Otti’s visit is the first real step in bridging that divide, showing that a governor is not an alien overlord but a servant capable of descending into the dungeon to seek a way out.
My critics ask, “You want him to return to resume his carnage?” and my response is a sombre question: Has his imprisonment stopped the carnage? Mazi Nnamdi Kanu has been in detention for years, renditioned, solitary-confined, and sentenced, yet Ihiala, orsu or Okigwe has not become safer and the unknown gunman has not disappeared. If anything, the situation has metastasized because the vacuum created by his incarceration and the government’s refusal to engage politically has been filled by criminals and enforcement gangs who claim to act in his name but often act for their own pockets. We have tried the “crush them” approach, we have tried the “ignore them” approach, and we have tried the “lock him up and throw away the key” approach, yet the result is an Ihiala, Okigwe and several places you cannot visit. Governor Otti’s visit is not an endorsement of violence but a courageous attempt to stop it by going to the root to de-legitimize the criminals; when Nnamdi Kanu endorses Otti’s governance and calls for peace from his cell, he strips the sit-at-home enforcers of their moral cover and isolates the true criminals from the agitators.
To those who ask us to imagine the outrage if a Northern Governor visited a convicted bandit, I say we must be intellectually honest and look at the record. Northern Governors like Masari of Katsina and Matawalle of Zamfara did not just visit bandits; they took photos with them in the bush, holding weapons in a bid to demobilize them, and even the Buhari administration created “Operation Safe Corridor” to rehabilitate Boko Haram fighters who had slaughtered thousands. Why wasn’t this extended to our boys?. They did this because they understood that when a fire is burning your house, you use water, sand, dialogue, or whatever works to save the structure. Look at the South West, where the Yoruba elders did not abandon Sunday Igboho to rot but engaged through political and diplomatic backchannels to ensure he was not crushed, and today, the South West is not under a weekly lockdown. Why is the Igbo elite strategy solely to curse the darkness rather than light a candle?
We must distinguish between banditry and political agitation, for while Nnamdi Kanu’s methods may be disputed, he represents a movement born out of deep-seated marginalization, and you cannot treat a movement that commands the sentiment of millions of youths merely as banditry to be treated with bullets. To treat the symptom without treating the cause is to guarantee that the violence continues forever. I called Governor Otti a “modern-day Mbakwe” not to canonize him, but to contextualize the validation he received from Kanu himself, highlighting that for the first time, the “Leader of the Agitation” and the “Leader of the Government” are aligned on the need for Good Governance. Otti is showing that the antidote to agitation is performance, proving that when you build roads, pay salaries, and restore dignity, you make the ground infertile for violent radicalism.
To my respected seniors and peers, it is easy for us to sit in Lagos or Abuja and express righteous indignation, demanding that Kanu rots in jail while our homeland burns, but that anger, while justified, does not bring peace nor open the road to Ihiala or elsewhere. Leadership is not about doing what is popular with the elite; it is about doing what is necessary for the survival of the people. Alex Otti walked into that prison—into the fire—not to celebrate a prisoner, but to rescue a region, doing it so that one day my brother Adinuba can drive to Ihiala in peace and so that the “boys” in the bush will have no excuse.
I stand by my piece not because I love the carnage, but because I am desperate for it to end, and I believe, with every fiber of my being, that dialogue, engagement, and political resolution is the only way home.
Let it be known, written in stone and shouted from the rooftops, that I do not endorse violence, nor do I find any glory in the carnage that has befallen our kin. My soul bleeds for every life cut short, for every property razed, and for the peace of mind stolen from our people. My heart goes out to the exiles in their own country, those who look toward the Niger Bridge with longing but are held back by the terror of what lies beyond. Violence, in all its ramifications, is an abomination to our land and our culture, a stain that we must collectively scrub away.
But after the condemnation, we must face the hard, practical question: what next? Here I state, without equivocation, that I support every genuine effort—however unconventional, however risky—that seeks to ensure the discontinuation of this carnage. We are in desperate need of our own moment of reckoning, our own Truth and Reconciliation, our own Good Friday Agreement that heals the deep fractures of the past. This healing will not begin with endless arguments or the rigid posturing of righteousness; it starts with engagement. It starts with the courage to do what may not look right to the purists or sound right to the critics, but is absolutely necessary for our survival. We must bind our wounds, not with silence, but with the difficult work of dialogue. And this is how we genuinely mourn the dead, heal our land, and exorcise the demons that have taken over our land.
Arguments are good. But they won’t save an inch of Igboland.
Ndewo nụ.
©️ AI-KO
