Thank you very much gentlemen of the press, my brother (referring to Bassey Inuaeyen) has said it all, what I want to add is that we were informed by the venue committee members who went to set up the canopies and the podiums that the police who came in some truck load of ADUMA police formation said that the order came from the government house, the governor who claimed we didn’t consult him properly or we didn’t consult him or inform him before the event.
What I want to say is that as a law abiding citizen of this country and from the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria 1999 that we have freedom of Association and Assembly, what have we done wrong? That we have decided to work together and come together to make sure we reduce or completely eradicate political crises in our area so that we can work together to chat our future and make sure that we liberate our people from the shackles of ignorance, misunderstanding and the present political oppression to chat our course and also be an entity as a federal constituency where we will contribute our quota to the development of the state.
That we will be able to take part in the analysis of who is fit to govern Akwa Ibom and we want to make sure that anytime anyone wants to come and see us he will come and see the entire constituency and not what it used to be in the past because we are partakers of election, voting and the struggle to put a government and at the end we will not have anything to look back at and we decided that let us now pull ourselves together so that if anyone come to consult us he or she will see all of us together and will tell us what he or she will do for the federal constituency.
What have we done wrong? We are not the first; we have the Ati Annang and other socio political organisations in the state. Nowhere has either the order from above or government or governor would stop their meeting, are they telling us that we don’t belong to Akwa Ibom any more, are they telling us we have lost our independence as a federal constituency? Are they telling us we have lost our autonomy as a people and we should not put ourselves together? The issue of the two paramount rulers are mere concoctions of an attempt to thwart the inauguration because the paramount rulers are not and have never been considered to be part of the NTIPE IBIBIO socio political Association because as of today, except the constitution is so amended, the traditional rulers are not allowed to belong to political and socio political organisations.
They are the custodian of our traditions and culture and that is the part they have to play, nobody expected them to be part of the NTIPPE Ibibio socio political council, they were mere invitees by our attitude of respect as we invited other traditional rulers across Akwa Ibom state. The preparation of this programme has been on for the past 5 to 6 months why should the traditional rulers suddenly decide just three days ago to say they have disassociated themselves from the event? This position of theirs is suspicious.
You must agree with me that there is no smoke without fire and a toad does not run in the day time for nothing. Somebody must have urged them to do so. Because these are the same people we consulted traditionally and all the traditional rites and privileges were accorded them and they even blessed the preparation and the council. And received all the traditional things we gave to them. Why did they just suddenly woke up from sleep and say they were no more associated with the programme? Another point is when the council chairman of Ikono graciously, happily and very delightedly gave us the approval to use the hall and the council premises and just two days ago he suddenly woke up from sleep and said he has withdrawn the approval and we decided, since the NTIPPE IBIBIO Elders council is not a creation of the local government therefore we never insisted that we use the local government facility, we took the function to a private premises, a community school but the police still came and stopped the function and as my brother (referring to Inuaeyen) said, we decided not to fight, where is our strength when whoever sent them had mobilized over 30 pickups (trucks) of security men, how can we fight them with empty hands?
But we have come to the public courts to let the public hear and judge whether we deserve this level of treatment. Where somebody comes and determine the way we want to live our life. Determine how we want to move and what will be in the best interest of the area. When we are forgotten in the area of development, as of today, Ikono does not have one good road constructed by the state government and you have suddenly remembered us to come and stop the inauguration of our association. Why does that person suddenly remember we are part of the state and whatever we want to do we should not do? We pray that the same person will come and change the course of the future of our generation and our children yet unborn so that our future and destiny will be included in the positive note of development not only when we want to form associations.
We want you to ask questions on our behalf, we want the world to hear. Like my brother said, there is no democracy without a vibrant press or media that is why we invited you to tell you the story to make sure that you let the world know how we have been treated as we are not a part of the state, as a mouthpiece of the people, we want you to take our message to the world. So I want to thank you for coming.
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