Tunde Odesola
Sometimes, words create accidental rhyme where meaning does not. Etymologically, ‘Moses’ and ‘Osmosis’ are not related, even though they sound similar, and both bear a sense of ‘passing through’. Osmosis, a Greek word, literally suggests water passing through a boundary, just as Moses, the Anglicised version of Moshe, a Hebrew name, means “to draw out” of water.
Though he grew up in the palace of Pharaoh, biblical Moses brimmed with so much daredevilry that he killed an Egyptian for flogging a Hebrew slave, convinced that no human eye saw him nor the nose of the law scented the blood on his hands. Moses must have thought himself a patron saint, until he attempted to broker peace in a two-fighting fracas involving his Hebrew compatriots the next day, but was rudely reminded of the Egyptian blood he had spilt a day before. With his cover blown open, Moses went cold with fear and fled the fury of Pharaoh.
Today, I come in the likeness of Moses, having myself lived far away from home at the dawn of my youth. In the 1980s, I had journeyed to the south-east and schooled in the then-Imo State, now Abia, a neighbouring state to Ebonyi, where heads have been falling and blood has been gushing from kin’s neck veins. I am not Hebrew. I am Yoruba. Call me Ngbati-Ngbati Moses, I won’t complain. But my Moses is not a murderer.
My Moses is worried about the killings of the Igbo by the Igbo in Igboland. Ebonyiland is tired, sick, and bloated with human blood. Splosh! Splash! Splosh! Splash! Splosh! Splash! Marauding footsteps spurt blood in sodden fields. In the Okporojo community, which has turned into a battlefield between Edda and Amasiri, former brothers aim at brothers, shooting – pa, pa, po, po, and jumping for joy, thronging to church on Sabbath, pouring libations at shrines, thanking the Lord that the AK-47 they fired hit their neighbouring brothers in the heads. Widows are multiplying. Orphans are swarming. Bloodshed over the Okporojo land dispute. Vanity upon vanity. Dust fighting dust over dust!
I recall. Despite priding themselves as sophisticated and accommodating, the Yoruba, during the 1990s and 2000s, engaged in an orgy of madness similar to the one ongoing in Ebonyi now, when the Ife and the Modakeke engaged in a communal conflict, dispatching many lives to their graves, maiming limbs, shattering peace and property. Also in the 1990s, the Aguleri-Umuleri communal war over land in Anambra State marked another conflict that showed the threadlike demarcation between sanity and insanity, attesting to the consanguinity between man and beast.
Secondary school science taught me that osmosis occurs when water passes from a region of higher water concentration to a region of lower water concentration through a semipermeable membrane. From a figurative perspective, however, osmosis can occur in a bowl of clean water when gari is poured gently into it, and the gari rises towards the water line. Like osmosis occurring in a living cell, the gari draws water into its dry grains, swelling and pushing water upward. Thus, when matters spiral beyond control, Nigerians say with weary resignation, ‘water don pass gari’. In Amasiri and Edda, water has indeed passed gari. Here, ‘water don pass gari’ serves as a proverbial osmosis. Like Moses and osmosis, whose meanings both whisper water tones, the very name Ebonyi itself flows from water. It means a great river. Tragically, that river has turned red now.
The senseless killings in Amasiri and Edda, and the knee-jerk response of the Governor Francis Nwifuru-led state government in tackling the situation have shown that truly ‘water don pass gari’. While the approach of the governor to the issue is far less than desirable, the jocular reference of President Bola Tinubu to the killings is worrisome.
On February 23, 2026, the President, during the breaking of the Lenten and Ramadan fast with some governors in the Presidential Villa, jokingly said, “I am glad I can see (Governor) Abba from Kano. Even though the cap is red, it is not different from that of the Ebonyi State governor. Ebonyi governor, I saw the crisis on the news, please temper justice with mercy.” The President’s quote I reference here was taken from a statement issued by his spokesperson, Mr Bayo Onanuga.
The President’s statement paints some disturbing scenarios. One: Is the President saying there was no security report on the Ebonyi calamity, and that he only got to watch the crisis on the news? Two: For the President to lamely urge Nwifuru to ‘temper justice with mercy’ weeks after watching the crisis on TV means that the President did nothing to save the situation after he watched it. Three: If the President acted when he saw the news, he wouldn’t be asking Nwifuru to ‘temper justice with mercy’. And, is NwifurMr.a law court? Four: Did the lukewarm attitude of Mr President on the Ebonyi crisis not fuel the anti-Igbo allegation being levelled against the Federal Government in some quarters? Five: How can the Federal Government remain unperturbed when more than 150 people have been feared dead in the communal crisis, and hundreds are living in dehumanising conditions? Six: Was the Amasiri-Edda crisis deliberately downplayed by some forces in the nation’s security agencies to deceive the President? Seven: What has the President done since the governor shunned his advice to temper justice with mercy?
If King David were a Nigerian, Psalm 23 would probably have read like this, “….Thou preparest a table before Mr President, in the presence of some governors, including Nwifuru; thou anointest their heads with oil, their cups overflowed. Even though Amasiri and Edda walk through the valley of the shadow of death, the President is unconcerned…”
Decades-long land dispute is at the heart of the conflict involving the two warring communities, with Amasiri staking historic claims to Okporojo land where Esa-Odo people reside today. The Okporojo area consists of fertile farmlands, which Amasiri traditionally claims, but which, in today’s border demarcation reality, is under the control of Essa-Odo. In the bid to find a solution to the perennial land conflict, Governor Dave Umahi worked with the state legislature and stakeholders to put Amasiri under the newly established Afikpo Local Government Area, carved out from the defunct Afikpo-North Local Government Area, just as Edda was moved to the newly created Edda Local Government Area, carved out from Afikpo-South Local Government Area. This patchwork notwithstanding, the, ideological fault lines of competition, suspicion and survival had set Amasiri and Edda on the path of perpetual conflict.
Unregulated increase in population negates a consumer economy such as Nigeria’s, with farmlands and water growing scarcer, and competition for land becoming fiercer. The inability of past Ebonyi State governments to implement drafted white papers, recommendations, and demarcate the boundaries between warring Ebonyi communities over land, especially Amasiri and Essa-Odo, is a failure of governance.
Findings showed that the Umahi administration set up a committee that worked on a report produced by the administration of the first executive governor of Ebonyi, Dr Sam Egwu. Consequently, the Umahi-initiated committee made some recommendations on the report, ref,lecting boundary adjustments between Amasiri, Edda anditsr communities in the region. The committee submitted their recommendations to Governor Umahi about the time he was leaving office in 2023. The committee had 12 representatives from both Amasiri and Edda, with the traditional ruler of Amasiri as chairman. Therefore, Umahi handed over the recommendations to his successor, Nwifuru. But the recommendations have yet to be implemented.
Sources close to the state government disclosed that Nwifuru, however, read the committee report to the hearing of Amasiri and Edda representatives at a peace meeting in his office, where both parties agreed that the content of the document was authentic. It was while the parties were waiting for the government to implement the report, about three years into the administration of Nwifuru, that disaster struck in Okporojo, where no fewer than four persons were killed and beheaded.
Speaking with me in a telephone interview, the Chief Press Secretary to Nwifuru, Mr Monday Uzor, explained that the state governor was fair and proactive in the solutions proffered for the crisis. Uzor said one month before the latest attack on January 29, 2026, the two warring communities, including their traditional rulers, signed a peace agreement, pledging to maintain the status quo and allow peace to reign, pending the planned demarcation of boundaries by the state government.
Inter alia, Uzor said an agreement was signed by both communities, but that less than a month after the agreement, an attack was carried out on Oso-Edda indigenes living on Okporojo land by Amasiri people, resulting in the deaths of no fewer than four persons, adding that the state government had taken steps to restore normalcy. The CPS maintained that if the governor had not moved swiftly, there would have been reprisals.
He said, “The government imposed some sanctions. Initially, it imposed a 2 p.m. to 10 a.m. curfew. The curfew is now from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., and security agencies have been deployed to maintain law and order.” When asked to comment on the allegation of generalisation and partiality on the part of the governor, who meted out punishment to the entire Amasiri town for the alleged sin of a faceless few when Amasiri had also lost lives and property in the past, Uzor retorted, “How is the governor partial? Part of the conditions given is for Amasiri to provide the heads of those beheaded. If somebody is buried without a head in Igboland, it is believed that such a person will not rest in peace. This is why the heads should be recovered to give the dead befitting burials and bring their killing to a closure.”
Defending the governor for sacking all Amasiri political appointees in the executive arm, Uzor said it was a move in the right direction because Edda kept to the spirit and letter of the peace deal signed before the resurgence of hostilities on January 29, 2026, but Amasiri flouted the deal by resorting to violence. “Amasiri are not only having problems with Okporojo people, but they are also having boundary issues with Akpoha, where they beheaded someone and buried him in a shallow grave,” Uzor said.
Aside from sacking all political appointees from Amasiri, including the Commissioner for Tertiary Education, Prof Amari Omaka (SAN); Coordinator, Amasiri Development Centre, Mr Anya Baron Ogbonna; six management members of the centre, three Special Advisers, Christian Pilgrims Board member, Secretary to Afikpo Local Government Council, among others, Nwifuru also abrogated the Ebonyi State House of Assembly-approved Amasiri Development Centre in Amasiri, which had been in existence before he became governor. The centre is one of the 64 development centres created by the state government across various communities of the state to enhance development. Twelve of the 13 LGs of Ebonyi have five development centres each, with Ivo LG having four, thereby making 64 development centres in all.
Even if Satan was called to adjudicate in this matter, he would find Nwifuru guilty of highhandedness and nail him to the cross. Satan would uphold the plea of President Tinubu for King Kong Nwifuru to temper justice with mercy. By sacking all political appointees and grounding Amasiri schools, hospitals, churches, etc, the governor has not acted like a snake swallowing its tail. With lives reportedly being lost due to the closure of hospitals, chemists, etc., in Amasiri, Nwifuru is creating another humanitarian problem. How would the governor feel if he travels to the US, for instance, and he is bundled into prison because a Nigerian he does not know had run afoul of the law? By giving all the people of Amasiri a blanket treatment over the alleged action of a few, Governor Nwifuru has announced his government’s utter unbelief in the security agencies, including the police and the DSS. He has not acted any better than those who have allegedly been spilling blood on either of the two sides of the divide, because might and vindictiveness have been the fuel behind the killings. The governor’s action goes to say that if he had a state police force under his watch, he probably would have unleashed it on the people of Amasiri in his annoyance at the despicable killing of Edda indigenes in Okporojo on January 29, 2026. But do two wrongs make a right?
Between 2021 and 2023, when Nwifuru was Speaker of the House of Assembly, a land crisis occurred between his Izzi Local Government community and the Ikwo community, in which many people were killed. Deputy President-General, Amasiri Town Union, Chief Maduka Amadi, said no fewer than 13 people were killed on September 12, 2025, when violence again erupted between Izza and Ikwo people, stressing that the governor did not clamp down on either of the two communities.
Maduka added that many persons were killed on February 18, 2026, in a land dispute between Effium and Ezza-Effium people of Ebonyi, saying that, “In all these crises, the governor has kept mute and didn’t declare a state of emergency.”
But the Chairman, Edda Clan Committee on Resolution of Amasiri-Edda Crisis, Mr George Ukpai, a lawyer, debunked the allegations of victimisation by the Amasiri community as false. In a telephone interview with me, Ukpai, who sounded thorough and refined, alleged that Amasiri launched a characteristic attack on Okporojo despite a peace pact signed by both sides, resulting in the loss of lives on January 29, 2026.
To be continued.
