Official Website of Governor Chimaroke Nnamani

Fully impressed be the extent of rural development assumedly brought about by the diffuse effect of more autonomous communities in the State, Traditional Rulers in Enugu, thump for the Governor, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani, whom they view as the rescuer of the erstwhile backward parts of the State which had come to limelight due to the creation of Development Centres and more communities.

Your Excellency, Sir, we are delighted by the ready attention given to our request to pay this courtesy visit, which we wish to use to reaffirm our commitment to your administration and provide further insight into what is going on in the various local communities in Enugu State.

We were not surprised when the response for us to be your guest came barely nine hours after we dispatched our request in writing. We were not surprised because earlier in the life of this your administration, you warned us to understand that those who gave excuses that they could not reach the governor at any time were persons who had other motives, other agenda and possibly mischief in their mind.

Since you made that statement, we did test the waters and at each point, you did prove to us that the era when it would take months to get appointment with a governor or other high state officials were gone for good.

In fact, many of us can attest to the situation where a mere direct phone call to any official of government would attract an immediate response from the Governor himself.

Your Excellency, having lived through regimes, seen various temperaments of leaders in government, we can attest to the fact that the reason your government has dug deep in the mind of the people of Enugu State is because in your liberal nature and approach to governance, you have cleansed the system of old gestures which beclouded intensions of government and raised suspicion. And in you baffling practice of involving everybody in your administration, building a government of those who never hoped to have their talents explored, spreading the values of privilege and opportunities to where it was never fathomed to come from, Your Excellency, you have raised progressive kings where none was, you gave voice to the voiceless, you gave food to the hungry, you gave shelter to the homeless, you consoled the widow, you appointed and nurtured fathers and mothers for the orphan.

Your Excellency, much as these may not have been fully interpreted by all, we, the traditional rulers in Enugu State , know that it has been on this foundation that you built the government policy on creation of more and more autonomous communities; on which you anchored the Development Centre Programme of the Enugu State government.

Today, instead of being emasculated and suffocated in a few communities, we have 436 autonomous communities, most of which already have their traditional rulers recognised and mobilised.

Your Excellency, we understand your gesture. You are saying bye-bye to the era of potentates and yakunzos, who are never fed up with the vast territories at their possession. The era of overriding gburugburus, who would not tolerate any alternative to their voices and who sit in some epicentre of complex traditional wrangling; sucking and munching, as the fringe territories burn and implode.

I am talking of the era in which the areas forming our new autonomous communities were only statistical blobs on the vast chart of the Pharaohs, who never fought to amass the territorial spaces, but who would never let the people be. They would not tolerate the democratisation of the local communities since such threatened their prestige as chieftains of vast territories – afia a zughi, nwa ogbenye eri nni – in which large scale emasculation of ideas, talents and hope for villages, clans, families and other categories were the norm.

It was also an era of far placed local government headquarters heavily hampered in administration of remote and unheard of villages while simple village pupils could hardly pronounce the names of the chief towns (local government headquarters) of their local government areas.

Today, our children who complete university education or gain admission to undertake one can now easily walk to the Development Centres to pick letters of local government of origin. They can easily access other local administration services which, hitherto, were located as far as, tens of kilometres away from each village, and through hideous, deadly village roads and paths. Today, and for the first time for some communities, now nearby agric extension officers (located in the Development Centres) are at hand to help our people in food crop development and cultivation. Indeed, the time between contacts with government, which used to take days are, these days, matters of a few hours; in some cases, minutes.

We praise this effort strongly and we thank God that even as our people were not privileged to be part of the various past exercises in local government creation, the current practice of Development Centre – at no extra cost – assures us that what comes to each Local Government Area, from the Federation Account Allocation can always be spread over to the entire areas – stopping for all times, the ugly practice of some areas remaining perpetually ignored.

Your Excellency, the lesson has registered in all of us that these have not come by accident as you made it clear to us in 1999 that you had returned from the United States to build a government of all; more, a government of those who had ‘perpetually’ been excluded by the erstwhile few masters of our yard.

While thanking Your Excellency for these, we have to confirm here that the devolution of the rank of the Traditional Rulers’ Council, running in three tiers of State Council, Zonal Council and Local Government Council, stands as the model to build leadership and responsibility from the grassroots to the higher echelon of State responsibility. We recommend for other States of the Federation to copy this model, which is a brain child of His Excellency, Governor Chimaroke Nnamani. Today, while members of Traditional Rulers Council at the Local Government levels, work hard, train hard and look forward to upward movement to the Zonal Council, the Zonal players are getting ready to play in the Court of our State Council, which has this special privilege of having its Chiefs’ Chambers in the Eastern Nigeria Parliament Building fully renovated by His Excellency, here with us. We will soon invite His Excellency for the commissioning.

We remain grateful for this structure of local administration and highlighting of our native values just as we thank His Excellency for allocating the right size of plots of land for the construction of Obu Nsukka, which foundation laying, as will be conducted by His Excellency, is awaited.

It is worthy of note that by the special grace of God as he has used His Excellency to expose traditional rulers in Enugu to wider complexes of governance, our members have had the following privileged exposure in governance and political orientation:

1. Today, our members are commonly appointed to boards and parastatals, at Federal and State levels, where we are privileged to bring to bear on the polity, the sensitivities of the local people;
2. Our Principal Officers in the Traditional Rulers’ Council have had special allocation of operational vehicles and facilities to conduct their offices effectively;
3. For the first time, a State Government has expended resources and time to consciously train traditional rulers in what the Chimaroke Administration defines as capacity building, thereby helping local rulers to understand the proper values of democracy as they should be applied, especially in conflict resolution, record keeping of cases, proactive actions to halt deviances and citizen orientation to gauge community feeling for timely responses;
4. Again, for the first time since our era, traditional rulers who have now become indispensable factors in Chimaroke Nnamani’s stakeholder-driven democracy are pleasantly surprised to see themselves as members of policy making bodies, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with eggheads, bureaucrats and politicians, to formulate the State Budget; joining in debates to direct or redirect the course of development and fully exerting our influence on policy making process, just as it should be.
5. By the good disposition of His Excellency, Governor Chimaroke Nnamani, traditional rulers in Enugu, now sit with the ready benefit of experience of members who were exposed to national political power play, which they gained in the last National Political Reform Conference of which they participated and had since imparted on others the grand values in horse-trading, high-stake negotiation and hard-pressed compromises.

Proudly, we say, it could never have been better!

Traditional Rulers in Enugu State are never Oliver Twist but we will continue to ask that the frontiers of operational facilities be extended. Against that background, we most earnestly ask His Excellency to consider the following as further icing on the cake:

1. We pray His Excellency to note that there are still communities where Igwes-elect are still awaiting recognition and coronation; praying that as Government had conducted itself in the past, those Igwes-elect whose election, nomination or ascendance are not contested, should be quickly accorded the right recognition to start functioning;
2. We use this opportunity to request His Excellency to note that as the seasons run, the implements wear, and so we most respectfully pray that the directive given for another set of operational vehicles for the Secretariat of the Traditional Rulers’ Councils be implemented;
3. Having lived the gainful prestige of earning the highest stipend paid to traditional rulers in the entire South East Zone of Nigeria, we urge His Excellency to please take this one more notch up so that other States would never level with us in motivation and entitlements of traditional rulers;
4. Lastly, we wish to appeal to His Excellency to appreciate that as we see in him the beacon of hope for those who never had a voice, the maker of VIPs from amongst nobody(ies), the master of liberalisation of our social and economic configurations, we demand that Government institutes a permanent study of the Diffusion Principles which underline this administration’s success in reaching out to, and remaining in touch with, every set of Enugu people, irrespective of social or political clusters. By this, we are saying that the pattern of grassroots administration and the value-distribution practices which came, and so successfully, in the wake of the Development Centre Programme of Government and numerous Autonomous Communities, need to be connected with the myriad historical evolution of our communities as they arrived, lived and interacted with forces of nature, pressures of man and seasons of uncertainty.

We thank Your Excellency for your time. We remain assured that we are a part of the system and we can help drive the process and we invite every citizen or resident of Enugu State to continue the backing of the Government of Chimaroke Nnamani, as no other can afford the openness and benevolence of he who is driven by the interest of the downtrodden and far forgotten.

To God be the Glory.

Delivered by H.R.H. Igwe (Barrister) Jeremiah Onovoh, Chairman, Enugu State Council of Traditional Rulers, September 27, 2006, Banquet Hall, Government House, Enugu .