However, there are influences from outside that are still trying to dampen the spirit of the people but they have refused the negative advances. The Ijaw, Itsekiri, Urhobo, Yoruba, Hausa, Edo, Igbo, Isoko, all of us are now coming together as one. There was a time in the last few years when you cannot see the Ijaw, Itsekiri and Urhobo man coming together to do anything. We are now organising joint fiesta in Warri. People are not gainfully employed and that is the reason for these vices, which is not peculiar to Warri alone. It has to be tackled and there will not be violence and theft anymore in Warri. It is obvious, however, that there is so much unemployment in Warri. If you drive out at 11p.m., you wil see that relaxation spots are back, people are there and are happy. But now, you see life is bouncing all Warri, Effurun, Udu. A few years ago, you cannot even leave your house at 8p.m. But I can tell you that things are gradually coming back.
However, somewhere along the line, that peace and security was broken. The Warri that I know is the Warri where I go out and come back, sleep until anytime in the night without molestation. Sometimes, even at midnight, one could go out to a club (there were very many clubs then), without a car trek a distance of even up to five kilometres, have a good time, come back home with or without a taxi and fear no harassment on the road. They are alien forces they came from outside and were not born in Warri. However, I can tell you that the walls of enmity, which they built, are being shattered with what Warri Rebirth Initiative is doing. They only came for parochial and economic reasons and in order to get whatever they think they wanted, they needed to kill their brother. If they grew up in Warri, they will not see their brother as enemy. The alien forces, as far as I am concerned, are the Itsekiri, Urhobo and Ijaw, who did not grow up in Warri, who do not see the unity we are talking about. When we meet, we evoke the one- family phenomenon and we are hoping that it will grow more than that to the extent that we will expunge the alien forces that put disunity among us. That disunity is what we are trying to remove from our midst by our coming together. But people came from outside and overwhelmed us. They brought disunity. They came and sowed it.Īn original Warri boy, whether Urhobo, Itsekiri or Ijaw never cared about where you came from. This discord was brought by people who never grew up in Warri. It was ethnic fight that brought that it into our midst. However, as I said before, the Ijaw, Itsekiri and Urhobo are saying that they did not create this problem. It had never been so and it was not so in our time. It is not correct to say that the relationship between Ijaw and Itsekiri has been hostile. It is the idea that we have and will start implementing from January 2016.įrom observation, the attitude of the average Ijaw and Itsekiri man to each other is that of hostility. We discovered that some alien forces, call them strange people, have sown the seed of discord already in the children and we must break it if we are to move forward.
But, unfortunately, after the meetings we have not been able to see this same spirit carried on by members from different ethnic nationalities coming together again. That is not the vision we have Our vision is for everybody to be his brother’s keeper just as we used to be.īecause of this, we have decided that in the next few months, we are going to ask all our members to start coming to general meetings with their children so that the children will know that my parents lived with so and so persons from different ethnic groups they enjoyed themselves, so why can we not follow their example. That is to the extent I will say that we have succeeded.
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