By Emameh Gabriel
This July will mark five years since traders in Onitsha, like other parts of the South East, began complying each Monday with the sit-at-home order from IPOB. Given this entrenched acceptance, their current fury over a week-long order by the government of Anambra State is puzzling. What makes one form (almost five years) of closure tolerable and another unbearable?
The contradiction is hard to understand. For five years, Monday has not been a day for work in much of the South East. It is a day of quiet streets, closed shops, and suspended life. It began as a political statement but has since settled into something else, a heavy, expensive habit. A ritual that costs too much, but one that people have learned to live with.
Governor Chukwuma Soludo, an economist understood the heavy cost of this ritual to the economy of the state. He ordered an end to the Monday sit-at-home, including the continued closure of the Onitsha Main Market. But the traders defied his order and kept their shops shut again this past Monday. In response, the Governor did something no one expected. He closed the Onitsha Main Market himself for a week. And when people took to the streets to protest his closure, he extended it by another twelve days.
Who were they really protesting? Was it the governor who stepped in to break a cycle of loss? Or was it the pressure from IPOB that kept them locked down each week? The confusion tells its own story.
It is a strange thing to watch and as a Nigerian, I feel a deep unease seeing this unfold. Here is a people famed for enterprise, for making something from nothing, for building markets across the world. Yet in their own homeland, they are caught in a pattern that does the opposite.
And it is especially painful because many of these traders may not fully understand one simple truth: the market is not a neutral space. It belongs to the government. The government that built the roads leading into it, that provides the police post nearby, that enforces the contracts and settles the disputes. How can one obey an order that closes the market, yet protest the government that keeps it safe? This defies the basic logic of a functioning society.
Governor Soludo’s move is courageous not because it is loud, but because it is firm. For too long, this Monday ritual has been met with speeches and sympathies, but little else. He has done something different: he has introduced a consequence. If you will not open for fear of an invisible command, then you will not open at all until you remember whose authority allows you to trade in the first place.
The loss, when you hear them, make you wonder how this has gone on for so long. Anambra State loses nearly N20 billion each month to these Mondays stay silent. Across the South East, the loss over four years is close to N7.6 trillion. That is not just money missing from a ledger. That is school fees not paid, jobs not created, goods not sold, ambitions not met. It is a slow draining of vitality from one of Nigeria’s most vibrant regions.
What began as a voice of protest has long since lost its message. Now, it is just a habit, a costly, destructive routine. It no longer serves the people; it only burdens them. The real shackles are not on anyone’s wrists in detention, but on the hands of the same business community in the state.
And who pays the price? Always the same people. The woman selling tomatoes by the road, whose goods spoil by Tuesday. The bus driver who makes no fare. The student missing lessons week after week and exams year after years. The loss is not shared equally; it falls hardest on those who live day by day.
There is a deeper damage here, one that goes beyond money. When a whole region accepts that one day in every seven is for hiding, it changes something in the spirit. The famed Igbo industriousness is not a gift; it is a practice. It is kept alive by doing, by opening the shop, by starting the engine, by showing up. A generation is learning that some days are not for showing up. That is a dangerous lesson.
So what is to be done?
To the other governors of the South East: Soludo has stepped forward. He has drawn a line. Your silence now is a weight on his effort. This is not an Anambra problem alone. It is a regional stagnation. It needs your voices, unified, clear, and backed by action. Protect those who wish to work. Give them the confidence that the state is behind them. One governor cannot rebuild what five years have broken; it needs all of you.
To the people of the South-East: This will only end when you decide it is over. No one can give you back your Mondays; you must take them back. The power of any order lies in the obedience it receives. Withdraw the obedience, and the order becomes empty words. Open your shop not because you are brave, but because it is yours. Send your child to school because their future cannot wait. Do it together, and the spell is broken.
It is easy to speak of rights and freedoms in grand terms. But sometimes freedom is a simple thing: it is the right to open your door on a Monday morning and go to work without having to explain why. Governor Soludo has reminded everyone that the government exists to protect that simple right.
The South-East cannot claim its place in Nigeria if it voluntarily steps out of the flow of commerce each week. You cannot ask for a share in the national promise while withholding your own contribution.
This is not just about politics or protest. It is about survival. The future of a people is built on what they do daily, not what they avoid, but what they build. It is time to build again. It is time to return to Mondays, to work, to life. The market is waiting. The government has spoken. The rest is now up to the people.
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