For sometimes now, the World Igbo Congress has been afflicted by a negative press and a dwindling image quotient among the Igbo for whom that yearly conference is convoked. The anger of most Igbo is that the World Igbo Congress is all talks and no action. They charge that the World Igbo Congress seems to be stranded on the conceptual stage of what Igbo problems are and the ways to go about tackling them. The belief that such approach stands to rather play around than tackle the Igbo problems. They have gone ahead to term the WIC as a useless and sterile jamboree, serving different mundane purposes for the convokers and the attendees but certainly not aimed at resolving the social, political and economic crisis Igboland has been plunged into especially since after the civil war.

For me, I only express sympathy for WIC because I know that it is a good idea that has been carelessly handled. It was a project that is still sound on ideas but lax on the willpower to take it some steps further than the lofty promises on which it was birthed. Entrapped in this dilemma, WIC had been mishandled to serve the vain and loathsome needs of some Igbo politicians, businessmen and avatars who now see it as a yearly ritual to sound off and engage in self-celebration while the Igbo problems deepen and assume a frightening dimension. While this perversion of what started as a well-heeled initiative lasted, the organizers allowed themselves to be ensnared by the worldly ways of the recurrent characters that are responsible for the progressive degeneration of the Igbo society. It is in this Sheol that most Igbo wonder why the World Igbo Congress is still stranded in sterile organization of yearly talk-shops, several years after it berthed. It is this feeling of frustration that is breeding a raging anti-WIC sentiment in Igboland today that one wonders if the WIC will survive few years in future or if it can even maintain the paltry image quotient it is having today. What more, the WIC is beset presently by a schism that may have flowed from this feeling of frustration on what it ultimately aims at achieving for Igbo.

For me, I don’t really believe we should bankrupt the WIC and throw it into our rich garbage heaps of brilliant ideas gone awry. I don’t think we should consign WIC into another failed project and look for ways to form another group that may even meet a worse fate than the WIC. I feel we should rather help the WIC to re-discover itself and play its envisaged frontal role in the practical development of Igboland. We must all assist the WIC to re-shape and re-mould its mission to serve more purposeful and more discernable meaning for Ndigbo both at home and in the Diaspora. To do this, the organizers of the WIC must show some reasonable degree of flexibility to admit that they have not really delivered on what they initially set out to achieve. They have neither provided conceptual clarity nor given a practical fillip to the solution to Igbo problems and this means that they must not continue clinging on the high horse that they are doing great. They must be humble enough to admit where they have fallen short of the expectations of Ndigbo and open their minds to imbibe and employ newer ideas and initiatives to the quest to give Igbo the needed jump-starting to reclaim their pride of place in the Nigeria nation.

I am therefore suggesting;

•  That the WIC should form a viable tripartite Action Committee made up of Igbo in Diaspora, the various state governments in Igboland and Ndigbo at home, working through several organizations and the respective town unions to tackle the problems in Igboland.
• Such committee should employ the executive powers of the state governments and the spirit of we-feeling that drive the Igbo famed self-help developments drive to identify and execute strategic projects and initiatives that are germane for the effective growth of Igboland.
• Projects should be identified in critical sectors like education, health, industries, etc and funded through a counterpart funding that would require the state (and local) governments to provide 60 per cent, Ndigbo in the Diaspora 20 per cent and Ndigbo at home to provide 20 per cent of the total monetary requirements to execute these projects.
• The Action Committee may aim to build one secondary school of excellence, complete with all facilities in each of the fifteen senatorial zones in the South East and one in Delta within one year. Through the common fund, these projects could be executed and the appropriate staff recruited to man these educational centers.
• The Action Committee can extend its intervention to University and Primary education later after establishing secondary school centers of excellence. There is no way why it cannot set up one world-class university in Igboland and one model primary school in each local government in Igboland through this process.
• The Action Committee may take health the next year and decide to build, say one health center of excellence in each of the five states of the South East.
• It could further go on and intervene in so many other critical sectors that drive growth and ensure they compliment every effort with the necessary human resources to ensure they are ran to the best standard in the world and retain their durability.
• Areas of intervention could span housing, roads, provision of potable water, agriculture, etc. The WIC, having worked for several years in bringing both the government and the governed, the Diaspora and home based to talk and jaw jaw on Igbo problems, is well positioned to secure the cooperation of Igbo to this initiative.
• Igbo at home have a rich history of such communal approach to common problems and would not mind making compulsory yearly contribution for the common good. The various autonomous communities and the town unions are always useful in this kind of endeavor.
• Igbo in Diaspora in various countries have ways of enumerating themselves and working towards a common goal and would easily meet its own funding obligations by taxing themselves.
• The respective governments in the South East can devote a chunk of their yearly budgets towards meeting their own counterpart funding agreements. This will greatly divest them of the task of meeting the least expectations of the people in the areas this committee choose to intervene. 

I have just strived to string my thoughts on what the WIC needs to play themselves back to the hearts of Ndigbo and strike meaningful impact among them. I am not saying, by any means, that the prescriptions are exhaustive and would cure all Igbo problems. They are just results of trying to guess what WIC needs to do to reclaim the hallowed grounds it has lost through its open-ended conferences. It should be noted that these ideas could further be exposed to rigorous analysis to see their viability or otherwise and numerous meetings and further engagements need be adopted to meld the common front needed for the successful implementation of these and like recommendations. It should also be noted here that I am prescribing a twin-role of catalyst and active participant for the WIC and this will free it of the charge of organizing annual jamborees to celebrate inanities while Igboland degenerate and also give value to Igbo people that look up to it for leadership in these trying times.

Peter Claver Oparah.

Ikeja, Lagos.

E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 For sometimes now, the World Igbo Congress has been afflicted by a negative press and a dwindling image quotient among the Igbo for whom that yearly conference is convoked. The anger of most Igbo i...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 13.10.2008 15:34