The Board of Trustees Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Chekwas Okorie, has hailed President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for signing into law the South East Development Commission Bill.
According to report the bill was first sponsored in 2017 by Hon Chukwuka Onyema, representing Ogbaru Federal Constituency, Anambra State, in the House of Representatives but did not survive the second reading.
However, in 2024, Rt. Hon Benjamin Kalu, the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, resuscitated the bill and expanded its scope.
The bill was passed with commendable speed, and the Senate did not delay in giving its concurrence.
President Tinubu then assented to the bill expeditiously, which gave birth to what is now the South East Development Commission Act.
The Act, among other specified objectives, is principally aimed at addressing the infrastructural and other developmental deficits resulting from the fratricidal Nigeria-Biafra war that ended in 1970.
Chekwas recalled that the Federal Government of Nigeria, under General Yakubu Gowon, announced the policy of “No Victor, No Vanquished” and pledged to implement the programme of Reconciliation, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction (3R) in the war-ravaged part of the then Biafra enclave, which is now in the South East geopolitical zone of Nigeria.
The commitment of the Federal Government of Nigeria to deliver on the 3R was observed in the breach.
For approximately 50 years after the end of the war, there was no visible federal presence in accordance with the objective of the 3R.
“It is in this light that I see the patriotic action of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in enacting the South East Development Commission Act as a bold step to heal the wounds of the civil war and restore to the people of the South East geopolitical zone their well-deserved and long-overdue sense of belonging in Nigeria,” he said in a statement he signed in Abuja on Thursday.
“We look forward to sincere and honest funding of the commission to carry out its core objectives.
“I urge our people at home and in the diaspora to cooperate and collaborate with the Federal Government of Nigeria to help the commission achieve the lofty objectives for which it is established. It is said that it is better late than never.
“After more than 50 years since the end of the war, the promise made then is about to be fulfilled under the leadership of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.”
