ATTACK ON AKWA IBOM WOMEN BY BARR. INIBEHE EFFIONG AND WHY HE HAS PROVEN HIS NUISSANCE VALUE BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT.

 

To say the least, we are worried and embarrassed to see the sorrowful condition in Akwa Ibom State in the past one week occasioned by the gruesome murder of Miss Iniubong Umoren made more sorrowful by the mischievous, self-glorifying and grandstand antics of one Barr. Inibehe Effiong. 

Apart from his theatrical ubiquity and habitual interloping, his insolent, ill-advised and mendacious serial assault and insult on the sanctity of government, His Excellency, Governor Udom Emmanuel and Wife, Dr. (Mrs.) Martha Emmanuel, we have stumbled upon a baseless and contemptuous article on conventional and social media platforms in which statements are traced to the same recalcitrant Barr. Inibehe Effiong, titled:  “A’Ibom Lawyer Condemns Women’s Protest Over Iniubong’s Death, Says It’s Political”. 

One boneless sentence in his invectives quips: “Why should the Commissioner for Women Affairs and other female political office holders and female politicians be the ones leading this all important rally?” This is a stunt by a cunning racketeer who thinks he can reap where he never bothered to sow in his desperation and haughtiness.

We are tempted to ask in auto-reverse: Why should Barr. Inibehe Effiong be the rabble-rouser in a State his only evident contributions are scandal, blackmail and noise pollution? Is this toddling lawyer the only Human Rights Activists from and in Akwa Ibom State who is aware of the murder of Miss Iniubong Umoren? 

Responsible lawyers and conscientious human rights advocates do not play the butterfly. They do not make names or get respect by force but earn it through years of rigorous decent labour and impactful expertise of populist dimension.

Because we were all part of the protest, and we will do more of such in days ahead should we have fresh cause to do so, we hereby wish to categorically state as follows:

I.That Akwa Ibom women do not celebrate misfortune to gratify egotism or spite political foes. They mourn with those who mourn and dance with those who dance. This alien trend from Babylon that Inibehe in his insolence frantically seeks to introduce is strongly rejected. 

2. That our happiness in this sadness is that Iniubong was a typical decent and goal-oriented young Akwa Ibom lady in search of legal means of survival; not like one of those at street corners that Barr. Inibehe always picks for nocturnal escapades. So, even at death we are proud of Miss Iniubong Umoren.   

3. That if Barr. Inibehe Effiong would saucily misconstrue as politics and would not expect Her Excellency, Dr. (Mrs.) Martha Emmanuel, the adorable and celebrated architect of Family Empowerment and Youth Reorientation Path Initiative (FEYReP), to be devastated and go wild over the murder of a resourceful and promising 26-year-old female graduate, it clearly proves what irrational and nihilistic split-personality political sentimentalism has turned this vagabond lawyer into.   

4. That if the brutal extermination of a girl-child after four years in the university would not promptly draw the ire and sympathy of loving and concerned women and mothers like the Deputy Speaker of the Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly, Rt. Hon. Princess Felicia Bassey; Commissioner for Women Affairs, Dr. Ini Adiakpan; Commissioner for Agriculture, Dr. Glory Edet, etc, who have been pillars and anchors for gender advocacy in their respective offices, leading a retinue of other depressed Akwa Ibom mothers and women in their ranks, to demand for justice for Iniubong’s death, then one must be forgiven to assert that Barr. Inibehe Effiong needs emergency psychiatric diagnosis.   

  

5.That the women have no regrets over the necessary step they took to publicly express their sympathy and emphatically drum into the ears of those handling the matter to be wary of smart merchants with dead conscience like Barr. Inibehe Effiong, who may have a cartel of barons whose eyes are tenaciously fixed on money than justice.   

6. That although Barr. Inibehe Effiong by now has left nobody in doubts about his selfish and ulterior motives in swooping upon the calamity that has befallen the bereaved family, we are nevertheless still curious about more ridiculous dimensions he may want to drag this infantile showmanship to, before commonsense persuades him otherwise.  

7. That although Inibehe is entitled to his personal cosmetic opinions, degrading the essence and utility of advocacy to the despicable level he has picks big holes in his academic credentials.  Since it appears that Barr. Inibehe Effiong’s overt or covert target is to desecrate the nobility of the legal profession by his fault of incorrigibility for some stale wraps of moi moi and expired packets of yogurt, we wish to advise him out of concern that faces like his scarcely go far in such adventurism. 

8. That only a person who has or is about to lose every instinct and component of humanity would chose to celebrate Iniubong Umoren’s barbaric murder the way Inibehe Effiong has; mocking the innocent girl’s memory and trivializing the misfortune with a flurry of fallacies and sentiments in the media. 

If not, one wonders why this over-excited charge-and-bail so-called lawyer has, by arrogation and boomerang presumptuousness, chosen to be a gadfly who has been deceived and doomed to always capitalize on every eventuality to make useless noise on every street corner, even when and where he has no audience. Could this be how madness initially begins for a scoundrel in the law profession? 

But whom does Inibehe Effiong really represent? If Akwa Ibom youth were to choose a representative to champion a cause for them, what is the ratio of probability that Barr. Inibehe in his testimonial impudence and loquaciousness would fall among the first Twenty Million, and what madness would drive him to think otherwise in a demography that had since pronounced persona non grata upon him? 

It therefore might shock only a fresh stranger in the State that, of all his claimed relevance, as a rabble-rouser and notorious tout on Court corridors, none of the governors of the State from creation or his sanctimonious paymasters had ever found him worthy to be entrusted with any responsibility, even that of being in charge of the refuge dumpsite along Eka Street. 

And we ask: Assuming Iniubong Umoren was Inibehe’s sibling or biological sister, would he have chosen to attract the world’s attention to himself over her sorrowful death and distract focus from the ongoing investigations by the police and others involved the way he is doing now? It beats every sense of decency and logic for someone who flaunts himself as a human rights defender to act in sharp contrast to the conscious sensitivity that should drive and dignify that designation. 

We are aware that the name “Inibehe” in Ibibio wordstock entails both opportunity and possibility. There exist windows of opportunity for Barr. Inibehe Effiong to turn a new leaf, having grossly erred and derailed in the foregoing.   

*Sponsored by Akwa Ibom Young Women Initiative and Emancipation