How Nnewi People Solved The Power Tussle Between Indigenes And Non-Indigenes

By Azuka Onwuka

When Nnewi people suddenly became a minority in a market they initiated and nurtured for decades in their own land, do you know what they did?

I will tell you.

The Nkwo Nnewi Market was constructed on the Edo sacred land after the pogroms in the North. After the Civil War, many Nnewi people refused to return to their former locations in different parts of Nigeria because of what they had lost. They nurtured the market. At first, it was not popular. But as time went on, it grew and even manufacturing companies were built in the town.

But something interesting happened. The business owners had started by taking their kinsmen as apprentices. This helped to spread wealth around fast. By the 1980s, business owners began to move outside Nnewi and Anambra to Enugu and Ebonyi to take apprentices.

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Decades later, these apprentices, who had become their own bosses, out-numbered Nnewi people by far in all the markets in Nnewi. The implication was that non-indigenes could decide who would be the Chairman of the market associations and the sons of the soil could do nothing.

It created some misunderstanding. But wisdom, foresight and compromise prevailed. The Nnewi people went into an agreement with the non-indigenes: rotational leadership. The Chairmanship rotates between the Nnewi indigenes and non-indigenes, while there is a formula for producing other officers. Everybody feels a sense of belonging. Everybody wins. Nobody gets killed. No property gets burnt. Peace reigns, development continues to occur.