The Concourse
By Soney Antai, Award-winning columnist
Ibaka Road notes
Death, the ice-old bastard, again struck in Oroland. This time, it snatched away an officer and a gentleman, a titled chief and knight of the Methodist Church Nigeria, Eyo Inuekim, who worked with the Nigerian Customs and rose to the enviable position of a Deputy Comptroller of Customs. He had just retired, we learnt, but death that has in the past few years seemed to be targeting educationally and financially viable Oro people, late last year chose to do its dirty job in the family of the Inuekim’s of Asak Ukang Ebughu, Mbo Local Government Area. It took that second son of the family. And to pay my final respects without any response from him to whom respect was paid, our WatchmanPost team was there in Mbo on 15th March, the day Eyo was buried.
As journalism professionals, our team decided to use the trip to that burial to hunt for some news stories. And which better place could we look? Ibaka became our place of choice. Ibaka, the town once associated with a deep-sea port, and some political buccaneers ipso facto, turned into a cash cow, is located at the tip of the Mbo River that empties into the Gulf of Guinea.
If one is going Ibaka from Oron Town end, one has to go through Enwang, the capital of Mbo Local Government Area. And that’s the way we took.
Between Uyo and Ibaka, there were more than 10 check points. Most of these were manned by policemen and naval ratings while the rest were controlled by young persons who seemed to be working for the local governments along our route. Curiously, most of the checkpoints were inactive, if you know what I mean.
Ibaka arguably hosts the busiest beach market in Akwa Ibom. There is hardly any time you wouldn’t find some 50 to 100 boats moored on the shoreline, which stretches into hundreds of metres. They are there for business. Ibaka has two bus stations just shorter than a kilometre apart of each other; but the busier one is the one closest to the beach.
The place is also host to a Forward Operations Base (FOB) of the Nigerian Navy. It is expanding at the seafront as thatched hovels adorn that frontier. It attracts foreigners from Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, among others, who come there for business. Boats convey passengers from there to and from those countries. Perhaps no other community in the state attracts and harbours a cocktail of foreigners as much as Ibaka does.
Fishing is the primary attraction of these foreigners. In exchange, they bring in an assortment of their own goods for sale. The place attracts more businesses than any other one in Mbo LGA. If you visit Ibaka and have effective demand for fish and or crayfish, you can bet on buying some, and at relatively pocket friendly prices
However, Ibaka has several problems. About two kilometres from Enwang, you see the road to the place becomes a snaky, narrow strip of coal tar patches filled with potholes and bumps. It has been this way for years. The state government or the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) will do well to look at this and tackle it head on.
Marine erosion is as real in Ibaka as the fresh fish you find around its beach. At the beach front, the concrete buffer emplaced to checkmate marine erosion, has given way in some areas thereof. At ebb tide, abandoned and discarded nets are seen trapped inside the sand along the shoreline. Plastic products litter the water front, but nobody seems to see anything wrong with all of that.
Similarly, Ibaka is such a crowded place, especially around the coastline, such that if there is an outbreak of any communicable disease, the impact would be of plagueful proportion. To worsen matters, it is not certain that their source of drinking water around the beach is a hygienic one. It is not also clear how they dispose of their intestinal and associated personal wastes.
Ditto, if any fire should break out, as has happened in the past, the impact would be monumentally catastrophic. That is because of the closeness of each dwelling place to one another, and, as already indicated, the thatch materials with which they are built. In some parts of the area, it is muddy all about, and to facilitate movement, folks place sticks and planks as bridges to walk on to go to wherever they go.
In terms of internally-generated revenue, Ibaka Beach has the potentialities of giving Mbo Local Government more revenue than any other single revenue source. But what is the Local Government Council doing about this? One area it needs to look into is the bus stations in Ibaka. The first one upland, though fenced round and tarred, has been abandoned. This is not proper. It should be put to use while the one close to the water front should only be for cargo-conveying vehicles. This way, the congestion at the beach could be reduced.
The expanding water side could be an incubator of vermins, and we must not wait to be reactive. Some semblance of planning should be done by ensuring that what pass for homes there are not an aggregation of a long line of combustible items waiting for infernal implosion. Such planning could, and would make Ibaka breathe.