Ever since the events of last Saturday in Owerri, Imo State, when people invaded the field to loot empowerment and palliative items donated by the visiting City Boys movement led by Seyi Tinubu, there have been a thousand and one theories, most of them aimed at apportioning blame without offering a single concrete solution. Though it was a political gathering convened to drive the re-election campaign of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, many have conveniently lost sight of the event’s social dimension and what it reveals about Nigeria’s broader economic trajectory.
Some theorists have been rational, attributing the stampede to hunger and faulting the organisers for failures of crowd control. Others have been outright ridiculous, suggesting that power struggles within APC structures triggered the chaos. But one Sandra Duru has gone further still; she has turned a crowd management incident into a political witch hunt, targeting Governor Hope Uzodimma with accusations of security failure. According to Duru, “Governor Hope Uzodimma showed glaring failures in his role as Chief Security Officer of the state.” She further alleged that what happened gave the lie to the governor’s assurances that Imo State was safe.
It is necessary to interrogate that claim, not out of any impulse to abdicate responsibility, but because the claim is constitutionally illiterate and factually hollow, and it deserves to be treated as such.
Every person with a working knowledge of Nigeria’s security architecture knows that no governor possesses the authority to issue a directive to the lowest rank and file of the military or the police. That power is vested exclusively in the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, exercised through service chiefs, theatre commanders, and police commissioners deployed to the states. Governors collaborate with security agencies, they provide logistics support, enhance troop welfare, and facilitate inter-agency coordination. They do not command. The title “Chief Security Officer of the State” is a colloquialism, not a constitutional designation conferring operational command. For a person bearing the title of Professor to weaponise a term she has not bothered to properly understand is, at best, intellectually negligent.
Now, as for the security situation in Imo State, only a wilful partisan or a rank ignoramus would refuse to acknowledge the transformation from where the state stood between 2021 and 2022 and where it stands today. Working in close collaboration with security agencies and the federal government, the Uzodimma administration has decisively stabilised the security environment. The evidence is not rhetorical. A procession of high-profile conferences hosted by the army, the police, and other national institutions in Owerri is not the behaviour of organisations that consider a state unsafe. Indeed, it was only months ago that Imo hosted the first-ever Imo Economic and Investment Summit, which drew presidents, prime ministers, and global investors to Owerri without a single untoward incident. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, standing on Imo soil, declared that contrary to widespread fear and insinuation, Nigeria was, in fact, safe. To now suggest, on the basis of a single crowd management incident, that Governor Uzodimma has been blowing hot air about security is not analysis. It is petty confabulation, and it does not deserve the dignity of being called commentary.
Beyond the constitutional and empirical failures of Duru’s argument, there is the fundamental failure of logic. Stampedes of this nature are neither exclusive to Imo State nor the product of governance failure. In 2024 alone, Nigeria witnessed at least 96 deaths across seven deadly stampede incidents. Over the past thirteen years, nearly 300 lives have been lost nationally to this recurring tragedy; in Oyo, in Ibadan, in Abuja, in Anambra, and in the Federal Capital Territory. The causes are structural and national: desperation, overcrowding at relief distribution points, and the basic arithmetic of insufficient resources meeting overwhelming need. In Ibadan, organisers promised food to 5,000 children; more than 15,000 arrived. In Kwara State in 2013, a food distribution at the residence of then-Senate President Bukola Saraki claimed 20 lives. Between 2010 and 2011, similar incidents in the same state killed 36 people; 11 at a campaign event in November 2010 and 25 more during palliative distribution at an inauguration the following May. To pin a national crisis of poverty and crowd dynamics exclusively on the Governor of Imo State requires a level of intellectual dishonesty that should disqualify anyone from serious commentary, let alone from the rank of professor.
There is also the matter of Duru’s opening protestation of non-partisanship; a claim that does not survive the first three paragraphs of her own article. A writer who volunteers, unprompted, that the President is her mentor and that she has followed his career since Lagos; who closes by praising security arrangements in states governed by his political allies; and who reserves her entire prosecutorial energy for a governor of the same party, that writer is not non-partisan. She is partisan with the serial numbers filed off. Whether she carries a party card or not is beside the point. Her loyalties are written plainly into the structure of her argument, and no disclaimer at the top of the page can undo what the rest of the page reveals.
What this exposes is not a principled critic holding power to account but a writer nursing a personal grievance and reaching for the nearest available incident to ventilate it. If her concern were genuinely security, she would have engaged the national pattern of stampede tragedies, the constitutional limits of gubernatorial authority, or the documented evidence of Imo’s security trajectory. She engaged in none of these. She saw an opportunity to diminish Governor Uzodimma, and she took it selectively, recklessly, and without a shred of the analytical rigour that her academic title implicitly promises. The rest is noise.
What is further telling is that Duru draws a sweeping conclusion about the governor’s security record from a single incident while entirely ignoring the documented evidence to the contrary. Is this the first major crowd-pulling event to have been hosted in Imo State? Certainly not. On 13th October 2025, Governor Uzodimma unveiled the MyImoApp and simultaneously empowered 10,000 youths with digital tools. The event was massive. It was orderly. Nothing happened. A few weeks later, he empowered another 10,000 people in the state. The venue was jam-packed. Nothing happened. In logic, a discipline one presumes a professor ought to respect, you do not construct a general conclusion from a single data point while suppressing the mountain of evidence that contradicts you. Duru has done exactly that, and her professorial credentials make it worse, not better.
Furthermore, her approving aside (that what failed in Imo would never have failed in Lagos and Akwa Ibom) strips away whatever remained of her pretence to objectivity. She is not measuring governance by a consistent standard. She is selecting the outcomes that serve her argument and discarding the rest, the oldest trick in the polemicist’s book, and unbecoming of anyone who trades on academic credentials.
The reality on the ground in Imo State contradicts her narrative in every direction. The governor has set up a committee to assess and reconstruct communities recovered from criminal elements in Okigwe Zone. That committee has conducted public hearings, moved into the affected communities, and is working up comprehensive rehabilitation and welfare packages for victims. These are the actions of an administration that has done the hard work and is now building on it. Anyone parroting a different narrative has not been to Imo State or has been there and is lying.
What happened at the City Boys event was not a failure of security. The organisers liaised with security agencies and were provided adequate cover. The security personnel deployed to the venue were professional, restrained, and managed a volatile situation with commendable discipline, a fact conspicuously absent from Duru’s account. What we witnessed was the consequence of our society’s unresolved crisis of poverty, compounded by a familiar strain of entitlement and impatience that no deployment of security forces can cure. A genuinely hungry man would have been satisfied with one bag of rice. That some persons carted off three or more bags tells you something not about Governor Uzodimma, but about the character of the opportunists in that crowd.
Imo State is safer. Sandra Duru knows this, or she would know it if she looked. Either way, the record is not hers to rewrite.
Udemba is a public affairs analyst based in Owerri
