A call to Isoko nation, by Fred Edoreh

A universal truth is that governments can provide basic infrastructures, amenities and enabling environment but economic development and prosperity can only come by the conscious mobilisation, organisation and empowerment of the people to take productive actions.
To situate Isoko nation as a people of common traditional and cultural affinity and interest within the context of the Nigeria of today, we need to ask ourselves a few questions:
1. While our sons and daughters graduate in numbers yearly from various institutions, how many companies are there in Isoko land that can employ 10 university graduates of different professions at global standard benefits?2. What opportunities are there for the teeming population of youths with diverse skills and talents to pursue their dreams and engage in productive enterprises?3. Apart from our oil deposits, in which we are more or less onlookers in the industry, what cutting edge in agriculture, industry and commerce are we known for, nationally?4. What comparative economic advantages have we optimised through the decades to build opportunities to attract inflow of investments, generation of employment and enterprise for wealth creation for our people and communities?
The answers to these and more questions underscore an urgency to re-appraise the system and substance of our local economy.
Just to buttress, we have seen a rise in the local production of rice, with farmers in many communities in the North, East and West benefiting and growing their local economies from various national and international support programmes for cultivation, processing and sales.
Deriving therefrom, our nation now feeds on Kebbi rice, Abakaliki rice, Ofada rice, Ekpoma rice, Benue Yam, Agbor or Ijebu Garri, Niger fish, Benin Palm Oil etc. Similarly, in industry and commerce, we have Aba Made products and Onitsha Main Market to which our people troop. But, Isoko what?
At the core of the organisation of the everyday life of local populations is the local government. This means that the health, prosperity and happiness of the people depend to a large extent on the activities of the local council which has a critical role to play in engineering development by sourcing investments, relationships and partnerships to build sustainable capacities and opportunities in multi economic sectors; and mobilising, organising and supporting the people and communities to take productive actions for their prosperity.
Sadly, through the decades, we have witnessed dwindling empowerment of the local councils following the vagaries of policies. They have suffered regimes of zero allocation, deficit allocation and withheld allocation, all of which have constrained their capacity to meaningfully champion the development of their communities; build and maintain roads, schools and health facilities; strengthen agriculture, commerce and industry; empower women and youths; and cater for the aged, vulnerable and less privileged.
On the other hand, in various other climes, local councils champion the economic development of their communities through various strategies. They have assets in agriculture to ensure food security and growth of allied industries; low and middle income housing schemes; electricity; airports; transportation systems; private real estates; education; health; sports etc, first for the service of their people and secondly to generate revenue to sustain continued development.
Worrisomely, in the Nigeria of today and the future, even with the regime of direct allocation, the situation of our local governments might get worse with the prevailing national economic difficulties due to low sales and glut in international price of crude mainly from which allocations are derived, and also from the global effect of the COVID-19 pandemic which might linger for years.
This outlook calls for a new thinking on how to ensure our prosperity as a common people. We cannot continue year in year out, decades in decades out, to base our development, prosperity and future completely on the constantly delimiting vagaries of our national system. 
While we must commend successive executives of Isoko local councils and past and present political and community leaders, for their doggedness in impacting on the people even in the midst of various obvious difficulties, it is now imperative for us to adopt self economic determination towards piloting our people out of the loom of prevailing and imminent instabilities. 
The only way to achieve this is to begin to design new visions and develop new strategies and resourcefulness to establish expansive platforms, capacities and opportunities, within the allowance of the law and possibilities, to reinvigorate the economic life of our people.
We need now to work harder to build an independent self reliant economy as though the totality of our development lies only and squarely on us, while, at the same time, increasingly seeking the cooperation and support of the top governments and agencies as though our entire survival depends solely on them. 
Then, we must globalise our local economy by connecting with national and international development and corporate institutions to build new and broader capacities for the benefit of our people.
The idea is to complement provisions of government by mobilising all possible capabilities of our people, home and abroad, and sourcing all accessible national, international and corporate resources to build new foundations to expand opportunities for the economic and social development of our home land.
The first port is to mobilise and enable our people to develop abilities for effective utilisation and preservation of natural resources in our environment, support them to develop and expand their individual skills and talents and empower them with strategic investments for the optimization of the resources and skills.
This has to come with new investments to redevelop and expand assets in infrastructural facilities especially roads, electricity, clean water, housing, telecommunications and public services in education, health and the environment. 
Also critical to the delivery is the retraining of administrative and operational staff, the engagement of various expertise and the introduction of new technologies to drive the process of transformation.
We need to create a system of closer partnership and equity between the local government and the people in which all citizens inclusively have access to opportunities to support their aspiration and share in the responsibility of achieving and securing greater collective prosperity.
Notwithstanding that all local governments across the country are in the same situation, with a few doing better by the privilege of national economic assets in their locations, we owe ourselves a duty to take our destiny in our own hands and change our narrative, a right to be positively different and possibly set new examples in local development. We can…though, only if we will.
True, politics must be played, but we can give our local politics better meaning by playing it not just as a game to access and control power but as a process of authorisation of visionary, competent and committed individuals to pursue the course of development on behalf of the people for our collective growth and prosperity. But, again, it is simply up to us.