An End to the Monday Closures and a Moment for Reflection

The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has announced the immediate and permanent cancellation of the Monday sit-at-home across Nigeria’s Southeast. In a statement issued on Sunday, February 8, the directive was attributed to its detained leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who urged residents to resume normal activities, reopen markets, and send their children back to school without fear. Major newspapers reported the next day that markets and schools in many cities opened on Monday, a quiet but symbolic return to normal life after more than four years of disruption.

For many people, this announcement brought relief. Yet relief cannot erase the reality that the sit-at-home experiment will go down as one of the most costly own goals in the region’s recent history, a protest that inflicted deep economic and social wounds without achieving its central objective.

What makes this outcome particularly painful is that some of us saw it coming. When the sit-at-home began in 2021, I raised concerns about how destructive it would become if allowed to continue indefinitely. Those criticisms were not always welcome. Many who were strongly opposed to the federal government argued that the shutdown was a legitimate and necessary form of protest, and any dissenting voices were often dismissed or shouted down. It was difficult at the time to persuade people that a tactic designed to apply pressure could end up weakening the very society it was meant to defend. Unfortunately, the reality proved a simple truth: you cannot cut off your head to cure a headache.

The logic of the policy was flawed from the beginning. Protests are meant to impose costs on those in power, not primarily on ordinary citizens struggling to survive. Yet the burden of the Monday shutdowns fell almost entirely on traders, transport workers, artisans, and small business owners who depend on daily income. Meanwhile, the leader in whose name the protest was being enforced was not living in the Southeast — not even in Nigeria — to experience the weekly disruption or the loss of income that residents endured.

The scale of the economic damage is difficult to overstate. A widely cited 2025 report by SBM Intelligence estimated that more than ₦7.6 trillion was lost between 2021 and early 2025 as a result of the weekly closures. That figure represents countless individual stories of stalled businesses, unpaid school fees, abandoned investments, and shrinking opportunities. The Southeast, long known for its entrepreneurial energy, found itself losing one working day every week, a handicap no competitive regional economy can sustain indefinitely.

Beyond the financial losses, the atmosphere of fear that took hold was unparalleled. Even when governments attempted to reverse the shutdown, fear proved stronger than official directives. In Anambra State, Governor Chukwuma Soludo publicly ordered markets and offices to open on Mondays. Many residents resisted, not because they did not need the income, but because they doubted the state’s ability to protect them from intimidation or reprisals.

I remember discussing this with a friend who lives in Awka shortly after the governor issued that order. She told me not to mind the directive and asked a simple question that revealed the depth of public anxiety: where was the security to enforce it? About a week ago, she sent another message describing how teachers and pupils fled a school after receiving a threatening letter from a splinter group declaring Monday classes illegal. Stories like these were repeated across the region, shaping behaviour far more powerfully than any government announcement.

Over time, trader frustration began to surface more openly, particularly in commercial centres such as Onitsha. Market unions started pushing back against forced closures that cut deeply into weekly earnings. Protests in early 2026 signaled that patience had worn thin and that many residents were no longer willing to bear the costs of a protest that seemed to yield no progress.

The sit-at-home began in 2021 as a reaction to Kanu’s arrest and detention, following his controversial transfer to Nigeria from Kenya and the subsequent legal proceedings that culminated in a life sentence in November 2025. The weekly shutdowns were intended to force concessions or negotiations. In the end, those concessions never came, the legal outcome did not change, and the economic damage continued to mount. The region paid a heavy price, yet achieved none of the strategic objectives that justified the policy in the first place.

This is why the cancellation, while welcome, should also prompt honest reflection. The Southeast now faces the urgent task of rebuilding confidence and repairing its reputation as a hub of commerce and innovation. That effort cannot be left to individual states acting in isolation. It must be spearheaded by close collaboration among governors, who need to think beyond political boundaries and focus on shared regional priorities.

There is no reason, for example, why major infrastructure projects linking the commercial corridors of Aba, Onitsha, and Nnewi cannot be pursued jointly. Federal allocations to states have improved in recent years, creating an opportunity to invest in projects that stimulate trade and attract investment back to the region. Governors must also learn from one another. The strides made in Abia State under Alex Otti have drawn national attention, and such progress should be a basis for collaboration rather than competition. Regional economic revival will depend not on isolated success stories but on coordinated planning and shared execution.

The end of the sit-at-home marks the closing of a painful chapter, but it also offers a fragile opportunity. The silence of those Mondays should serve as a reminder of what was lost and why the region cannot afford to repeat the same mistakes. Protest has its place in democratic societies, but tactics must be judged not only by their intentions but by their consequences.

For more than four years, the Southeast endured a policy that drained its economy, deepened fear, and delivered no tangible victory. No one truly won. The sooner that lesson is fully absorbed, the sooner the region can focus on the far more important task ahead, rebuilding an economy and a sense of normalcy that should never have been sacrificed in the first place.