The commercial city of Onitsha, Anambra State, was on Saturday totally locked down on as the annual Ofala Festival of the Obi of Onitsha, Igwe Alfred Nnaemeka Achebe took place in grand style.
Various traditional rulers across the country as well as dignitaries and politicians were on the ground to witness the three-day event, which kicked off on Friday, October 21 with a youth carnival organized by the Onitsha Youths Council.
The festival which continued on Saturday as Azu-Ofala was also used to mark the 20th-year reign of the Obi of Onitsha, who described his reign as the traditional ruler of Onitsha as a journey of leadership change with the sole purpose of fast-forwarding an ancient traditional society to the 21st century.
In his Iru-Ofala message, Igwe Achebe charged the Independent National Electoral Commission, to ensure peaceful, free, fair, credible, and transparent elections in 2023 as according to him, INEC owes a huge duty to posterity in discharging its statutory functions faithfully and transparently.
The monarch said, “Our country today appears to be in dire straits than at any other time since national independence, except for the three years of the civil war.
“The biggest challenge in the country today is insecurity which affects most parts of the country and disrupts every aspect of our public and private lives. The inability of farmers to harvest their crops due to terrorists and the conflicts between the farmers and herders are causing serious food inflation”.
“External debts have grown by more than 10 folds since 2015 from $19.7bs to $98.6bn. Also, the scarcity of the dollars to meet corporate and private foreign obligations has driven the value of the naira to about 30% of its 2015 value and some forecasters are predicting a rate of $1/1000 by the end of the year”.
Source: Punch