For the past few months, the airwaves and many inches of newspaper column space has been occupied with details of protests that have rocked the South-Eastern region and cities like Port-Harcourt calling for the release of the Director of pirate radio station, Radio Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu who has been in the custody of the Department of State Security (DSS) and also demanding for the secession of that region from Nigeria to form Biafra.

These protests have forced Nigerians to have discussions on the Biafran project, 45 years after the first attempt at secession led by the late Dim Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu was put down after a 30-month civil war.

It has also elicited debates on how well have the Igbo ethnic group fared in Nigeria’s political space, and whether the Nigerian project is working for everyone as a whole.

There is no doubt that there is still a lot of hurt from Nigerians of Igbo extraction on not just the Civil War but on events that led to it such as the pogroms in the North and events after it, such as the repeated ethno-religious clashes in the North that has caused the deaths of many Igbos alongside other Nigerians.

The official Nigerian response to these protests has been to initially ignore Mr. Kanu and his dangerous diatribe against other ethnic groups, and then to move to arrest him, rightly so, for engaging in criminal conspiracy, engaging in unlawful society and criminal intimidation.

There have also been warnings and threats by the military and the police that any disruptions to peace will not be taken lightly – a quite typical response to end all agitation by force.

Although President Muhammadu Buhari has condemned the protests and promised to uphold Nigeria’s unity, there has not been more in terms of an official government response to the protests.

For us at this newspaper, we believe that this response has to go beyond just mere rhetoric. While we do agree that the protests are in many ways misguided and the pirate radio station guilty of spewing hate speech, the station and the protests have proved popular because the prevailing situation on ground in the South-East in many ways vindicates Mr. Kanu and his station.

Without doubt, the South-East has the worst federal roads in Nigeria which are barely motorable, access to seaports and rail lines to move goods is hard to come by, and it took decades for international terminal to be built in Enugu by the Jonathan administration, making it easier for businessmen in the region to travel abroad without having to go to Lagos or Abuja.

All this is what is being used by the demagoguery of Nnamdi Kanu by claiming that this is part of a conspiracy by the Nigerian government to suppress and marginalize the Igbo ethnic group.

It can be argued that Nigerians generally suffer from this lack of infrastructure and economic access, and one won’t be wrong for saying so. But when there are still feelings of hurt based on having once been targets of large-scale violence, it becomes easy to believe Mr. Kanu.

The challenge for governments at all levels, not just the Federal Government, but also the state and local governments to wake up to their responsibilities and ensure projects and policies in the region have a positive impact on the people both in the short-term and long-term.

It bears stating that for far too long, political leaders in the region have conveniently the lack of infrastructure in the region on the fact that no Igbo person has ever been president while abdicating their responsibility to do their utmost best at the state and local government levels.

Unless governments radically change the lives of the people by making it easier for them to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit the people of the South-East are most famous for, it will continue to be easy for hordes of people, albeit misguided, to swallow the theories the likes of Nnamdi Kanu will conjure.

The government should also realize that jailing Nnamdi Kanu will not by itself end the protests or the agitation.

This is not to say that he should not be tried fairly in a court of law, but that what he has done – planting the seeds of the protests and the beliefs – is not one that muzzling or jailing him will uproot.

The only solution to the protests is to create a new narrative – one that shows that Nigeria does not have anything against the South-East, clearly evident in the presence of government infrastructure and programs that work – so that the benefits of being Nigerians is felt by everyone such that the argument for a secession is dead on arrival.