My latest visit to Obio Ibiet Esa, a community in Oruk Anam Local Government Area, had left so much of memories behind like a travelogue. I often try to imagine how it feels like to live in a community and go through administrations, one after another without any sprout of a project to lift hearts. And each time I successfully break through this fragile wall of imagining life in this community, I see people who appear full in their potential living a similitude of the stone- age -life of the early men.

Contrary to its living conditions far removed from any kind of development, Obio Ibiet Esa is one community I see natural endowments like a mass of snow. They fall everyday and everywhere around, but no government to pick them. For instance, there is a massive arable land for agriculture littered around the community. There are also palm fruits plantations in competition in mass with cassava farms. In addition to all these are swamps nature prepared with its hands for rice farming. The tall trees there like rock of ages are still another favour from the loving doings of nature that tower in the sky and adorn the sides.

Obio Ibiet Esa is also incredibly blessed with a population of peace-loving and hardworking men, women and youths. Almost always, these people are either working on their farms, or in mills where they produce fresh red oil for the markets within and outside the state.

Obio Ibiet Esa, from my observations and available facts, typifies a community where communal living like in the old is still being revered and held in esteems. A classical example was in my third or fourth visit where a big bowl full of ‘kpomo’ (cow skin) carefully mixed with oil, pepper and other ingredients was brought to the village square for everybody’s consumption. What really caught my attention, and perhaps, fed my admiration as well, was that only one spoon was deliberately used by everyone, as the bowl travelled from one hand to another for a scoop. Don’t ask if l took a spoonful or a scoop. But really, the sight resonated with some of my early readings about early men and how communally intertwined they were.

However, Obio Ibiet Esa, with all the love, commonality, and endowments, can be described as a hamlet harmed or armed by lack, abandonment and neglect. The community is a typical example of an area the word ‘development’ is alien to the tongue and soil. Obio Ibiet Esa has lived for an unremembered number of years without electricity. Worse still, there has never been any road in that community that has felt a blade of a grader from any representative or government. The last time roads had such pleasure, I was told, was a personal effort from Saviour Akpan who hails from there. Still, the community does not have any borehole constructed by any representative or development partner for the people like in some other communities. It is indeed a hamlet harmed by an age- long neglect.

But in the midst of all its woes and governance absence, Obio Ibiet Esa speaks of its representatives at the state and federal level, Governor Umo Eno, development partners, and even well-to-do individuals coming to break what appears to be development-can-never-come jinx in the community. What a faith!

I am sure that representatives of the community and Governor Umo Eno will do something for the inhabitants, as their faith lives. If not for the avalanche of resources there, then, for the peaceful disposition and willingness of the people to partner with any investor, especially in the area of agriculture. They must be moved away from living a similitude of Stone Age life in this now and age. Obio Ibiet Esa shall one day begin to live out its nickname – ” the cradle of befitting living in Africa”.