Southeast Sit-At-Home: A Trader’s Business Nightmare Every May 30

ABA — Chukwuemeka Eze has a simple rule for May 30. He stays home. Not because he believes strongly in the Biafra Heroes Day sit-at-home order called by IPOB and related groups. He stays home because the last time he tried to open his shop on this date, armed men came and broke his window and warned him not to come back.

Chukwuemeka sells electronics in Ariaria International Market in Aba. On a normal trading day, he makes between N50,000 and N200,000 in sales depending on what moves. On May 30, he makes nothing. His shop is shut. The market is ghost-like. The usually bustling streets of Aba are quiet in a way that feels less like celebration and more like a wound.

“I am Igbo. I know what the civil war means. I respect the dead. But this sit-at-home is killing us economically. Every May 30, I lose a day of income. Every May 30, I am afraid. That is not how you honour the dead,” Chukwuemeka said.

He is not alone in his frustration. Traders, transport workers, school proprietors, and small business owners across Aba, Onitsha, Enugu, Owerri, and other southeast cities have increasingly spoken out against the economic cost of the annual sit-at-home. However, speaking out has consequences. Several people who have publicly defied the order have faced violence from enforcement groups.

The Economics of Silence

The Aba Chamber of Commerce estimated last year that the southeast economy loses over N50 billion on every sit-at-home day. The figure covers lost sales, disrupted supply chains, cancelled logistics, and missed business opportunities. Multiplied across all the sit-at-home orders called throughout the year, the total economic damage to the southeast runs into hundreds of billions of naira annually.

Beyond the economic toll, the psychological impact on traders like Chukwuemeka is significant. Living under a condition where you cannot freely choose whether to open your business is a form of indirect coercion that has become normalised but is deeply abnormal. Many traders said they have simply adjusted their business planning to write off sit-at-home days as dead days.

The federal government has tried and failed to end the sit-at-home through a combination of security deployment and political engagement. The army and police presence in Aba today is significant. But experience shows that enforcement alone does not open markets when traders feel personally at risk.

A Complex Political Reality

Many southeast residents have mixed feelings about the sit-at-home. They understand the historical significance of May 30 as the date Ojukwu declared Biafra in 1967. They feel the pain of the civil war in their family histories. They want that pain acknowledged by Nigeria’s political establishment.

However, they do not all believe that shutting down their businesses is the right way to make that acknowledgment. And increasingly, many are saying so privately even if saying so publicly remains too dangerous. The gap between what people feel and what they are free to express is itself a form of the oppression that Biafra was supposedly a response to.

Chukwuemeka said he will open his shop again on Sunday. He will try to make up some of what he lost today. He will not talk about what he lost or why. He will just sell electronics and pray that the next calendar year brings fewer compulsory closures and more days when he can simply work in peace