ABIA: WHEN THE CENTER STRUGGLED, BUT THINGS DID NOT FALL APART
In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the tragedy of Umuofia was never that the people lacked strength. It was that the old order refused to listen, even as new winds gathered at the horizon. The real danger was not the arrival of the white man but the rigidity of a leadership that mistook stubbornness for wisdom. When the center failed to adapt, “the machete struck the air.”
Abia today stands at a similar crossroads — a place where old suspicions wrestle with new realities, where citizens, long betrayed by decades of failed promises, still look over their shoulders expecting disappointment to come creeping again like the locusts that once devoured Okonkwo’s fields.
For more than two decades, Abia lived in the metaphorical shadow of an Ezeudu’s funeral — clouded skies, deep lamentation, and the scent of something broken. Roads collapsed like the center of Umuofia’s abandoned huts. Schools became like the fallow farms Okonkwo met during his exile. Hospitals resembled the shrines of Oracle priests, dusty and lifeless. And the people grew accustomed to survival, not progress.
When leadership fails, Achebe warns us, “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”
Abians stopped hearing, stopped believing, and stopped expecting.
But like the dawn that breaks slowly after a harmattan night, a new consciousness is rising. Not perfect, not magical, but deliberate — and the people are watching with the caution of a clan that has seen too many seasons of deceit.
Abia today is not the Abia of yesterday. Something new is pushing through the red soil.
Achebe said, “When a moon shines, the cripple walks without fear.”
And truly, for the first time in many years, ordinary citizens are daring to believe again — quietly, cautiously, but sincerely.
Government is no longer told through loud proclamations; it is felt in classrooms where children now sit on chairs instead of broken blocks; in health centres that no longer smell of despair; in roads that no longer demand the sacrifice of shock absorbers; in courtrooms where transparency has stopped bowing to godfathers; and in a public treasury where the ritual of looting has lost its immunity.
The same Abia that once swallowed the dreams of its people is slowly learning to give them back.
The same Umuahia that once felt like Okonkwo’s dry barns is beginning to resemble fertile land.
But Achebe warns that progress is fragile. Even the strongest yam needs patience before it can be harvested. That is why Abians must understand that rebuilding a state broken for 24 years is not like mending Okonkwo’s hut after a storm. It is like reconstructing the entire compound stone by stone — an intricate process, vulnerable to sabotage, and often misunderstood by those who benefitted from the ruins.
Those who once presided over Abia’s decay now speak as though they did not write its darkest chapters.
They cry wolf like the elders of Umuofia who resisted change but offered no solution.
They chant suspicion because they know that a people who begin to hope again become harder to deceive.
Achebe reminds us that “a man who brings home ant-infested faggots should not complain when lizards visit him.”
Many of today’s loudest critics are simply watching the fire they once set finally meet water.
Abia is not perfect. Not yet. Not fully. But the center is no longer falling apart.
The centre is holding.
The centre is rebuilding.
The centre is learning to listen.
And as long as leadership chooses dialogue over force, accountability over propaganda, and service over self-indulgence, the people will answer, like Umuofia once did, with renewed loyalty.
In the end, Achebe teaches that societies rise when they confront their past honestly and walk forward boldly. The new Abia is trying — not through noise, but through visible work, quiet reform, and a moral awakening unseen in many decades.
The gods may test a people, but they do not abandon a clan that begins to correct its ways.
Abia is correcting its ways.
Abia is healing.
Abia is rising — slowly like the sun that first touches the treetops before claiming the earth.
And unlike the fall of Okonkwo, this story is not a tragedy.
It is a renaissance in motion.
AProf Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke
