IS THERE NO ONE ELSE? — FROM TROY TO ABIA’S BATTLEFIELD OF CLAIMS
In the 2004 epic Troy, Brad Pitt’s Achilles walks onto the battlefield, slays the towering champion Boagrius in seconds, and turns to the stunned army with a chilling challenge:
“Is there no one else?”
It is not merely triumph. It is exhaustion — the moment when every challenger has fallen and yet the field still expects another to rise.
That cinematic echo now curiously mirrors Abia’s political theatre.
For nearly three years, Governor Alex Otti’s administration has stood in a rolling arena of accusations. Each claim arrives like Boagrius — formidable in noise, dramatic in posture, certain of victory. And each, when confronted with verification, collapses.
“There are no roads.”
Road corridors reopen.
“There is no healthcare.”
Facilities rehabilitate and expand.
“There is no reform.”
Systems digitize, arrears clear, institutions reset.
Now the latest challenger strides forward:
“There is no airport progress.”
Yet even as the allegation echoes, runway clearing, grading, and alignment — the primordial stage of any airfield — proceeds across Nsulu. Earth moved. Corridors marked.
Foundations laid in soil before concrete ever appears. Aviation infrastructure begins long before terminals rise.
And so one cannot help but hear Achilles again — not in arrogance, but in weary inevitability:
Is there no one else?
No accusation left that facts have not answered?
No narrative left that reality has not overtaken?
No claim left standing once the dust of verification settles?
Because what unfolds in Abia is not the absence of scrutiny — it is the repetition of disproven certainty. Each fallen allegation summons another, as though denial itself must be sustained regardless of evidence.
The tragedy is not criticism; democracies breathe through challenge.
The tragedy is persistence of disbelief after confirmation.
Achilles’ battlefield was mythic.
Abia’s is civic.
But the pattern is strangely shared: challengers arrive in succession, and the contest ends not with silence, but with the same unanswered cry across the field:
Is there no one else?
AProf Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke
