Author: Celestine Mel

Some arguments don’t gather momentum because they are true. They gather momentum because the people fueling them simply cannot afford to lose. That is the ugly truth that may be festering at the heart of the raging debate about the Ibom Deep Seaport. Strip away the legal briefs, the syndicated headlines, the coordinated op-eds, and the breathless claims of ethnic betrayal, and what you might find standing naked is not patriotism. What you may find is panic—the panic, perhaps, of powerful men whose bet went wrong; men who quietly bought up swaths of land around the Ibaka community expecting a…