By Chinedu Agu
There is a saying in Igbo that a man who sold his dog to buy a monkey still has a squatting animal in his house.
The elders tell the story of a villager who once had a hunting dog. Despite its occasional nuisance, this dog not only kept his compound safe but often led him into the forest and returned with the game that fed his household.
One market day, overcome by vanity and folly, the man sold the dog and used the money to buy a monkey. He paraded the monkey through the village square, boasting of its cleverness and tricks.
But the villagers only laughed. The monkey could chatter and mimic men, but it could not hunt, it could not guard, and it could not put food on the table. Worse still, it stole fruit from neighbours, scattered cooking pots, and spent its days squatting idly on rooftops, a nuisance to everyone. In the end, the man had not improved his lot. And so the people regarded him as a fool who traded like for like, with the latter a bigger nuisance.
That story comes to mind as we watch the Imo State House of Assembly, fresh from recess, announce its first business of the season: renaming Owerri’s historic Douglas Road after His Excellency Governor Hope Uzodinma.
But just like the man who swapped his dog for a mischievous monkey, the lawmakers have exchanged one painful memory for another; and a fresher one at that. “Douglas Road” may have represented colonial subjugation, but “Uzodinma Road” evokes a wound that still bleeds: the Supreme Court judgment of January 2020, widely seen in some quarters as the subjugation of the will of the people. Add to the insecurity in the state, decaying infrastructure, institutional stagnation, human capital degeneration and selfish political dominance of the past five years and more, and it is clear that the Imo Assembly has not healed history but deepened the wound.
Having resumed from legislative recess, one would expect the Imo Assembly’s first order of business to be tackling insecurity, probing the rot in our justice sector and health sector, and demanding accountability for billions of naira in federal allocations, or debating how to revive the dwindling economy of the state. Instead, the House chose symbolism over substance: passing a resolution to rename Owerri’s historic “Douglas Road” to Hope Uzodinma Road.”
The lawmakers justified the move by citing the legacy of Harold M. Douglas, the colonial District Commissioner whose tenure in the early 1900s is remembered for cruelty, exploitation, and the Ahiara and Eziama massacres. According to them, removing Douglas’s name is an act of decolonisation.
But here lies the paradox: in seeking to erase a scar left more than a century ago, the Assembly has replaced it with a bruise still fresh and painful. Douglas is a distant memory. The Governor is today’s reality. For most Imolites, this new name recalls the Supreme Court judgment of January 2020, still regarded as a judicial sleight of hand that overturned the will of the people. It recalls years of spiralling insecurity, villages deserted by gunmen’s terror, and institutions reduced to rubber stamps. Which memory hurts the people more — the colonial officer long dead, or the governor under whose watch their state has become a byword for fear?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his classic, Decolonising the Mind, reminded us that true liberation lies not in changing names but in changing institutions and consciousness. Decolonisation is about freeing the mind from domination, not swapping one oppressive symbol for another. The Assembly’s resolution is no act of liberation. It is self-glorification dressed up as history.
Even Rochas Okorocha, for all his excesses and empire-building tendencies, resisted the temptation to name any major road in Owerri metropolis after himself. It was a line he would not cross. This Assembly has gleefully crossed it, exposing its docility before the executive. Oversight — the sacred duty of any legislature — has been traded for signage.
Legally, the Assembly may have overreached itself. Section 7(1) of the 1999 Constitution guarantees the system of local government and vests them with functions under the Fourth Schedule. Among those functions in Paragraph 1(e) of the Fourth Schedule is “naming of roads and streets and numbering of houses.” In plain terms, it is the prerogative of local government councils, not the State Assembly, to rename Douglas Road. What the lawmakers have done is not only unnecessary but arguably unconstitutional. At best, they can make recommendations. At worst, they are usurping powers reserved for another tier of government.
This fits into a growing national pattern. Just as Nyesom Wike in Abuja has made a hobby of renaming projects after President Bola Tinubu, Imo lawmakers have chosen to outdo themselves in sycophancy. When legislatures become praise-singers instead of watchdogs, democracy is mocked and scorned.
Yet history offers Imo a better path. If Douglas must be erased, why not replace him with heroes whose names inspire unity and pride? Why not replace it with names that evoke dignity?
The struggle for good governance is not about street signs but about whether our institutions work for the people.
An Igbo proverb warns: “He who removes an old thorn only to plant a new one has not cured the pain.” Douglas Road may have been an old scar from colonial rule, but the new name will be a fresh bruise that throbs daily in the memory of Imolites. Scars may fade with time; bruises are sharp, immediate, and raw. The Assembly has not healed history; it has deepened the wound.
The final tragedy is this: Douglas reminds us of a scar inflicted by strangers long gone; the new name reminds us of a bruise inflicted by our very own, and one that still hurts each time we walk through Owerri’s heart, because the wound inflicted by a friend hurts more than that of an enemy.
Chinedu Agu, a Solicitor & Notary Public, past secretary of NBA Owerri, and advocate for good governance and human rights, can be reached on [email protected].
10 September 2025.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
