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Sports Editorial Columns Allure It gave us the izu afia mindset: if it cannot be bought and sold this season, it may not
be real. Profit first, profit only. It gave us the defeatist shrug — ka anyi hapu ya, let’s leave it — with which
we abandon every collective project the moment it demands patience and rigour. It gave us the tradition of the
philanthropy of bags of rice at festival seasons: generous in gesture, suspect in substance, unable to guarantee change
to a child’s future. And it has left even our most celebrated institution, the Ëgba boyi apprenticeship scheme —
rightly admired around the world — reproducing traders when it could also be producing engineers, technicians, coders,
and builders of companies that outlive their founders.Related NewsTinubu’s reforms, temporary pains, lasting gains —
OnanugaSATH Cloud joins 2nd Nigeria Manufacturing & Trade Outlook 2026 as associate sponsorI walked away from power
rather than compromise my integrity —Octogenarian Eburajolo The deepest damage, five and a half decades later, is no
longer physical. It is that too many of our own people no longer believe in the future of their own region. We invest in
economic enterprises everywhere else except home. We build our best non-entrepreneurial houses in villages we visit
randomly and live our real lives elsewhere subject to abusive external influence. That is not strategy. That is
resignation wearing the costume of pragmatism. ÌdirÍzË funny anymore. Trading ideas for development — again This is
the conversation the inaugural Afia Annual Lecture and Awards (AALA), holding on 26 November 2026 at the International
Conference Centre, Enugu, has been convened to force into the open. Its theme — Uwa Bu Afia: Trading Ideas for
Development — is both a reminder and a challenge: we have done this before, and we must do it again. AALA is
designed as the annual town square for that new enlightenment, new awareness and the evolvement of the new story: a
platform where the East’s (and Igbo’s) best minds — at home and in the Diaspora — gather not to mourn what was
lost, but to imagine and create new possibilities, recreate trade blueprints for what must be built; where we honour not
merely the wealthiest among us, but those whose ideas are compounding for the next generation. The marketplace has
moved. The question before Ndigbo, and indeed before all Nigerians is whether we will move with it — or keep
perfecting our mastery of a stall the world is leaving behind. Uwa bu afia. The world is a marketplace. Our fathers once
traded in ideas and built the fastest-growing economy in the world. It is time the East returned to that stall. •Emeka
Mba, former Director-General of the National Broadcasting Commission and the National Film and Video Censors Board, is
the Founder and CEO of Afia Media, convener of the Afia Annual Lecture and Awards, holding 26 November 2026 in Enugu