Lost history · About 2000 to present
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Much of the beef eaten in Igboland passes through a market on the Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway. Even the people who built it can't agree on its age, its founder or its name.
If you buy beef in Umuahia or Aba, there's a good chance the cow came through Lokpanta. The market sits beside the Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway in Umunneochi, at the northern edge of Abia. Former governor Orji Uzor Kalu, who moved it there, called it the biggest cattle market in both the South East and the South South.
It didn't start there. In 2023 the security adviser to Governor Alex Otti traced its route for Blueprint. It began at Garki in Umuahia. From there it moved to Ubakala, then over the border to Okigwe in Imo State, and finally to Lokpanta under Kalu.
An opinion writer in The Nation added more detail. He said the old Umuahia market stood where Abia Mall is today, and that it was older than Abia State itself, which was created in 1991. In his account, it wasn't Kalu who first moved the cattle out of the town centre. He said that was the military administrator, Colonel Ike Nwosu.
Kalu remembers the town centre the same way. Speaking to reporters in Abuja in 2019, he said, "What they call Shoprite today used to be cattle settlement, if anybody knows that." He said Umuahia and Aba were crowded, and the cattle trade had to go somewhere with more room.
Kalu's version of how Lokpanta happened sounds almost like a family meeting. He said he made the herders an honest offer. He would provide electricity and water, but this would be their new place. Then he hired five Coaster buses. "Bring your RUGA," he said he told them. He'd go along with some of their leaders and look at the land together. If everyone agreed, he would call the local communities and talk to them.
Meetings followed, he said, the communities said yes, and the market took off at Lokpanta. In The Nation interview he gave the year as 2001, his first years as governor. Vanguard reported him giving 2000. The opinion writer said 2004. Nobody seems sure of the exact year.
The name is disputed too. The same writer said the land doesn't really belong to Lokpanta. In his account it belongs to three communities, Lokpaukwu, Lekwesi and Umuelem Isuochi. He said the market only got the name Lokpanta "erroneously", because it was close to the Better Life Rural Market at Lokpanta.
Kalu was also making a wider point. He told reporters it was wrong to think the cow business belonged only to the Fulani. He said he'd been selling cows himself since his student days at the University of Maiduguri, and he still did because it paid. Most of the cattle in his area weren't owned by Hausa-Fulani traders at all, he said. Uzuakoli people and their neighbours trade cattle too.
The reason Kalu was talking about Lokpanta at all in July 2019 was a national row. The federal government had floated RUGA, a plan for settlements for Fulani herders, and it caused so much alarm that it was dropped. Kalu, by then a senator and the Senate Chief Whip, said people's fears were misplaced, and that he'd set up exactly that kind of settlement in Abia years earlier. His complaint was about the way it was done. If the government just announced a RUGA policy without explaining it, he said, "people in my village in Igbere do not understand what RUGA is. They will fear and say that they want to kill all of us." In his telling, the meetings and the bus trip were the reason Lokpanta worked.
A market that size needs people living near it, and over the years buildings grew up around the stalls. In 2023 that became a problem. Vanguard reported that Otti's government linked the site to kidnapping. Officials said ransom payments had been kept there, and that bodies had been found in the forests nearby.
The government sent in bulldozers. Homes, brothels and other buildings that had never been approved were pulled down. The state ruled that Lokpanta would stay a cattle market, but a daily one where nobody could live. Traders could come in to buy and sell, and then they'd have to leave.
That move fed a lot of rumours. Blueprint reported the government denying that it was sending herders back to the North. It said it was only ending people living on the market grounds, not shutting down the trade.
So Lokpanta carries a lot of history for a market most people only drive past. It began in the middle of Umuahia, on ground that's now a mall. It moved through three more places before it reached the expressway. People still argue about who moved it, when, and whose land it really sits on. And in 2023 it went from a place people lived to one they're only allowed to work in.
