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Political and traditional leaders from Nigeria’s South-East converged on Abuja this week to press the case for a sixth state in their region, meeting with the deputy speaker of the House of Representatives as the country’s constitutional amendment process reopens the long-contested question of state creation.
The delegation, drawn from Imo and Anambra states and comprising lawmakers, traditional rulers, and local government officials, visited Benjamin Okezie Kalu — who chairs the House Committee on the Review of the Constitution — to signal regional alignment behind the proposal to carve out a new state called ANIM from existing South-East territory.
Senator Osita Izunaso of Imo West told the meeting that the proposal had already cleared legislative hurdles at the constituency level and that the groundwork in the proposed state capital, Orlu, was well advanced.
He cited upgraded road networks, functioning hospitals, a government house, and operational universities as evidence that the area could sustain statehood. “We are ready and only waiting for the pronouncement of ANIM State,” he said.
The South-East is currently the only geopolitical zone in Nigeria with five states, while the remaining five regions each have six. Proponents of ANIM State have long argued that this disparity translates into reduced federal representation, fewer development allocations, and diminished political leverage at the national level — a structural inequity they say the constitutional review process offers a rare opportunity to correct.
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Kalu, himself from the South-East, framed state creation in practical rather than symbolic terms, telling the delegation that the exercise was fundamentally about expanding the reach of governance and development, not accumulating political status.
But he was candid about the difficulty ahead. Securing the constitutional threshold required for a new state would demand votes from lawmakers well beyond the South-East, and those votes, he said, would not come without deliberate relationship-building across other regions.
“You must build friendships across the North, South-West, and South-South because they will be in the room when the vote is called,” Kalu told the group, urging flexibility in how the proposal was presented to accommodate the interests of legislators whose support would be decisive.
The push for ANIM State is not new — agitation for an additional South-East state has circulated through Nigerian political discourse for decades — but the current constitutional amendment cycle has given advocates a concrete legislative window to pursue it.
Whether that window produces a result will depend on whether the regional coalition behind the proposal can translate local consensus into the national majority the constitution requires.
