Soludo began his second term. He pointed at the date as the evidence.

Chukwuma Soludo was sworn in for a second term as Anambra governor yesterday at Alex Ekwueme Square in Awka.Former Presidents Obasanjo and Jonathan were there. Vice President Shettima was there. So was Emeka Anyaoku. The crowd was large.

But the most revealing thing Soludo said had nothing to do with the dignitaries.

"I'm sure many of you flew into Anambra yesterday, being Monday. Previously, that was not possible."

That sentence contains four years of governance compressed into two lines. The Monday sit-at-home order that IPOB enforced across the South-East had made flying into Anambra on a Monday too dangerous to risk. Markets closed. Schools closed. Civil servants stayed home. The economic cost was enormous and largely invisible in national economic data. The psychological cost was worse.

Soludo says 62 criminal camps have been dismantled and 8 local government areas previously under siege have been restored to normal function. The Homeland Security Law 2025 gave the state legal architecture to pursue the enforcement. It wasn't quick. It wasn't glamorous. It didn't involve a single press conference announcement that things had changed. It was consistent pressure over four years until the Monday that used to shut down everything became the Monday former presidents could fly in on.

In a week when Katsina is counting bodies from a reprisal attack and Maiduguri is still in the aftermath of its worst bombing in five years, Anambra is the data point that shows what patient, unglamorous security work can produce.

Soludo is not without complications. His second term starts at a moment when South-East politics is heating toward 2027, when the question of Igbo political representation at the federal level is openly being debated, and when he pointedly told his inauguration crowd that he'd be happy to see an Igbo president "but the timing isn't right." That last line has its own weight. He didn't say who the timing was wrong for.

His first term proved a thing worth proving. The sit-at-home is over. People flew in on Monday. That's not nothing.