On the Igbo Presidency Project (2)

By Igboeli Arinze

The rest is history and President Muhammadu Buhari went on to defeat Jonathan and even went further to defeat Atiku Abubakar in 2019, using up the two terms meant for the North. In the spirit of fairness and the need to foster that elusive oneness presently under siege by a coterie of pseudo ethnic nationalists as well as a number of events that have made the claims of a united Nigeria less tenable, it is imperative that there is a power shift from the North to the South, anything other than this will only gift the Nnamdi Kanus , Sunday Igbohos, Adeyinka Grandsons and Asari Dokubos more ammunition to carry on their activities which only seek to divide Nigeria when it suits them.

Each region in the South may angle for the seat, but with the fact that SouthWest has had its shot at the presidency following the Obasanjo years and that its sister region in the South South had five years under Goodluck Jonathan , it is therefore in the interest of the country to zone the presidency to the SouthEast region of the country, the only zone within the South that is yet to produce a president.

The talk of Igbo Presidency is aimed at healing and strengthening the nation’s bonds, since the end of the civil war, NdiIgbo as a people have repeatedly questioned the essence of the ‘One Nigeria’ they were forced back into, this is not because of their unbelief in Nigeria,as the Igbo man has repeatedly shown  faith in the country than any other region or ethnic group. NdiIgbo, have repeatedly invested all over the country,built homes and businesses, lived amongst other communities sharing in the ties that bind us as one people. Yes we fought a war but that war was for our survival as a people, that war was forced on us by a counter coup, two pogroms and the reneging on the Aburi Accord, NdiIgbo thus are not with guilt and have no business apologizing to anyone for the carnage that we witnessed. The talk of denying the region the presidency owing to the coup of January the 15th 1966 and the civil war which ended in 1970 is in bad faith and must be rebuffed by well meaning Nigerians. Let us ask then, was the counter coup of July the 29th a bloodless one? Are we not to also seek retribution for those who participated in such? What of the willful massacre of brother officers who had no hand in the coup or the killing of civilians in the North? When shall we also exact retribution by denying these regions a place under the Nigerian Sun?

While I agree that an Igbo presidency will not be a fix all to the nation’s problems, it could be a start to dealing with all the problems that stare us in the face. For example, following the unfair annulment of the June 12 elections, the Northern elite at that time sought for a Yoruba general to lead the country and help placate the region for its misdeeds in 1993. The Obasanjo presidency as bad as it was somewhat reunited the nation, a nation many had pencilled down to disintegrate by 2015. But for Obasanjo’s greed, the nation would have benefitted immensely from the constitutional confab and the constitutional review processes, all these were lost because the man wanted a third term! The nation also witnessed the same spell when Jonathan took the reins of office, here for the first time in our nation’s history, was a minority at the fore of our nation’s leadership, it sent a message that any Nigerian, without the distinction of birth, fortune, region and religion could aspire to become the president of this country and that it was not the birthright of anybody. It is also on record that the Constitutional Conference of 2014 under the auspices of the Jonathan government made a lot of milestone achievements and proffered a number of recommendations, sadly this was not to be as a Jonathan much more interested in a second term, kept the report to gather dust while he himself went on to be humiliated at the polls.

What exactly am I driving at? Simple, NdiIgbo, having invested heavily in the nation know where the show pinches when it comes to the elusive search for that  ‘One Nigeria’. A President of Igbo extraction will not only reunite the nation, it will also give the nation the opportunity to restructure itself along the path of that free and fair Nigeria we all crave for.

It is therefore insulting to the tenets of fairness and equity by which nations are forged and held together to deny the Igbo nation the opportunity to produce a successor to Muhammadu Buhari, granted, no ethnic group or region on its own can solely ascend to the presidency on its own and thus must engage in the horse trading expected to win the votes and confidence of other people, but then we must attempt to heal this so fractured nation, in such a healing lies our redemption as a people and as the vanguard of the black nation.  Like we did in 1999, let us replicate in 2023.

Nigeria Must Succeed!