By Tiko Okoye
On Tuesday, November 17, 2020, Ebonyi State Governor Dave Umahi officially announced his defection from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC). The defection was long in coming and was a topical issue during the period of the 30-day ultimatum he gave to the National Working Committee (NWC) of the PDP to zone the 2023 presidency to the South-East or risk massive defections. Reactions to the announcement were predictably fast and furious.
Several prominent Igbo leaders of thought, including Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, former deputy governor of Abia State and current Senate Minority Leader; Dr. Chukwuemeka Ezeife, the Harvard University-trained former governor of Anambra State; and Chief Mbazurike Amaechi, a former first republic aviation minister and key member of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s kitchen cabinet, contended that Umahi’s action “could culminate in a balance of forces in the zone by bringing enormous pressure to bear on the APC and PDP to pick their respective presidential candidates from the South-East.”
But they equally engaged in double-speak by dismissing Umahi’s defection as “selfish in view of the fact that he is the current chairman of the South-East Governors Forum” and that “he should have consulted widely before taking the actions he took.”
Being the chairman of the South-East governors’ conclave should not, and does not, extirpate Umahi’s constitutional right to freedom of association. As for consulting widely, the man reportedly held a meeting with his fellow PDP governors in Abuja about a week to his coming out. Besides, where were the affected Igbo leaders when Umahi, exercising his locus standi as chairman of the South-East Governors Forum, issued the ultimatum to the PDP NWC? Are they not actually the ones who ought to plead “Guilty as charged” for fiddling while fire was on the mountain?
Only recently, we read news reports that Ohanaeze, state governors, leaders of thought, Ndigbo-in-the-Diaspora, youth leaders – and even MASSOB! – are planning to hold a spectacular roadshow in the South-East come December – one that is aimed at mobilising the masses to fully back the demand on both APC and PDP to present presidential candidates of Igbo extraction in the 2023 election.
But the point I have been consistently making over the years – even as I remain at the receiving end of unsavoury abuses and horrendous conjectures from my kinsmen – is that Ndigbo are going about the ‘agitation’ for ‘2023 is our turn’ in a failure-prone, wrong-headed manner. Most of us keep screaming at any given opportunity that what we want is restructuring and not the presidency, as if both of them are mutually exclusive! But we then proceed to queue behind our leaders threatening Apocalypse and hellfire if Ndigbo are not allowed to produce the president in 2023!
Such mixed signals – including the strident clamour for Biafra by IPOB – most probably encouraged presidential aspirants in the South-West to believe that the coast is clear for them to seek the presidency a second time after Olusegun Obasanjo had utilised their ‘turn’ between 1999 and 2007 on the reasonable assumption that Ndigbo are not really interested.
Power is never collected or given on demand as if one is operating a bank current account. You build strategic bridges and powerful political alliances to procure it. To give the leadership of the pan-Igbo sociocultural organisation, Ohanaeze, their due credit, they have indeed made motions of building strategic bridges and alliances, but the problem is that they have been doing so in the South-West and core-North (North-West and North-East) political firmaments on very weak foundations that cannot effectively withstand the rigours of wear and tear.
It is fine for Ohanaeze to seek to collaborate and partner with the South-South Elders and Leaders of Thought Forum and the Middle Belt Congress with credible leadership clout, but to belabour to achieve same with gangs of visceral bashers of the vested interests of the Northern Establishment, such as the geriatric and expired politicians in the Afenifere and the inconsequential two-man Northern Elders Forum, essentially made up of Tanko Yakassai and Prof. Ango Abdullahi, chiefly to make eye-catching headlines and photo-ops, is nothing but madness. You simply cannot build castles in the air and expect them to stand!
Ndigbo really need to think out of the box. It is a trite saying that charity must begin at home rather than abroad. Among the six geopolitical zones, the South-East has clearly proven to be the safest haven for PDP candidates since the return to democracy in 1999. Surely, such a blind following and cult-like loyalty deserve to be timeously rewarded by the party and it remains a very sore point that for over 20 years the zone has faithfully played kingmakers to PDP presidential candidates from other zones, it has yet to produce a No.2 man talk less the president!
The foregoing is the very point that Umahi was seeking to make – to tug at the consciences of national leaders of the PDP, if they still have consciences, to do what is right by Igbo right now, not a sweet bye-and-bye mirage! But instead of Ndigbo political elite – who are chiefly members and lovers of the PDP in any case – backing the claim he was staking on our collective behalf, they typically lost their liver and cojones, choosing instead to throw him under the bus. But history would be very kind to Umahi for courageously toeing a path strewn with thorns when it would have been easier and more profitable to take a stroll on the path of least resistance by keeping his thoughts to himself.
Let me be clear on this: the route with the most likelihood of producing a president of Igbo extraction must start with the PDP zoning the 2023 presidency to the South-East. Nothing else will suffice. It is only after accomplishing this quest, and a generally acceptable candidate with national name recognition emerges – of which there are many in the South-East – that we can now embark on the final stage of horse-trading with real movers and shakers in the core-North – both in APC and PDP – to convince them beyond any shadow of doubt that our chosen or anointed candidate would work in the best interests of all sections of Nigeria and deliver established Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The singular cardinal objective would be to put asunder the “accord concordiale” (apologies to Dr. KO Mbadiwe) between political influencers in the South-West and core-North that oiled the electoral machinery that wielded the APC victories in 2015 and 2019. If this is not successfully accomplished, any hope of producing a president of Igbo extraction in 2023 would remain a mere pipedream.
You only have to consider that as per the latest voters’ register officially compiled by INEC, the North-West has 17 million registered voters, South-West has 14 million and North-East has 11 million. Compare these statistics with the South-East’s 7 million, South-South’s 9.2 million and North-Central’s 8.5 million – with the latter realistically much lower when you discount Kwara and Niger and parts of Nasarawa and Kogi from the equation – and wonder if anybody is still in cuckoo land!
- To be continued on Friday
Tiko Okoye, a Boston University Hubert Humphrey Fellow, wrote in from Abuja (tkooziks@gmail.com)
