Reactions to my essay titled “2015 Presidential Election: Reality or Myth?” were fast and furious. Quite interestingly, most of the fan mail from the South East geopolitical zone admonished me to “think and write like an Igbo man”! I’m not unaware that a lot of falsehoods and outrageous things are being peddled about Muhammadu Buhari. But it is this same Buhari who is the only presidential candidate of a major political party in the nation’s history that has nominated two eminent Igbo sons as his running mate – Dr. Chuba Okadigbo in 2003 and Edwin Ume-Ezeoke in 2007.
It is this same Buhari, then a lieutenant colonel, that Pastor Angus Okoli, a war correspondent of the defunct Spear magazine, testified went beyond the call of duty to not only provide for the welfare of young Biafran soldiers captured from the Umuleri/Aguleri sector during the civil war but also ordered their release back to their base in “Biafra II” (that part of Biafra that was cut off from the main enclave when the Nigerian Army occupied a long stretch of the Enugu/Nkpor Highway – see page 9 of Saturday Vanguard of February 7, 2015 for details). Shouldn’t a loathing for Ndigbo be made of sterner stuff?
I was completely taken aback when I read news report of the Harvard University-trained former governor of Anambra State, Chukwuemeka Ezeife, declaring magisterially that there would be no elections as long as Professor Attahiru Jega remains the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman – even after Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national chairman, Adamu Mu’azu, recanted and passed a vote of confidence on Jega, and vowed that the dates for the rescheduled polls and official handover are sacrosanct! Makes one wonder why members of our first 11 continue to have a man-Friday mentality and tend to weep louder than the bereaved at the drop of a hat.
Ohanaeze secretary-general, Dr. Joe Nwaorgu, also recently disclosed that the most important reason the body has endorsed Jonathan “and can do so 100 times again” is because between him and Buhari, Jonathan is the one likely to implement the national confab report. Really? How? It is this kind of pedestrian effusion from Ndigbo political elite that makes one wonder if there’s more to the endorsement than meets the eye!
But there seems to be a silver lining in the dark cloud, as not all our highly illustrious sons have allegedly sold their souls to the devil for an oil block or government hand-me-down. In an essay captioned ‘The Buhari of my personal experience’, Ignatius Olisemeka, a former Ambassador to the United States of America and one-time foreign affairs minister didn’t mince words when he declared that “Of all the Nigerian leaders, with the possible exception of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Tafawa Balewa, Buhari has been the one that has most approximated my dream of what a Nigerian leader should be” (page 14 of Saturday Vanguard of February 7, 2015).
In another commentary published in The Nation on Sunday (February 15, 2015), Eze Festus Odimegwu, former chairman of the Nigeria Population Commission (NPC), ex-managing director of Nigerian Breweries Plc and a close ally of both former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Jonathan, unapologetically faulted Jonathan for “seeing himself as a politician instead of the president of Nigeria” and one who “sacrificed and was ready to sacrifice anything and everything, anyone and everyone for re-election”.
Odimegwu ended his piece by averring that “It is very clear to the discerning that majority will vote for the APC presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, to save Nigeria from bad leadership and an under-performing administration.” Phew! Truth be told, Buhari may not be a saint. No human being is; even the great Madiba, Nelson Mandela, rightly said he wasn’t one, but see the stellar legacies he left behind after spending just four years in office. Buhari similarly embodies the new hope for hard-pressed Nigerian masses!
Some have opined that voting for Buhari constitutes a movement backwards. If moving backwards means a naira that was at par with the American dollar, a more stable electric power supply, a more equitable society (through the supervised distribution of “essential commodities”), a more disciplined society when traditional values meant something, a safer and more secured nation and a time when corruption was less pervasive, then may we ever continue to move backwards, as a way of ultimately leap-frogging back to the future!
If you look at the west, you’ll find three to five groups well represented in the major political parties. The same is true of the North. Such a strategic political diversification ensures that no matter which party wins, there’s still something in the pot for the different regions. It’s only South-Easterners that have chosen to play the game with eyes blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs by placing all their bets on a racing horse without a thought for all the unmitigated risks of the horse neither racing nor winning!
Before misgivings, concretise and speculations run riot, let me hasten to add that I’m not canvassing for the splitting of our pan-Igbo organisation as I believe it’s possible to achieve political diversification under one umbrella where honesty and sincerity of purpose subsist.
What amazed me most in the course of my interactions with a random sample of South-Easterners was that the broad consensus among them that if elections had been held as scheduled, Jonathan would have been beaten silly by Buhari! If we can see the writing on the wall, why then do we inexplicably insist on putting all our eggs in one political basket? Why are we allowing ourselves to be dragged by forces seemingly beyond our control(?) towards the wrong side of history? Our elders say that a prudent man must take immediate steps to dodge a stone he sees aiming straight for his head!
Four years ago, Ohanaeze publicly canvassed an Igbo bloc vote for Jonathan. An Ohanaeze advertorial disclosed that among other promises, Jonathan had accepted to use the powers of incumbency to facilitate the emergence of a president of Igbo extraction in 2015 (a tacit agreement that he would spend only one term in office) and create a sixth state in the South East. We were also assured that the president would approve the dredging of the River Niger and transformation of Onitsha into a thriving deep inland seaport. Further, Jonathan pledged to build a second Niger Bridge before 2015 and complete the quality rehabilitation of the Onitsha/Enugu and Enugu/Port Harcourt expressways.
And our leaders – whose personal interests have probably been well taken care of – are now asking us to turn a blind eye at Jonathan’s scorecard in the zone, and, as if hypnotised, we are marching like sheep to the slaughter! Politics is a game of numbers and my greatest concern is that Ndigbo have myopically chosen to collaborate with those who cannot really help our larger interests while antagonising those we ought to be fraternalising with in order to realise our group objectives. We are not playing good politics at all; rather we are exhibiting pitiable naivety and wishful thinking.
There’s neither sense nor logic to the opinions we continue to collectively hold. As things stand today, Ndigbo don’t occupy the plum offices of the President, Vice-President, Senate President, House Speaker, Chief Justice, Chairman and Secretary of the two major political parties, Chief of Defence Staff, Chief of Army Staff, Chief of Naval Staff, Chief of Air Staff, Inspector-General of Police, Director of the Department of State Security, Comptroller-General of Customs and Comptroller of Immigration.
Yet, we constitute the third largest ethnic nationality and have consistently given any PDP presidential candidate the largest bloc vote! If Jonathan wins, the status quo would remain because the posts are already occupied. It is only with an All Progressives Congress (APC) victory – and by Ndigbo maintaining a strong presence in the party – that things can drastically change for the better for us. The hen said that why it screamed when the hawk carried away her chick was not so that the predator would release the prey, but so that those around would bear true witness to what happened.
So, you call me an APC man if you like, although I don’t possess the membership card of any political party. But if that’s the price to pay for telling the truth as it is, then so be it. Ndigbo, cheenu ezigbo echiche!
