the pedestrianism of its parent body, Ohaneze Ndigbo, came up with a
strange prescription on how best Igbo can navigate through the difficult
terrain that is the Igbo 2023 Presidency project. The group suggested
that at least two of the five South East governors and many
legislatorsshould defect to the APC to make the project realizable. It
mused that the Igbo choice of party is the greatest factor that will
vitiate their aspiration to produce a Nigerian president in 2023. I said
this is a strange prescription because Ohaneze Youths and its parent
body have not hidden their love, admiration, commitment, support for PDP
and they have formed a firm bulwark against the party’s predictable
paths to extinction by ensuring the Igbo form the most solid block for
the party since formation. It is rather strange that in the said period,
PDP had not done anything tangible for Igbo except having them as
unquestioning hewers of wood and fetchers of water while its sixteen
years’ glory lasted. This remains a fervent topic for another day.
Back to the Ohaneze Youth prescription. It reeks of the hollow,
knee-jerk understanding of power and politics which has afflicted Igbo
for neon years. Again, the same Ohaneze Youths recently belched of how
it was forming a grand alliance between Igbo and other Nigerians who are
distanced from the present Buhari and APC government to take over the
country in 2023. Is its recent prescription therefore a design for Igbo
to work from within to topple the APC applecart, if I may ask? But I
won’t go along to invest such grand plot to the group. I won’t also
invest the Ohaneze Youths of wisdom even of a belated variant because it
wasn’t speaking from wisdom but from the same pedestrian atrophy that
has riddled the Igbo understanding of politics. Its prescription is
rather the self-serving and shallow permutations of a challenged card
player who has been cornered in the game thus any plot is game.
I, for one, don’t see the rest of Nigerians who have invested in APC
yielding grounds to the Igbo entrants into the party they so much
loathed and worked against in its entire history. I don’t see the
defection of one or two governors to APC as the elixir needed for the
Igbo to achieve the gargantuan project of Igbo presidency because the
defection will still suffer from the absence of good faith. I don’t see
the defection dealing with the unceasing tirades and hate some Igbo have
launched against other Nigerians since PDP was defeated, to their
chagrin, in 2015. One or two defections cannot re-build the critical
bridges of trust and confidence which the same Ohaneze Youths and its
parent body assiduously worked to destroy in the larger Nigerian polity.
Its mending needs a critical, holistic effort that will require equally
assiduous bridge-builders. Simply, the Ohaneze Youths prescription won’t
work and except for future political prospecting, I think Igbo PDP
should do well to maintain their line.
Sometime in 2017, I had written a well-received article, ‘Igbo: When
2019 Beckons’, where I tried to call the Igbo to reason on the
implications of their votes in the then coming 2019 elections to their
dream of ruling Nigeria n 2023. In the article, I had called the Igbo to
retreat to their ime obi (not the one Ohaneze and its youth group have
desecrated through their mercantilist politics and shameful subservience
to the PDP) and strategize on how and where to vote in 2019 because
where their votes tilt and how their votes perform in the election will
decide whether or not they will get the presidency in 2023. I clearly
told them that mine was not an appeal for them to vote for APC (as they
were bound to misconstrue it) but to take a durable decision on where to
vote in 2019 and live with the outcome thereafter. Mine was a suggestion
of deeper introspection and soul searching needed to make the right
decisions that will bode ill or good for the Igbo race beyond 2019.
I had in the same article, reminded Ndigbo that power is never ever
offered in a platter or given to those that have made the loudest noise,
issued so much sterile threats, cried most or generated for themselves a
sense of victimhood and self-pity. I had reminded them that they have to
work for what they get in a combustible nationhood as Nigeria by putting
their best feet forward and adopting sobriety and tact instead of the
rash of emotions and sentiments they have been oozing since 2015. I told
them that for them to get the best for themselves, they have to put
their best brains to work against the predilection to allow the
unthinking, loud and intemperate rabble seize their high grounds and
commandeer those that should lead to forceful acquiescence. I told them
that the reigning fad in Igboland where the tail wagged the dog must be
replaced for Igbo to make a headway in 2023. I made it clear to them
that a wrong move in the 2019 election stood to condemn the nearest
possible time an Igbo can be Nigerian president to 2039!
I must point out that the few negative reactions, insults and abuses I
received for the article were predictably from the Igbo but that didn’t
bother me. As a people, Ndigbo never cared to show they would take in my
humble suggestions in the article. Rather, they, and of course, such
other motley cartels of PDP bogeymen in the South East such as Ohaneze
and Ohaneze Youths took turns to show they cared not about the indelible
wisdom in such suggestions as I tried to advance. Ohaneze, led by a
purblind, self-serving, pathologically challenged, mercenary leadership
told the whole world they never cared about 2023 or even a Nigerian
president of Igbo extraction. They came to howl on the rooftops that
they don’t need the presidency but restructuring. Such favored their
continued servitude to what was becoming the blurry interests of PDP.
They never hid the ancillary role they played to whatever the PDP
wanted.
When Atiku Abubakar emerged as the presidential candidate of the PDP,
the Ohaneze was to jettison its vow to show disinterest in the
presidency. They waged body and soul to the pursuit of PDP and Atiku’s
interest. That same Ohaneze that said it wasn’t interested in Nigerian
presidency was to grow so shamefully banal as it announced that Atiku’s
choice of Peter Obi as the running mate to his certainly doomed
candidacy had tamed all its noisy charge that the Igbo had been
marginalized! It grew so impudently blind to the counter-reasoning that
the Igbo support for the candidacy of President Buhari and the APC
remained the shortest route to a Nigerian President of Igbo stock in
2023. Ohaneze’s demeaning service to PDP and hate for Buhari and APC
were so bad that on the day President Muhammadu Buhari was scheduled to
come to Onitsha to open the Zik Mausoleum and honour the legendary Dr.
Nnamdi Azikiwe was the day Ohaneze fixed an impromptu meeting where they
adopted Atiku as their candidate for the 2019 presidency. The rest is
history but suffice it to say that Ohaneze sank with Atiku in 2019 and
this marked the Igbo to the second catastrophic political disaster in
four years and blew the best chances Igbo had of producing a Nigerian
president in 2023! Talk of thunder striking the same object at the same
spot a second time?
The 2019 election has come and gone and the 2023 contest races on but
the Igbo are seized in a maze of not knowing how best to shell out from
a self-dug hole and stake a sustainable demand for the presidency in
2023, which many feel should be theirs for the asking. Ohaneze Youths
has been seized in a fit where it manufactures a cacophony of ideas,
threats, action plans and routes through which Igbo will get the prized
diadem and among these plethora of roadmaps in the latest where it is
calling on some Igbo governors and legislators to defect to APC, which
had been so horribly profiled by groups like Ohaneze Youths in the
recent past. We will see how this resort to abject, knee-jerk
pedestrianism will give us the presidency and most especially how it
will spur other parts of Nigeria who have been subjected to ceaseless
pillorying by such groups as Ohaneze for the interest of PDP to now ease
power to the laps of Igbo in 2023. We have also heard some ageless
Ohaneze chieftains and virulent proponents of PDP politics like
Chukwuemeka Ezeife issue the threat that Igbo will declare Biafra if
they are not given the presidency in 2023. Time will tell how these will
work
But it Is germane to state that Igbo are far gone in the labyrinth which
such groups like Ohaneze, Ohaneze Youths and such other groups and
individuals sworn to the perpetuation of the narrow PDP interests have
dug for Ndigbo to redeem what certainly is a very difficult mission. For
long, Igbo have been enfooled, duped and encased in a cocoon of
duplicity by the kind of hollow and acrid politics that have benefited
only the same people that are wallowing in sheer confusion on how Igbo
can suddenly become president without any enduring template. Those who
thought they were furthering their primitive greed by deepening the
crevices between Ndigbo and the rest of Nigeria, destroying critical
bridges that should make us trusted confederates in a multi-ethnic
Nigeria are those trashing about today in predictable myopia, issuing
impracticable panaceas to our getting our rightful dues in Nigeria. It
is so shameful. Their self-serving bad politics anchored on promoting
hate, mutual distrust, anger and division since the fall of PDP in 2015
is coming to hurt and hunt Igbo today. They may have reasons to sustain
this bad politics because it benefited them as it lasted but the
generality of Igbo is bearing the brunt today and will bear it for many
more years to come. We are all collective victims of their collective
greed and this will haunt us for many years to come.
There is still time for all Igbo to start mending real fences; not for
Igbo governors to stage a defection to APC or for the entire Igbo to
empty into APC for the purpose of getting the presidency in 2023 but for
all Igbo to rebuild trust and confidence with other Nigerians. They may
still stay put in PDP but they must reach out to others and engender the
spirit of oneness with other Nigerians. Igbo must adapt to the reality
that getting the Igbo presidency may take a little longer but repairing
and mending destroyed bridges will certainly do much to reconcile Igbo
to other Nigerians and ensure we don’t sweat in the future to get what
should rightly belong to us in the larger Nigerian space.
Peter Claver Oparah
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com