Ndigbo And 2023: The Chicken Is Finally Home To Roost

PETER CLAVER OPARAH

Recently, Ohanaeze Youths Worldwide; that bogey group that compliments the pedestrianism of its parent body, Ohanaeze 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 legislators should 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze Youth prescription.  It reeks of the hollow, knee-jerk understanding of power and politics which has afflicted Igbo for neon years. Again, the same Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze and Ohanaeze Youths took turns to show they cared not about the indelible wisdom in such suggestions as I tried to advance. Ohanaeze, 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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. Ohanaeze’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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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. Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze for the interest of PDP to now ease power to the laps of Igbo in 2023. We have also heard some ageless Ohanaeze 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 Ohanaeze, Ohanaeze 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 benefitted 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 benefitted 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 writes from Ikeja, Lagos.