By Abuchi Obiora
The 2023 Presidential election in Nigeria threw up several questions about the issue of injustice to the diverse indigenous ethnic nationalities in the country. These injustices were committed against them by the political elites which is clearly under the grip and direction of some known individuals in Nigeria and their stooges that are spread across the six geopolitical regions of the country.
All the problems that Nigeria has been having since her independence in 1960 have been as a result of the denial of justice and equity to her indigenous ethnic groups by these few individuals who exhibit daft shrewdness and mastery in chameleonic permutations to obtain and retain power in Nigeria ad infinitum.
The inequity in the politics of Nigeria was so evident in the organization, conduct, control, and delivery of the 2023 presidential election results that there is need to reminisce on that election and observe whether the disunity and absence of peace in Nigerian is not tied to the divisive activities of the elitist political class who employ all manner of tactics to obtain and retain power. The need has also arisen to find out if justice and equity demanded by the diverse indigenous ethnic nationalities in Nigeria is not imperative for peace and unity in the country.
The Nigerian political system has long been skewed to work against the popular interest of Nigerians who are a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious people inappropriately lumped together as one country by Britain through colonization. This abnormality was to be upgraded and legalized with the 1979 Constitution of the Federal Republic as severally amended. Thenceforth, the process established by this legalized irregularity has been producing the Presidents of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The vicious cycle normally starts at every election year with the stage-managed presidential primaries of the political parties.
The Presidential primary elections of the political parties prior to the 25th February, 2023 election says so much about the odoriferous path to the attainment of the office of the President of the Federal Republic. It has become the political tradition in Nigeria that three categories of presidential candidates emerges from the political parties after the parties primaries.
The first category of the Presidential candidates is those candidates who solely fund their political parties and/or get contributions for the funding of their parties from their friends and business associates. This is the ‘one man show’ type of presidential candidates wherefore the party delegates to the primaries already know who to cast their votes for. In this type of party primary, there are virtually no other candidates seriously contending or competing for the office and where they exist, it is just for the sake of giving the process a democratic appeal in the view of the public. Examples in this category are the AAC and the APM political parties.
The second category of presidential candidates is those from the major political parties with national spread. This is where the action is because all of the political ‘juggernauts’ find their presence in these major political parties. The primaries in the major political parties are greatly influenced by the elitist political class. This is where the real and dangerous wheeling and dealing to the point of chicanery is the unwritten rule. Many Caucasus among this group of politicians try greatly to influence the outcome of the primaries in this category because they know that from amongst this second category of Presidential candidates will emerge the President of the Federal Republic. For this reason, so many things are done by the different Caucasus to present the candidates including monetizing the primaries. Nigerian politicians actually steal while in office to prepare for this particular process because hundreds of millions of dollars are always sunk in the project.
The process of choosing the presidential candidates in this category is jealously guided by the oligarchs in Nigeria who believe that they should control political power in the country ad infinitum. Unless a presidential aspirant is in their good books or have been selected by them to achieve certain pre-set agenda or purposes on their behalf, the oligarchs do not allow these slots to pass by them. They bribe, maim and kill in order to control the process. Apart from themselves or their ‘anointed’ candidates, no Nigerian, whosoever you may be, however rich you are, and however close you think you are with them, has ever ‘smelled’ the office, not to talk of attaining it, unless, of course, by an accident of fate as happened in the case of Goodluck Jonathan.
Many Presidential hopefuls who thought that they were going to rule Nigeria lost out in the battle for the above reasons. A good example to cite here is the case of Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu from South Eastern Nigeria who is a longtime close associate of President Mohammadu Buhari. Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu obviously thought that his long and close political association with the President will earn him an automatic ticket as the presidential candidate of the APC for the 2023 election after the primaries. He was wrong. He was disappointed. He, most probably thought that since power was expected to shift from the north to the south in 2023, there would be no better candidate in the party from South East than himself. In shock, the man exclaimed after the primaries, “where is the justice?”. Since that disappointment, nobody has heard anything from Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, the closest man to Mohammadu Buhari, who had shown tenacity in loyalty to the president from the earliest days of Mr. President in Nigerian civilian politics.
The third and last category of Presidential hopefuls that emerge after the party primaries is the business man’s category. This group of people .go into the contest in order to destabilize recognized candidates through splitting the votes which those recognized candidates expect to garner from certain geopolitical regions of the country. This action is always meant to benefit the highest bidder candidate. Because they know that they are not in the contest to win the primaries, they ‘settle’ the party delegates that are loyal to them whose votes they use to cause nuisance against the targeted candidate. At the end of the exercise, they get paid in hundreds of Millions of dollars by the person they have worked for.
I have decided to narrate this sordid path to the office of the President of the Federal Republic to underscore the disgust of Nigerians for the process and the readiness of the politics of Nigeria at the centre, for internal revolution. This revolution eventually came because the intrigue surrounding the emergence of presidential candidates in Nigeria is actually what produced Peter Obi as a Presidential candidate in the country. When it was evident to him that dollar ‘was talking’ and that there was no way he could secure the PDP presidential party ticket for the 2023 election without spending money, the man who vows that he will never spend ‘shishi’ to secure any political office, moved on to join the Labour Party, then under the presidential candidacy of his intellectual friend, Prof. Pat Utomi. Pof. Pat Utomi has been waiting to embrace the presence of Peter Obi in their midst and conceded the presidential candidacy of the party to him.
The unique emergence of Peter Obi as the presidential candidate of the Labour Party outside the traditional, nepotism-infested and corrupt way the former presidential candidates of Nigeria since independence emerged (apart from President Olusegun Obasanjo, Umar Yar’dua and Goodluck Jonathan) gave him the edge over the other presidential candidates and endeared him to Nigerians. From the quiet process in Asaba that produced him as the presidential candidate of Labour Party, Peter Obi began to have the love and trust of Nigerians both at home and in the Diaspora.
The emergence of Peter Obi as a Presidential candidate for the 2023 election was a coup de grace by Prof. Pat Utomi and his intellectual colleagues against the established wicked political order and in favour of the silent and unrepresented Nigerians across the diverse ethnic nationalities in the country. But for the emergence of Peter Obi as a presidential candidate in Nigeria, the deprived and depraved Nigerians had almost entered a cul de sac in the unending political engineering of the few elitist slave master politicians in Nigeria. Buoyed by his unequalled credentials to which he always ask people to ‘go and verify’, Peter Obi as the arrow head of the new political revolution in Nigeria called the #OBIDIENTS, is generally accepted by Nigerians who came out en mass to exercise their presidential franchise freely in his favour.
Having proven that the woes of Nigerians spread across the many indigenous ethnic nationalities across the geopolitical regions are brought upon them by the corrupt, unjust process by which the political elite produce the leadership of the country (because they want to perpetuate the status quo for their self-aggrandizing purposes), I present the second part of this week’s discourse with the caveat that the best option for Nigeria is to stay as one united and vastly populated country where the rule of law must reign, where justice must prevail, and where the country must cease to be a place where the cash cows are milked dry by the barking dogs who refuse to give access of leadership to the cash cows whose milk is used to lubricate the wheel of progress of the country. This caveat recognizes that the minimum condition for building any strong and workable union resides in observing justice, equity, fair play, and a level-playing ground for all the participants in the union.
As a Public Affairs Analyst and a Social Scientist, I am sensitive to the positive response of the international community in assisting the granting of reasonable levels of autonomy to the oppressed people around the world because this serves as the earliest grassroots approach to solving the increasing cases of social unrest and internecine wars across the world. As a matter of fact, all the countries doing well around the world have one thing in common: they all practice a loose system of relationship which grants distinct groups their differing levels of cultural, social and economic autonomies. This is unlike Nigeria where a dubious type of federalist constitution has always been interpreted, in practical terms, as a unitary, winner takes-it-all document.
With this background, though very bad experiences they were, the Igbo ethnic nationality of Nigeria has been immensely advantaged by the ethnic profiling of the Igbos and people who look like Igbos in Lagos state during the 2023 elections. This is a positive occurrence for the quest for self-determination of the Igbos. My opinion is that if all the socio-cultural groups and political opinion leaders in Igbo work in synergy with a robust legal team to present the Igbo self-determination quest to the United Nations, enough new grounds that will link up with the genocide of the civil war would be established to obtain a warrant for a referendum to decide if Igbos actually want to remain in Nigeria.
The above process may not come easy but its certainty is not in doubt if there is no division in the camp of the Igbo representatives. With this development, the systematic elimination of young and vibrant male Igbos in the guise of belonging to the IPOB or the ESN will be checked. Secondly, being a legal process permitted by international law, the struggle must have departed from the streets to the negotiating table.
Some antecedents exist in history where people seeking for self-determination have attained independence in this form. An example is Eritrea which acquired independence from Ethiopia. There is a striking corollary between the Eritrean and the Biafran cases. In the sixties, while Biafra decided to go to war to force Nigeria to grant it self-determination, Eritrea decided to take the diplomatic route by proceeding to the United Nations. Today, while Eritrea is an independent nation, Biafra still remains on the drawing board.
There is actually nothing to lose by the Igbos and indeed, the ethnic nationalities of Nigeria by taking this legal step. Self-determination quest is allowed and encouraged by the United Nations on the fulfillment of certain conditions. The assessment of such conditions remains the prerogative of the legal teams of the ethnic nationalities and they must be united in this purpose. Conversely, there is actually something to gain. What the country gains from this development is that the cabals who believe that they can endlessly enslave Nigerians will relinquish their tough grip on Nigerians because other ethnic nationalities including the Oduduwa, the Izon and the middle belt campaigners will take same steps at the same time to liberate themselves. The fact that these legal petitions will happen at the same time will overwhelm the few members of the cabals that we all know and can identity.
When these things begin to happen, all the slave masters in the country who are averse to the practice of true federalism in Nigeria will think twice because they will be left with only the two options of a total disintegration/separation and the practice of true federalism to attain the common dream of all of us …. the giant of Africa.
ABUCHI OBIORA
FOR:
Global Upfront Newspapers
REMARK:
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