ACHIEVING THE POLITICAL DREAMS OF NDIGBO IN NIGERIA

Igbo nation is a special breed. It is a region after God’s heart. Ndigbo have the most industrious and wealthiest people in Africa. In fact, when the Queen of England visited Nigeria during the colonial days, it was the private Rolls-Royce of an Igbo businessman, Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu of Nnewi that she used.

Ndigbo are very populous and estimated at over one hundred and twenty million people spread across the globe because of their enterprising, adventurous and cosmopolitan nature. There is a saying that any city where you enter and you do not find an Igbo person, then that city is not habitable. And they always treat any city where they find themselves as their own; they build, do their business, develop, marry and even speak the dialect of the city more than the indigenous people.

Unfortunately, Igbo people are not getting their dues in the politico-economic arrangement of Nigeria, a county where the late Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zik of Africa, played the most crucial role among his contemporaries to secure her independence.

Save for the Second Republic during which they temporarily bounced back to relevance through Azikiwe’s political pragmatism, the Igbo nation has sadly remained a recluse in the limbo since the ouster of the Second Republic by the military in 1983, and the advent of this Fourth Republic, which started in 1999.

Ndigbo can make bold to say that since independence in 1960, no Igbo man has been the Executive President of Nigeria, save for the six months military rule that was interrupted in 1966. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was just a titular president in 1963, not an executive president.

This unpalatable situation for Ndigbo is simply due to the fact that their political elite have, for a long time, abandoned Dr Azikiwe’s legacy and have, instead, embraced political opportunism, selfishness and mercantilism. Unlike their rivals, some politicians and businessmen of Igbo extraction lack unity of purpose, vision and selflessness.

Therefore, they have exposed the ethnic group to servitude, marginalization, neglect, injustice and oppression by the elite of other tribes. This should not be so if the political elite in the South East get their acts together and embrace, once again, the political philosophy of Zik of Africa.

Therefore, the most credible alternative in the present scenario is for Ndigbo to unite and fight a common political battle. Ndigbo can converge on the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA. This is because it is a political party predominantly founded and dominated by the Igbo intelligentsia. APGA is a legitimate institution, which Ndigbo can use to achieve their political goals.

The party was given relevance by the late Dim Chukwuemeka-Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was a presidential candidate of APGA in the 2003 and 2007 general elections. But for the absurdities of Nigerian politics, APGA swept the poll in the South East in the 2003 general election.

Since taking over the mantle of leadership in Anambra State in 2006, APGA administrations have performed superlatively well in terms of good governance and delivery of democracy dividends, despite the fact that the party is not in control of the federal government. As a matter of fact, Anambra has fared better than most states governed by other parties.

APGA is a pleasant reminder of the good governance provided by governments of the defunct National Council of Nigerian Citizens, NCNC and Nigerian Peoples Party, NPP, in the First and Second Republics respectively. In both republics, Ndigbo were not marginalized as is the case today.

Taking a queue from the political philosophy of the late Zik, the present crop of the Igbo elites can renegotiate the ethnic group into reckoning in the country’s political and economic space without selling their birthright. If Ndigbo must realize their dream of producing the next President of Nigeria, they must have to unite and team up under one political front because, according to Ikemba Ndigbo, united we stand, divided we fall.

Let Ndigbo stop wasting time to collectively use APGA to achieve what their forbearers used the NCNC and NPP to accomplish in the First and Second Republics. We cannot continue to be political stooge to others in order to satisfy our selfish interests rather than the general interest of Ndigbo. Let us think APGA for the collective interest of Ndigbo because Nkea bu Nkeanyi.