The people of the South East have, at last, come to realize how important it is to always align with the party at the centre, in contemporary Nigerian politics.
After the 2023 presidential election, the outcome of which did not favour their preferred candidate, the discerning among Ndigbo were forced into a necessary political soul-searching and stock taking. And in the process they have been able to separate the truth from the falsehood fed them by some mischievous political leaders from the region.
Analysts who examined the election results from the South East in the last general elections, noted the peculiar voting pattern witnessed in the region, particularly in the presidential election. It had the characteristics consistent with identity politics.
The South East zone gave their support almost wholesale to the candidate of the Labour Party with whom they apparently identified as their kinsman, unlike in the previous elections in which they voted in the same manner for the PDP, being a party they helped form at the eve of the return to democracy in 1998.
Mainstream opinion leaders from the region, however, saw the development as an unwise political miscalculation, given the position of Ndigbo and their historical experiences in contemporary Nigerian politics.
Speaking in a recent interview with the Television Continental (TVC), a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who’s also the National Vice Chairman of the party for the South East zone, Dr. Ijeomah Arodiogbu, said,
“As things stand today in the South East, the truth is that in the 2027 presidential election, we won’t need another Peter Obi contesting for a repeat of that voting pattern in which almost 99% of the vote in the region was delivered to the Labour party supposedly on account of Mr. Peter Obi. This block vote had the effect of cancelling out the influence hitherto enjoyed by the PDP in the region, and thus benefited the APC. In the next presidential election, our party, the APC, will do marvelously well, not just in Anambra state, but across the entire region. Our people have seen the political light, and will now move in the right direction.”
The reason is clear.
Speaking further, Dr. Arodiogbu said:
“Ndigbo, the good people of the South East Zone, now know that the leaders of the other political parties in the zone are moving over to the APC…they are now joining us in their numbers, having seen the political light, so to say, and acknowledged the strong developmental strides thus far recorded by the Tinubu administration since its inception almost a year ago. They have seen through the sustained lies and deceit of our brother, the candidate of the Labour Party in the last presidential election. The people have seen that the man has nothing to offer to the zone other than empty political rhetoric, and the penchant for needless antagonism of every project of the federal government. He sees nothing good in all that the present administration has been doing to stabilize the economy and reposition it on the path of growth at the earliest possible time, in order to end the present hardship being experienced by our people on account of the recent unpalatable but inevitable series of economic policy reforms.”
In the course of the television interview, Dr. Arodiogbu went further to note,
“We, the leaders of the APC in the South East region, are working hard, consulting widely and engaging our people, and letting them see the need to play politics of commonsense and relevance, in the light of the reality on ground in the contemporary Nigerian polity.
We cannot continue to bite our nose to spite our face, all in the name of regional politics of identity which has left us with little political dividend since the return of democracy more than two decades ago.”
Indeed, the Igbo people are now turning around to embrace the truth, the truth that after the regions slavish loyalty and profitless devotion to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) since the return to democracy in 1999, it is time for the zone to break with the past, move to the centre and be part of the mainstream.
Happily, this movement has already started. It is at the centre that Ndigbo stand a better chance of realizing their legitimate and long held political aspirations as one of the three important regions that form the tripod on which the federation stands.
“Those in the opposition parties from the South East, especially those in the Labour Party, are not telling our people the truth. They are not telling them that His Excellency, Sen. Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the best thing that happened to Nigeria in recent times. But for his fortuitous emergence as president the nation would have by now been experiencing a bitter new reality. As at the time he was sworn in as president on May 29th 2023, Nigeria had all but degenerated economically to that parlous stage where the Federal Government would be unable to borrow to pay the monthly salary of its workers in such critical departments of the state as the military, the para-military, the police, other security agencies and also those workers in the essential services sector; the judicial officers, the doctors, and the rest of them. Outbreak of national chaos and anarchy would certainly have been the outcome, had President Tinubu not emerged to halt the dangerous drift to the precipice of a failed state.”
#Arodiogbu Media Office
