SIR: A few months after the 2015 general elections, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), set up a committee to review the circumstances that led to the sobering defeat it suffered, and to recommend steps that would help the party to avert a repeat scenario in future elections. That post-election committee was chaired by Ike Ekweremadu, a Deputy Senate President and the Senator representing Enugu West, and the findings regarding the party’s loss was unequivocal: the major reason was its non-adherence to the principle of zoning.
How then could a principle idealised as “the strength of the (PDP)” be considered an anathema just a few years later? That is a question Senator Ekweremadu would gladly avoid. Nowhere else has the benefits of zoning been more pronounced than in Enugu State, where adherence to rotational power-sharing has helped to foster an agreeable political climate that gives every section a sense of belonging. Ekeremadu is himself a product of zoning. Since 1999, Ekweremadu has, solely based on zoning, held a varying degree of political office, from Chief of Staff to a governor to Secretary to the State Government and a senator!
One of the arguments often put up to oppose zoning the governor’s seat is that it creates a provincial mindset in politicians who emerge through such arrangement, and that it tends to make them feel more obligated towards their immediate zone than seeing the entire state as their constituency. Perhaps this might be considered a plausible argument if the man for whose benefit that argument was advanced had extended his famed benevolence to the entire Enugu West Senatorial District that he represents, and not limited only to his Aninri Local Council, and largely his tiny village Mpu. The Zonal Intervention Projects, otherwise known as constituency projects, was an initiative launched by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration to spur speedy growth at the grassroots. The assumption was that being facilitated by legislators, the projects so chosen, and included in the Appropriation Act, will reflect the real developmental needs of communities across the country. But in the roughly 19 years he has been in the senate – 12 of those years as Deputy Senate President, Ekweremadu’s imprint is barely seen anywhere else in his Senatorial zone.
Leadership is about legacy. A leader who apparently has little qualms about the political and cultural division that his ambition will foster should never be trusted. By openly disavowing an idea he had passionately canvassed, and which has earned Enugu State much respect as a stable political entity, Ekweremadu has done incalculable harm to the immense regard he has earned over the years as a respected voice of equity and justice.
• Ezenwa Okenwa writes from Lagos.
