From Lawrence Njoku, Enugu
An Igbo group, the Alaigbo Development Foundation (ADF), has demanded a national consensus for the next president of Nigeria to emerge from Igbo extraction in 2027.
The group also asked the Federal Government to appropriate N1 trillion to the South-East Development Commission (SEDC) over five years for infrastructure development in the zone, in reparation for Igbo properties abandoned in Port Harcourt and Lagos during the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War.
It stated that the amount would serve as resettlement for the kith and kin of Igbo origin exiled from the South-East into other regions after the war.
The ADF President, Prof. Ukachukwu Awuzie, stated in Enugu that the call had become necessary following the exoneration of Ndigbo from the January 1966 coup by former Military President General Ibrahim Babangida in his widely publicised book, “A Journey in Service.”
Appreciating IBB for confirming that the January 15, 1966, Coup was not an Igbo affair, Awuzie said previous efforts to make the wartime Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, say the truth about the coup d’état yielded no results.
The former Vice Chancellor of Imo State University (IMSU), Owerri, recalled that in 2016, ADF wrote a widely advertised open letter to Gowon, pleading with him to tell the world whether the coup led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu was an Igbo coup or Nigerian coup as others were dubbed.
According to him, as expected, Gowon failed to respond to the letter published as advertorials in three national dailies and posted to his Ray Field residence in Jos, which he acknowledged, prompting ADF to respond in a book titled, ‘The Nigeria’s January 1966 Coup and Biafra: Myths and Realities.”
He, therefore, welcomed the fact that one of the protagonists in the “destruction of Ndigbo during the war, General Ibrahim Babangida, swallowed his pride to confirm the obvious that Nzeogwu, who led the January 15, 1966 coup, was more Hausa-Fulani than Igbo, and that the coup was not an Igbo affair, but aimed at installing Obafemi Awolowo as the Prime Minister of Nigeria.”
He added: “It was disingenuous the fact that the counter-coup of July 1966 was overtly geared to Northern (far-northern) domination, which negatively midwifed a horrid bloodlust and a total collapse of compatriot spirit against the Igbo, a situation that still pervades the Nigerian polity till today, thus questioning the basis of a united Nigeria.
