Ohanaeze Ndigbo urges justice to save Nigeria, wants Kanu pardoned

Apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, yesterday, cautioned against possible breakup of the country if the present imbalance in power sharing and social injustice continue.

It also urged President Muhammadu Buhari to grant prerogative of mercy to the detained leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.

The group also restated its earlier demand for an Igbo to succeed Buhari in 2023 to deepen the country’s unity, stressing that it has formed a Political Action Committee (PAC) with its President General, Prof. George Obiozor as Chairman and Ambassador Okey Emuchy, as Secretary to prosecute the 2023 presidential election.

Obiozor, who spoke with journalists after the group’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting at its secretariat in Enugu, disclosed that the PAC had the mandate to liaise with those seeking political power from within and outside the South East and sensitise other parts of the country on the political quest of Ndigbo in 2023.

He insisted that the country had drifted badly and its political and economic development now threatened, adding that time has come to reassess Nigeria’s journey with a view to rewriting the wrongs for a greater tomorrow.

He cited Ecclesiastes 3 in the Bible,’ which says: “There is season and a time to every purpose under the heaven; A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

“The essence of the above quotation is to remind Nigerians that the country needs introspective and retrospective thinking to reassess our journey so far as a nation. Doing so includes serious re-examination of our history as a nation.

“If the truth must be told, the nation has made two consistent mistakes that have worsened the nation’s other problems, leading to near breaking points. We drifted into the problems with nonchalance and sometimes, we are oblivious of their consequences until what we think is an easy problem developed into a national catastrophe.”

He asked: “How did we get into the western region crisis in the 1960s? How did we get to the civil war (1967-1970), the NADECO (Abiola crisis) and the South-South avengers?”

Obiozor lamented that as of today, the country’s situation was not entirely different, but had become even more complicated.

“The way things are, with communication and modern technology, our country is set, not only at the usual breaking points, which were more easily controlled and contained in the past to preserve Nigerian unity, but a point of synchronised national crisis, which will be more difficult to control today.”

He argued that Nigeria was a country negotiated and amalgamated under some agreements that balanced sensitive issues of power-sharing and balancing of power regardless of other conditions, lamenting however that, “Nigerian nationalism is receding, as ethno-regional nationalism grows astronomically.”