2023: The Jonathan Project, Ndigbo And Greedy South West Politicians

 There is an ongoing project. It is not a project to ensure that all settlements in Nigeria are provided with electricity and pipe-borne water. It is not a project to put tablets in the hands of all Nigerian school children so that they could be able to study from their homes as coronavirus continue to ravage our country. This project is not about how to develop a strategy to eradicate the 13 million out of school children in Nigeria (the highest in the world) and put them back in school. 

It is not how to get employment for the 21.7million unemployed Nigerians. This project is not how to fix our roads so that the farmer can move his or her surplus farm produce to the markets where they are needed. This project is not even how to stop the menace of herders on our highways, farms and communities across the country or how to stop the robberies and kidnapping on the highways. It is not how to stop the so-called foreign herders from ravaging our communities, destroying homes, creating internally displaced persons (IDPs) in parts of the country and occupying Nigerian communities with impunity while our leaders debate whether they are homegrown herders or foreign herders. 

This project is not how to take millions of almajiria out of the streets and into the classrooms so that they do not become the terrorists, robbers of tomorrow rather trained to become the engineers and inventors of tomorrow. This project is not how to stop the stealing of elections by politicians through the adoption of electronic voting. It is not even how to ensure justice, equity and fairness in a country ravaged by hatred, ethnic and religious bigotry of unprecedented proportion for a nation that claims to be the giant of Africa. This project is not how to stop the general insecurity in the country that someone has described as the Somaliazation of Nigeria-the path to a failed. 

This project is not about all the ills bedevilling Africa’s largest economy listed above. It is about how to make the former President of Nigeria, the one that called they previously gave the sobriquet ‘Clueless,’ the next President of Nigeria. It is how to make Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, President, again! 

That is the main project in town and it is being pursued with zeal. Forget all the denials, this project is strong, it is real, and I dare say that it may succeed. This project is not a national project. This project is a Northern project. I have nothing against the North. Some of my most valued friends are Northerners. I sometimes marvel at their propensity to play the political game so perfectly while Southern politicians are bedevilled by selfishness, greed and ethnic hatred. Ahead of the 2023 general elections, most dispassionate Nigerians rightly think that for equity, fairness, justice and to reintegrate the Igbo people of South-East Nigeria into the mainstream of Nigeria’s political space since the sad episode of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) in which the Igbos tried and failed to secede from Nigeria that the presidency should be zoned to the region. At the end of the war, the mantra of the Gowon regime that superintended over the country from the beginning to the end of the war was “No victor, no vanquished.” It, however, appears that the ‘‘no victor, no vanquished’’ mantra means nothing to a lot of Nigerians including southern Nigerians. At this time one would have thought that the rallying cry in the South is #OnPresidentFromSouthEastWeStand. Instead what we have been hearing is a cacophony of voices from other zones in the South insisting they must produce the next president. They give all manners of reasons why they should be the ones to become President and why the Igbo should not get it. Some of these Southern politicians particularly those from the South West who were beneficiaries of the kind of arrangement Ndigbo are demanding in 2023 in 1999 when all the major political parties in Nigeria presented Yoruba presidential candidates. Today because the

leverage the South West politicians have in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) they are doing everything to shut out Ndigbo out of the 2023 presidency in the party. Because what the South West is demanding is unjust and against commonsense God almighty has released upon them the spirit and counsel of Ahithophel and there is confusion among them! How could you in good conscience after producing a president for eight years and vice president for eight years (16 years in total) still insist that if the Presidency comes to the South you are the one to take it? You hate Northern hegemony, but you want South West hegemony in Southern Nigeria. That is unfair and that should not be allowed to succeed. 

With Southern Nigerians already divided over which of the southern zones to take the presidency, there is a fertile ground for the North to use Southern politicians as football to kick around ahead of 2023 presidential election. The North has therefore decided that the safest bet to the region returning back to power as quickly as possible if it decides that power should go to the South in 2023 is to hand the presidency to former President Goodluck Jonathan who by constitutional provision has not more than four years to be President, having done four years first term between 2011 and 2015. So the North appears to believe that Jonathan is the path for the quick return of power to the region when President Muhammadu Buhari leaves office in 2023. And the North do not trust other southern Nigerians like the former governor of Lagos State Bola Ahmed Tinubu or Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi, former governor of Abia State and senator representing Abia North and the Senate Whip, Dr Orji Uzor Kalu; minister of Science and Technology, Dr Ogbonnaya Onu; governor of Ebonyi State, Chief Dave Umahi, former Senate President Ken Nnamani among others, that they would abide by any single term agreement. 

The political history of Nigeria has shown that single term agreements are not worth the papers they are written, neither are the voices that uttered them believable. Because of Southerndisunity and the greed of South West politicians, if at all power is shifted to the South in 2023, it would go to the one that would guaranty quick return of power to the North by 2027.