2023 Presidency: Will Nigerians Listen To Elder Statesmen Adebanjo, Clark!

BY PAUL UWADIMA

The leader of Pan Yoruba socio-cultural organization, Chief Ayo Adebanjo and the Ijaw leader Edwin Clark, are not happy elders. They are angry over the state of the nation.

Left to the duo, the 1999 constitution should be discarded and another made in its place or at best the Confab Report of 2014 should be implemented. Nobody is listening. Hearts have been hardened. The elders appeared to be talking to the descendants of Pharaoh.

Undeterred by the stubbornness of sections of Nigeria, the elders have not given up on the country. They are on a campaign for a president of South East extraction in 2023. And they are not even Igbo. They are propelled by sense of justice, equity and fairness in a country in which after the civil war the government of the day announced that, “there is no victor, no vanquished.”

An African proverb says that what the elders see sitting down, the young ones cannot see it even if they climb on top of trees. Perhaps what Pa Ayo Adebanjo, and Chief Edwin Clark have seen ahead, the internet ‘soldiers’ and their sponsors have not seen it. Influenced by their present temporary advantage they have turned deaf to reason. These are the people who say power must return to the South in 2023 from the North for ‘justice, fairness and equity’. However once it appears that the North has acquiescence to their agitation and that power would indeed return to the South, they quickly discarded the principle of ‘justice, fairness and equity’ and insist that now it is going to be based on the survival of the fittest. But they were so shameless that they did not see the irony in the Northern dominance they are fighting against and the hegemony they wanted to foist on other Southerners. They detest “Northern born to rule mentality,” but are eager to foist “South West born to rule.” Hypocrisy is their name. And they have no shame. If they are so sure of standing on the survival of the fittest, why did they literarily coarse the North to step aside? They should have been ready to fight it out with the Kwankwasos, Atikus, Lamidos, El-Rufais of this world. And when they say that ‘power is not given, it is taken’ or that ‘power is not served a la carte’ they are ridiculing themselves because they are among southerners that said the North should not contest for president in 2023 so that they (southerners) could stand a chance.

Thank God for little mercies, not everyone is given to their foolishness and hypocrisy. The elders of the South are speaking out. And they don’t get bigger than Ayo Adebanjo and Edwin Clark. Between these two men are 189 years of experience. Both men are 94 and 95 years old respectively. When they speak Nigeria ought to listen and when they take a position it should be a given that it is in the interest of all. They have said for justice and equity the next president should be from the South East. They are right. And the reasons they have given for their position are cogent. It cannot be faulted, no matter how hard the naysayers tried.

Ayo Adebanjo did not only call for the South East to produce the country’s next president, he questioned those who think the region does not deserve the seat. He said this during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today, hinging his argument on federal character and equity. He said while the South South and South West have tasted power at the centre, the same cannot be said of the Igbo-dominated South East.

“How can you say rotation in the North and South, so when it comes to the South, it would be South-West and

South-South every time? Is the South East not part of the South? What is the moral we are talking about?” he asked during the show. “Is it not the South West that has served [through] Obasanjo for eight years, Osinbajo for another eight years as vice president? [The] South-South has served its own. Is the South East not part of the South? That is the question we should answer,” the elder statesman said.

Similarly, elder statesman and Ijaw leader, Chief Edwin Clark, recently, restated his position that the people of South-East region should produce Nigeria’s president in 2023. Clark said his reason was not because they are Igbo or people from South-East, but because they are Nigerians. Chief Clark who spoke during a programme on Arise TV, insisted that it would be unfair to deny the South-East the opportunity to produce the president. According to him, after the civil war, Gen. Yakubu Gowon announced that there was no victor no vanquish.

He wondered what had happened to that declaration if the people of South-East are denied the Presidency. He maintained that every part of the country has had a fair share of testing political power at the Presidency except the South-East.

What the elder statesmen were invariably saying is that other zones in the South should grant the South East the right of first refusal in the presidency contest. The two biggest political parties, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) should also narrow their presidential ticket to the South East. Interestingly, in both parties there are many South East people of capacity, integrity and love for one Nigeria that could make great president in 2023.

UWADIMA, author, media practitioner and copywriter writes from Abuja