BY: RALPH EJIMKONYE
There are clear indications that leaders of the All Progressive Congress, APC, may have divided over the quest by the South East to produce the nation’s next President.
The quest by Igbo to produce the next President after Buhari in 2023, has been backed by several groups including the pan Igbo organization, Ohaneze Ndi Igbo.
Ohaneze President, John Nwodo had vowed that leaders of the South East would join Nnamdi Kanu, to agitate for Biafra, if Igbo fail to produce country’s President in 2023.
While several other groups are backing the agitation, the utterances of some Igbo leaders particularly those who belong to the APC lately, has raised concern if indeed they are united to actualize the quest.
Since President Buhari’s nephew, Mamman Daura, said competence rather than zoning, should be a major factor to elect the nation’s President in 2023, some APC leaders in the South East, have aligned with his statement.
Despite the Presidency distancing itself from Daura’s statement, former Governor of Abia State and Senate Chief Whip, Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, concurred with Daura’s statement recently, when he said, there is no zoning in the Constitution of the All Progressive Congress.
He said any zone is free to aspire for the Presidency.
Kalu spoke when he visited two former military Heads of State, Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, in Minna, Niger State.
Imo State Governor, Senator Hope Uzodinma after meeting President Muhammadu Buhari, on Tuesday at the Presidential Villa, also aligned with Senator Kalu.
He said the quest for the Presidency is not a tribal issue.
He said “Well you know the position is not vacant now, there is a sitting president and we are practicing partisan democracy and not tribal democracy. So the emergence of presidential candidate will come on party by party basis, not tribe by tribe basis. But if there are other internal factors that will form part of the considerations for parties taking decision of course, that will be entirely the job of the leadership of those political parties and I think that is the right thing to do”
A chieftain of the APC and a former Commissioner in Imo State, Vitalis Ajumbe, had also
advised the Igbo nation to forget the Presidency in 2023 and settle for the Vice Presidency.
He said an Igbo being Vice President, would provide the rallying point for the Igbo nation which is presently lacking.
But Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, had a different view, when he said there is a gentleman agreement in the APC that the presidency should rotate between the North and the South.
“It is not written in our Constitution. But it will make for stability and fairness if it rotates back to the South.
“I was one of the wise men that drafted the APC Constitution with Chief Oyegun as head. That’s what we agreed on; that we don’t have to insert it but these are things that could be done by gentleman agreement” Ngige said