The issues at stake as Anambra votes

By the time you read this I would have cast my vote for my chosen candidate in the Anambra State governorship election. For reasons which are well known to every Nigerian, this is one election that has great implication to Nigeria’s corporate existence.

Even the global community will be waiting to see whether the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) would be able to mobilise the entire breath and width of Anambra to actualise its threat of election boycott in Anambra State and subsequently the entire Igbo land.

For Anambrarians, this election is first and foremost a battle for the control of the heart and soul of our dear state. This struggle for control as we also know is basically not among the gubernatorial candidates but between two forces pulling at the opposite directions. It is appropriately a battle between reason and passion, between faith and hopelessness.

The battle line was first drawn by IPOB, among them are young and old Igbo men and women who are fed up with the foot dragging and grandstanding that characterised the negotiation of a new Nigeria vis-à-vis the place of the Igbo and all other ethnic groups within the Nigerian union. Either rightly or wrongly, IPOB and its supporters believe that the way Nigeria is structured, not even King Solomon, if placed in Aso Rock would find it easy to perform despite his bagful of wisdom. This, they argue, has made it impossible for the Igbo and indeed any other Nigerian group to unleash their God given energy to better the lots of Nigeria.

Truth be told, IPOB is not the first to express revulsion about the unworkability of the Nigerian project but they were the first to assume that by waxing insults against the rest of Nigerians and non-cooperative Igbos they would achieve their desire of leading their members out of Nigeria into a promised land full of honey and milk.

That the IPOB group had a large chunk of the South Eastern population behind them is a testimony to the fact that there are Igbos who felt strongly about their message and their final solution to the Nigerian problems.

But within the same enclave where IPOB reigned, Ohaneze Ndigbo championed an alternative viewpoint; a counter that is rooted in the realistic belief that no society has ever eliminated all of its problems. Indeed what are considered progress in the life of a nation will, with time, metamorphose into future problems in a cyclic chain of problems and their solutions.

Who would have imagined that Messiah Mugabe of the 1980s will become Headache Mugabe of 2017 Zimbabwe? Essentially, the Eldorado which IPOB wish for exist only in a wonderland. But by thinking otherwise than IPOB, Ohanaeze has not relapsed into the fatal alternative that Nigeria’s lot cannot be relatively improved.

Ohaneze has advocated a dialogic resolution of these issues even where IPOB view them as intractable. Like IPOB, Ohaneze rues the so many missed opportunities that have characterised our country. They also wish to deflate the suspicious gaze which seemed eternally fixed on the Igbo as fallout of the civil war of the past, a gaze that tend to sap the confidence of a great people.If IPOB interprets the flight into Biafra as an escapement, Ohaneze views it as defeatist. Don’t run. Stay and confront the worst of your fears, Ohaneze tends to say.

Thus, when Kanu’s IPOB said no Igbo person should ever vote in any election organised by INEC, Nwodo led Ohaneze Ndigbo cautioned that self-disenfranchisement is like self-inflicted injury which nobody should blame on another. So today’s election is a choice between these two alternatives. When I finally cast my vote, it will be yet another pronouncement of my belief in the possibility of a greater and more prosperous Nigeria.

Candidates who are standing in for the election today are being assessed based on the perception of how they will unite with leaders from other parts of our country to achieve the dream of a prosperous Nigeria. What this means is that it is not going to be easy for the leader that will emerge as a consequence of today’s election. He will spend his entire tenure trying to justify to those Anambrarians who dared the threats of IPOB to vote in today’s election that they have not erred in their decision and choice. He will also be challenged to disprove IPOB’s thesis that we have exhausted all possibilities of negotiating a better Nigeria.

 

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