President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chief Nnia Nwodo, has said that the people of Southern and Middle-belt regions of Nigeria will only vote for a presidential candidate whose political party has restructuring in its manifesto. Nwodo spoke at Enugu Sports Club, Friday night, at the maiden edition of “Nkata Umu Ibe”, a monthly distinguished Speaker’s series organised by Centre For Memories, a pro-Igbo organisation.
Nwodo announced emphatically that Ndigbo will not fight any war again, but will partner with other ethnic groups with similar ideology, to continuously engage the authorities through diplomatic warfare, in ensuring that Nigeria is restructured into a true federation as envisioned by the founding fathers of the country.
The Ohanaeze leader commended the guest speaker, Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, who spoke on the topic, “Igbo Ekunie: Lessons from Post-War Recovery in South East Nigeria”, stressing that, he gave a concise, comprehensive and incisive detail into Igbo history, her circumstances arising from the war and post war constitutional repression of her spirit of industry.
Since we began the Southern and Middle belt Forum, the ruling party has just remembered that it promised Nigeria restructuring. It has activated a committee headed by the Governor of Kaduna State (Nasir Ahmed el-Rufai), and it has finally come to admit that we can have regional police, that we can have sovereignty over our natural resources including oil.
However it expressed reservations for offshore oil to be controlled by the federal government. They have never conceded these before. “We are now pushing to say, anyone who wants to govern Nigeria in 2019, your manifesto should include restructuring; we will vote for no one who does not want restructuring.
On the 21st of May we are going to have a South East summit on restructuring. “And in our view, any war to be pursued solely as Igbos will not be as efficiently prosecuted as one in which we pursued with people who have now agreed to our point of view that the agreement our forefathers had for a federation in 1963 was overthrown by the war and our federation became a unitary system in which the federal government became the Almighty,” he said.
Earlier, Prof. Odinkalu regretted that Ndigbo lost a lot during the war, both materially and psychologically, even as the federal government failed to fund and implement the three Rs (Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Re-integration), as being witnessed today in North East with the North East Development Comission, which was established following the devastation of the region by Boko Haram insurgents.
