ABUJA – President Bola Ahmed Tinubu have been challenged to correct the imbalance in his administration and the polity that has confined Ndigbo to holding the short end the stick in national affairs.
Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) in a statement in Abuja urged the President to replicate the “seemingly balanced appointments he made in the Armed Forces of Nigeria in other critical sectors of the economy under his government”.
The Rights group regretted that Ndigbo are seriously having the short end of the stick and are deliberately being marginalized in the scheme of things in the country.
Ambassador Bianca Odumegwu Ojukwu, widow of the late leader of Ndigbo and a foremost Nigerian statesman, Chief Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, had recently opined that the policies and actions of the Central government and some state governments were deliberately tweaked to sideline Igbos in business and political life, a view HURIWA said it shares.
The group therefore urged the Igbo states governments and their representatives at state and National levels to work for the infrastructural development and emancipation of Igboland from the present rubbles of systemic and systematically orchestrated marginalisation by the Federal Government.
“HURIWA is of the considered view that before we can argue strongly and denounce perceived or factual marginalisation of Ndigbo, we must first and foremost analytically look at the status of governance in the Igbo states and if truth must be told, the governments in all of the Igbo states have seriously not implemented the right kind of policies and programmes nor have they built the right kind of enabling environment to encourage investments and the rapid industrialisation of the South East”.
The group also took a swipe at South East governors for not providing the needed infrastructure within the budgetary capacities of those states noting that such critical sectors as healthcare, roads, education and job creation, have never witnessed much improvements in the South East since the return of democracy in 1999.
HURIWA has word of commendation for President Bola Tinubu for improvement in balancing appointments in the hierarchy of the Armed Forces of Nigeria and the police even it it observed that President allowed his own ethnic group to still influence his good intentions.
“The fact that out of the three clearly dominant ethnicities of Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba, only Ndigbo have been left with the short end of the stick by the current administration and the government of Tinubu has relegated Ndigbo to the position of those who should be comfortable with allocation of the crumbs falling from the master’s table.”
National Coordinator of the group Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko who signed the release described this treatment as unacceptable and dangerous for our nationhood adding that “it is a political heresy of the most toxic dimension, should the central government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu continues to treat Ndigbo like they don’t matter only because of the perception that the Labour Party’s presidential candidate Mr. Peter Obi took a majority of the votes cast at the 2023 February Presidential poll”
“If President Bola Tinubu is deliberately punishing Ndigbo for voting overwhelmingly for the Labour Party at the last Presidential poll, why then is the President making all the most strategic core appointments from Lagos State where the President also suffered crushing defeat to the Labour party’s candidate and former governor of Anambra State Mr. Peter Obi?
“Also, in the FCT whereby Tinubu lost to Peter Obi in the poll, the current administration has even pulled off the FCT from the Treasury Single Account just so Abuja’s infrastructural development is not jeopardised. HURIWA therefore expects that the Igbos must never be subjected to political alienation or marginalisation by the Federal Government”.
HURIWA recalled that the Central Bank governor appointed by President Tinubu is a Lagosian and over two third of his strategic domestic staff including the Chief of staff to the President are all from Lagos, even as the Rights group then wondered why the South East is been isolated whereas Lagos state has produced the clear majority of all the appointments made by President Tinubu including those in charge of the national economy of Nigeria including the Finance minister and coordinating minister for the nation’s economy who is also a Lagosian.
“HURIWA is therefore appealing to President Bola Tinubu to give Ndigbo their due in the other appointments that his administration is about to announce especially in the vacant boards of Federal government agencies and Embassies of Nigeria around the World.
“The Rights group called on the President to end this vicious circle of systemic and systematically unleashed marginalisation of the Igbos based on the outcome of the last election just as the group reminded the President that his political party won over fifty percent of all elective offices in the last poll in the South East which makes the Igbo people truly nationalistic voters and not sectionalists as wrongfully perceived in some ignorant quarters.
HURIWA recalled that the cerebral and well respected widow of iconic Igbo leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, Bianca Ojukwu, has alleged that the federal and some state governments were frustrating the Igbo in their various businesses in parts of the country.
Ojukwu, who spoke on the heels of recent demolition of property and business places owned by the Igbo in Lagos State, claimed there had been decades-old grand scheme and conspiracy to isolate Igbo from the mainstream of Nigeria’s affairs, particularly in the governance of the country.
According to her, the tendentious scheme extends to other major and sensitive sectors of the country’s existence and progress.
The former Nigerian ambassador to Spain said the gang up got to a head in recent time as the world began to see in clear terms the manifest Nigeria’s federal Government, ethnic, regional and state governments’ open policies that were hatched not only to isolate the Igbo from government and its major dividends, but also to dismantle their life-long, ubiquitous and solid economic and investment presence in non-Igbo areas of the country.
The Rights group which backed the position of Mrs. Bianca Ojukwu on the serial unjust treatments of Igbos in the successive federal administration’s and some states in the Country, has also called out the Lagos state governor Mr. Sanwo-Olu specifically, to realise that election was over and to focus on providing good governance to the good people of Lagos state instead of churning out demolition programmes that are clearly targeted at depriving Ndigbo in Lagos their constitutionally guaranteed right to own moveable or immovable property in Lagos state.
“If truth be told, the ongoing demolition of structures going on in Lagos is a political witch-hunt choreographed by the All Progressives Congress government to punish Igbos for overwhelmingly voting for the Labour Party in Lagos state”.
