From Tony John, Port Harcourt
A Port Harcourt-based legal practitioner, Mr Princewill Dike, has advised Nigerians to vote for a presidential candidate in the 2023 election who believes in the unity of the country.
Dike made the call yesterday, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, on the heels of recent declarations made by two stalwarts of the All Progressives Congress (APC), to run for the president in the 2023 election.
The lawyer alleged that one of the APC presidential aspirants, in an interview with one of the national dailies on April 12, 1997, asserted that “I don’t believe in one Nigeria.”
He expressed concerns about how such an aspirant, who declared that he did not believe in the unity of the country could make a good leader.
Dike expressed: “But one who reckons the indivisibility of Nigeria as an article of faith, both in dialectics as well as in praxis.
“Now, one begins to interrogate the moral locus of a man who, ab initio, doesn’t believe in one Nigeria, and now aspires to govern that country. One doesn’t need to be a Jewish Prophet nor Nostradamus “Who Saw Tomorrow” to prognosticate that if he becomes president, the indivisibility of Nigeria is under threat.
“In a similar vein, it will have moral consequentialism on Nigeria should he be elected President of Nigeria in 2023. The reason being that the Yoruba through Chief Olusegun Obasanjo had occupied the nation’s power cathedral. The Northern hemisphere has had more than a fair share of the plum office.”
The legal practitioner maintained that the 2023 presidency should be ceded to the South East for political equity.
“The only marginalised region is the Igbo, which Ikwerre is a sub-region. As an elder, it is rather expected of him to promote socio-political justice in Nigeria by seeing that the 2023 presidency is ceded to the Igbo, than promoting disunity with his vaulting ambition. The arch of political equity bends towards the Igbo in 2023.”