2023: Ndigbo kick-starts quest for Presidency, shortlists potential candidates

Leaders from the Southeast region has kick started their quest to clinch the presidency comes 2023 with the short listing of three potential candidates to fly the region’s flag during the general elections.

One of the leaders, former governor of Anambra state, Okwadike Chukwuemeka Ezeife, who disclosed this recently declined to mention the names of those who emerged top contenders for the race, said mobilization had begun in earnest.

Ezeife explained that Ndigbo do not intend to go on a solo effort, but would adequately and appropriately lobby, engage, and even beg other geo-political zone and stakeholders to ensure that justice is done by having a south-easterner occupy the presidential seat in the country in 2023.

According to him: “For now, I think we are getting appropriate support and we think that by 2022, nobody will be talking about anything else, and there will be no controversy about it. We are not going to present 1,000 Igbo persons to go and vie for the presidency.

The former Political Adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo, further averred that the need to fix and develop Nigeria can be solved by the egalitarian nature of the Igbo man, who as president, would not pay lip service to the imperative of wiping out under development, destitution and hunger in the country.

“Justice demands that an Igbo should be made president. And I can tell you that this imperative of Justice, equity and food conscience resonates among all people of goodwill in Nigeria and across the world.

The Igbo-Ukwu, Anambra State-born Ezeife pointed out that anything short of an Igbo president in 2023 would amount to the rest of Nigeria rejecting the Igbo, and that anyone so rejected cannot reject himself, and separate nationhood may become the enticing option.

“We should do what is rightly expected of any group that wants to be president. We are not depending solely on the fact that it is our turn. We will do everything necessary. But if we finish doing all these and in the end l, merely because we are Igbo, and one of us cannot rule Nigeria, we will take it that Nigerians have rejected Igbo citizenship of Nigeria. And as you know, a person who is rejected does not reject himself,” he added.