By Gideon Njoku
The aspiration of the Igbo to have one of their own as the President of Nigeria in 2023 will never come true, according to the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF.
The ACF says the Igbo cannot be trusted to hold Nigeria together as a country. A President of Igbo extraction, it says, would break up Nigeria.
Reacting to the controversy surrounding the assault on Senator Ike Ekweremadu by members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, in Nuremberg, Germany, the ACF said it has put a question mark on the chances of the South East to produce the President of Nigeria in 2023. Other tribes will be afraid of an Igbo Presidency, the group insisted.
ACF also said that the rascality and violence exhibited by IPOB, justify its terrorist status as pronounced ng a court in Nigeria, and gazzetted by the Nigerian Government. The group, also, said that the Igbo woulf mode more than any other tribe in the event of a break-up because the region does not have enough land to accommodate the activities of its people.
Said the ACF in an interview with *The Telegraph* by its Secretary-General, Anthony Sani, “The implications of the attack on the Igbo Presidency in 2023, would be the fear by other sections of the country that a President of Nigeria of Igbo extraction could play a Gorbachev and cause the split of the country”
Gorbachev, a former President of the Soviet Union, and later, Russia, was responsible for the break-up of the Soviet Union into small republics.
The ACF, however, admitted that the majority of the Igbo do not share the aspirations of IPOB.
Sani: The good news is that majority of the Igbo do not share the aspirations of IPOB, which is to cause the disintegration of the country.
“Most Igbo seem to share the view that the certain benefits of togetherness are far more than the uncertain gains of disintegration of the country. This is because there is not enough land for the Igbo in the South east.
“Igbo people, more than any other ethnic group in the country, need large domestic market for the expression of their commercial acumen by way of trading, considering that millions of Igbo have settled and invested outside their Igboland.”
The ACF scribe continued: “I saw the attacks of the Deputy Senate President in a fireign land as vindication of Nigeria’s courts, which passed the judgement that IPOB is a terrorist group. “Otherwise, the platform would use democratic due process to pursue its aspirations.”
Emphasizing that the international community will never take IPOB seriously, ACF dismissed the group “as a stone groping in the wild sea.”
