Igbo president: S’East should start courting other zones - Eyiboh

The South-East has been tasked to work collectively to bring out presidential candidates that would be accepted by a large section of the country if their quest to produce the successor to President Muhammadu Buhari in 2023 is to be realised.

The former spokesman for the House of Representatives, Mr Eseme Eyiboh, who stated this in an interview with Daily Sun in Uyo, yesterday, said though many Nigerians were sympathetic to Igbo for the perceived injustice in not allowing them to produce the president in contemporary time, no political party was ready to zone its ticket to a vacuum.

“Zoning in the first place is a mechanism intended to address perceived injustices, but it is a privilege because zoning in itself is not constitutional and not guided by law. It is a mutual agreement of the federating units or people of several regions coming together to say, this is this. So if that’s the position of the South East, I really sympathise with them that they have not had the opportunity to produce a Nigerian president. I agree with that completely.

“But the issue is that since zoning is not done to the vacuum, the South-East should now take a step further to come together and bring up potential presidential candidates and then start to buy-in and weld together a network of people to come into whatever thing that they are driving.

“For example, they need to talk to people in the South-South; talk to people in the North Central, North East, North West and South West. It’s not an online media event or where you begin to talk on the television and all that, because at the end of the day, it’s all about numbers.

“They should produce a presidential candidate that will be able to win an election, irrespective of the political party. No political party will want to fly a candidate that doesn’t have the impact or pedigree to win the election. I don’t know if they have done that at the moment. They might have done that, but I’m not aware,” Eyiboh said.

He said the South East producing Nigerian president should not be looked at as an issue of right, rather as a privilege because the minority South-South that produced a president of the country only did that under a very special circumstance which he calls “intervention of providence” otherwise that wouldn’t have been possible.