Posted by From ISMAIL OMIPIDAN, Abuja on
The only re-elected Senator on the platform of the Peoples Progressive Alliance (PPA) and Leader of the ‘2007 Movement' in the National Assembly, Senator Uche Chukwumerije has raised a fresh alarm over a plot allegedly by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to alienate the Igbo race from the forth-coming dispensation.
The only re-elected Senator on the platform of the Peoples Progressive Alliance (PPA) and Leader of the ‘2007 Movement' in the National Assembly, Senator Uche Chukwumerije has raised a fresh alarm over a plot allegedly by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to alienate the Igbo race from the forth-coming dispensation.
In a release signed by the Senator, a copy of which was made available to Daily Sun in Abuja on Thursday, Chukwumerije who argued that satisfactory accommodation of all interests in the country's plural political arrangement ought to be continually respected if the nation must move forward, described the attempt to relegate the Igbo race, especially now that the South- South relegation was being addressed by the Vice Presidency slot given it, as a repression tantamount to a political and social time bomb planted along the race's journey.
He described the purported zoning of the positions of the Deputy Senate President and that of the national chairman of the PDP to the race as an insult to the entire Ndi Igbo. He likened the Deputy Senate President position to a stand -by generator in a post that rarely risks a power failure, and that the powers of the national chairman had been drastically whittled down by the new arrangement in the PDP.
While calling on the Igbo race to reject the attempted plot by rejecting the position of a Deputy Senate President, the Abia -born Senator urged the group to insist on having as their minimum entitlement the position of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and any other national slot.
He said: 'I firmly believe in the evolution of a Nigeria in which tongue and tribe will dissolve into one large federal political community. But this rendezvous is quite a distance away. For now, we should live with today's reality.
'But a major interest group- the Igbo in the South -East zone is about to suffer increased disability from the zoning decision reportedly taken by a party that makes pretentions to nationwide majority support.
'Before now South-East and South-South were the two major ethnic nationalities that have been severely short-changed in the Nigerian cake-sharing arrangement. But the bitterness of alienation of the South-South is about to be partially assuaged by the award of the Vice Presidential slot to one of her sons. However the Igbo are doomed to continue to live with bleak prospects of little redress from the emerging permutation."