Enyinnaya Abaribe, the Senate Minority Leader, says President Muhammadu Buhari may crush agitators in the South East but cannot crush the ideology.
He said that apart from the Indigenous People of Biafra, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, there are more than 30 separatist organizations operating in the region.
Speaking during an interview on Channels TV, the Abia South senatorial district representative the people of the South-East have been grossly marginalised and unfairly treated by the All Progressives Congress government.
Abaribe said he was not a supporter of IPOB, stressing however that; “I am a supporter of the cries of our people against injustice…I stand with my people.
“One of the biggest problems that the media also has is that they tag everything IPOB in the South-East. You won’t believe that there are more than 30 different separatist organisations. IPOB, MASSOB, there are so many and each one of them come back to the same thing.”
“Why we are having separatist agitations everywhere in the country is that some people are unable to manage our diversity,”
Speaking on 2023, Abaribe said the All Progressives Congress can’t produce an Igbo President in 2023.
According to him, only the Peoples Democratic Party can produce an Igbo President in the next election.
“The man who the shoe pinches know where it hurts. The Igbos are the people in Nigeria who make conscious efforts of setting anywhere else without hurting their host.
“At any point, you have never heard that they kill and maim their host so they know how to aggregate everybody’s feelings, their customs, their laws, their norms, everything. And so, because of that, we feel that the Igbo will understand you, will even have the time for you.
“Today, we don’t feel that this government have the time for anybody.
“You will see a tremendous change starting with the fact that he will be able to or she will be able to manage our diversity.
On a president of Igbo extraction, he said: “We think that the party called APC is not set up to manage Nigeria properly and so it has to be our own party (PDP) that has been able to carry everybody along. And those of us Igbo within our party knowing that we have to play politics, talk to people, you have to be able to see your own point of view and buy into your vision are doing the consultations now.”
The Senate Minority Leader also said the PDP has not ceded the 2023 Presidency to the North because he has been part of all the “negotiations and the talks and I have never seen where there was any such ceding”.
Abaribe boasted that Nigeria would experience a turnaround within six months if he becomes President.
“I would if it falls on me; within six months, all these things would be a thing of the past,” he said
