The Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, has stated that allocating the 2023 president to the southeast will put an end to the region’s separatist agitation.
Ngige stated that if an Igbo individual is elected President in the 2023 general election, all of the agitations for Biafra and the scars of the civil war will be totally healed.
In an interview with Channels Television, the minister stated that the Southeast will forgive Nigeria as a whole for the “sins” of the civil war.
“If Nigerians of all shades of opinion in all the political parties agree to send down the presidency in both parties to the South-East, you would have buried the ghosts of the civil war permanently.
“You would have buried all the separatist agitations permanently; you would have buried all the sins of ‘oh no appointments, these and that’ permanently. Everything will begin to rest,” the minister said.
He, however, pointed out that the zoning of the presidency to the Southeast was a sensitive one considering the issues surrounding it.
“Why do I say so? I say so because we have a constitution of Nigeria which does not have the issue of zoning and rotation entrenched in it.
“But that same constitution, in section 14 talks about federal character and that in any establishment of government, there must be semblance of everybody participating so that there would not be any perception of monopoly of functions of the office there or the powers there by any section of the country.
“So, that area of the constitution, if you extrapolate it, it is talking about rotation. If you extrapolate it, it is talking about zoning, states to be represented in government or any government institution.
“That is why some political parties like the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) now have zoning and rotation. In the APC, we don’t have rotation entrenched there. But by mutual agreement, we’re doing zoning.
“We zoned the offices in the party. That’s why whenever you have the chairman coming from the North, the secretary will be South and vice versa. These are the two effective offices or power in any political party,” he added.
Nnamdi Kanu and his group, the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, have been in the forefront agitating for the restoration of Biafra.
To this end, Kanu was arrested in July in Kenya and repatriated to Nigeria, where he is being detained by the Department of State Services, DSS.
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