Apex Igbo Social-cultural Organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, has berated Katsina based activist, Mallam Mahdi Shehu, over his alleged comment that a vote for the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr. Peter Obi in the 2023 general election is a vote for Biafra.
The activist had in a video allegedly stated that a vote for Obi was synonymous with the destruction of the North and asked watchers what they stand to gain by voting for Obi.
Reacting to the comment, the national publicity secretary of Ohanaeze, Alex Ogbonnia, said after watching the video clip, he was shocked that such a person that held tenaciously to the grudges of the past was still active in contemporary era.
Ogbonnia said remarks by Shehu were outrightly distasteful and capable of igniting ethno-religious tensions across the country.
“The rabidity, thoughtlessness and hollowness that characterised the video signposts the last wish of a fading and end of the rope propagandist. Persons that harbour such despicable thoughts and mindsets are the pernicious cancerous social incubus which have for long held Nigeria down.
“Ohanaeze Ndigbo calls on the federal government to arrest, prosecute and ultimately confine Mallam Mahdi Shehu in a prison to serve as deterrent to other ethnic inflammatory chauvinists.
“If such a deep ethnic jingoism is allowed to play out in the oncoming campaigns, then the fledgling wing of the eagle may be irredeemably broken. Mallam Shehu and his ilk should be made to know that the ethnic cards that were played in the past to the detriment of unity, progress and corporate existence of the country have become loathsome, unserviceable and anachronistic,” he stated.
The Ohanaeze spokesman said evidently, there is no Nigerian, big or small, rich or poor, northerner or southerner, Christian or Muslim that is comfortable with the current state of affairs in the country.
He noted that the options open to Nigeria in the 2023 general elections are to continue with the abysmal tailspin of poverty, unemployment, rising inflation, banditry, kidnapping, general insecurity, epileptic power supply, mass strikes, etc, and in deed all the indices of a collapsing state on one hand or a productive, robust, visionary and combustive economic salvation on the other.
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