2023: Dissecting Udenta’s thesis on south-east presidency and Bala Mohammed’s candidacy

Suddenly, the much-awaited 2023 general election in Nigeria is upon us. Months ago, it was as if the nation awaited a whole decade. Yet, in five months or thereabout, the political parties will be presenting their candidates to Nigerians for the purpose of choosing President Muhammadu Buhari’s successor.

In the build-up all the while, two recurring decimals have been zoning and the insistence of the south-east to clinch the presidential tickets of the two leading political parties, namely, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). The push has been on even before the 2019 presidential election which paved the way for the zone to produce the vice-presidential candidate in the person of Peter Obi who paired with Atiku Abubakar in that year’s election circle. This time around, the push has been even more fervent and has reached a crescendo, leading to the eruption of the questions being raised about the desirability of a Nigerian president of southeast extraction.

Those leading this rather noble campaign (for Nigeria’s president of southeast extraction) have focused on the argument pertaining to the quest but have paid very little attention, if any at all, to factors that would make its realisation possible/impossible. This is the crux of the argument of Professor Udenta O. Udenta, the conflict and peace expert and leading political actor who happens to be of southeast extraction as well.

In his recent television appearances, the former national secretary of Alliance for Democracy when that party was one of the three with which the nation revived the current democratic dispensation, Udenta has called attention to what he sees as the complex problems surrounding the quest for Nigeria’s president of south extraction due to inclement political climate and other untoward environmental forces.

Udenta’s argument needs to be put in perspective and weighed against its merit in some dispassionate manner. There are two sets of factors that Udenta conceptualized and deployed to ground his argument. He wondered why some political actors should hinge the call for rotation of presidential power to southern Nigeria rather than to southeast as the only zone yet to produce the president from the southern divide. Udenta’s position is that it amounted to political subterfuge to leave the ticket open to scramble to the entire south rather than to a specific zone requiring restitution of cumulative historical injustices. To him and plausibly too, leaving the ticket open to the three zones therein the south cannot be called zoning, rather it becomes an exercise in concealment and deflection. Udenta believes that with the inherent dishonesty of politicians, the southeast would be shortchanged yet again and by then, it would be too late.

Udenta has traced the sacrifices of the southeast in the making and evolution of the current democratic dispensation and wondered why ceding the presidential tickets of the two major political parties to the southeast as happened for the southwest in 1999, would be a big deal if the political class is actually sincere about it. For him, therefore, if it is not going to the southeast outrightly, the zone would have been betrayed by her southern political allies. The zone should better reposition to negotiate its interest and political survival in post-2023 Nigeria, whether or not it produces the nation’s president.

Udenta has also further argued that if the above scenario were to unfold – the betrayal of the southeast – then the best chance the Peoples Democratic Party has of returning to power in 2023 would be zoning its presidential ticket to the northeast, where Bala Mohammed and Atiku Abubakar have openly declared their intent to run. Between the two gladiators, Udenta has also embraced Bala Mohammed’s candidacy as a strategic rearguard manoeuvre, describing him as a young, strong, detribalised, and visionary leader with very deep political savvy, given his construct of the doctrine of necessity that favoured Goodluck Jonathan, his pan-national leadership of the FCT as a detribalised minister and his outstanding record of service in Bauchi; indeed one leader who could pull the nation back from the precipice and put her back on the path to development.

Udenta blamed a congruence of overarching forces for substantially de-marketing the southeast zone, a situation that eventually opened the space for non-state actors to threaten the region’s social fabric and enviable record as hitherto the most peaceful zone in the country, and thus playing into the hands of those who are not even well disposed to the idea of a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction. There is little doubt that in a complex and diverse polity such as Nigeria’s there are still many who will be clinging on to the steady social decomposition in the region and using that in raising fears in the minds of many over the safety of the country’s unity under a southeast presidency.

Udenta further contends that the phenomenon of unknown gunmen (UGM) and ESN is intensely disruptive given that these non-state forces have deeply inserted themselves into the region’s physical domain and spiritual core in combination with possibly fifth columnists and false flag operatives is rendering the southeast almost ungovernable, with ungoverned space growing and faultlines also escalating. Udenta thus underscores the noted tension between a region in the throes of convulsive social eruption and the shrewd calculation of a political party that wants to win the election with a massive voter turnout deciding to invest its fortunes in the hands of a presidential candidate from such a potentially vote suppressed environment.

The logical sequencing of Udenta’s political thought is thus clear with a dialectical trajectory that is easy to underscore: the perfidy of the southern political elite in obfuscating the SE zone’s specific clarion call on power rotation. Udenta thus implied that the southwest hegemonic bloc that benefitted from the southeast sacrifices in 1998-1999 is morally disqualified from contesting the 2023 presidential election, and debilitating SE environmental circumstances that could circumvent and scuttle its regional presidential aspiration.

In this developing scenario, Udenta’s strategic calculation is for the southeast to begin the process of negotiating its political future and thus mainstreaming its core regional interests in the post-2023 dispensation by partnering with Bala Mohammed in a handshake between two politically depressed zones in relation to the exercise of presidential power and not wait till it’s too late and end up with bitter, had-we-known regret. In essence, the logic of Udenta’s political thought privileges the flowering of southeast presidential aspiration failing which the embrace of Bala Mohammed’s progressive politics of accommodation and inclusion is the next best thing for the southeast region.

Udenta’s frank portrayal of the southeast political condition is intriguing. In the face of all this, can anybody factually fault Udenta’s compelling argument about the doublespeak of southern political leaders, the growing political hegemony of the southwest and northwest, the decomposition of the southeast social, political, and economic fabric, the haunting reality that the two major political parties may indeed by-pass the zone in the selection of their presidential candidate and the need for a rearguard political strategy that produces an acceptable political outcome for the southeast, post-2023 by providing the plank on which to build for a more empowered political future in no distant time. Time, which is already in its nick, shall tell.

Mefor, a forensic/social psychologist and journalist, writes from Abuja. He can be reached via 09056424375, [email protected] and on Twitter @LawMefor1