By
Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
Recently,
the Chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Mr. John Oyegun, was quoted
as saying that he was “sad” that his party could not produce a lawmaker from
the South East to be elected as senate president or speaker of the House of
Representatives when the new national assembly would be inaugurated in June.
This was because during the last elections, the APC performed so poorly in the
South East that it was unable to win a single seat in the two houses of the
national assembly in the region.
*Bola Tinubu, Muhammadu Buhari and John
Oyegun
Ordinarily, this should have been an exclusive problem of the APC,
but given the way Mr. Oyegun spoke, someone might be deluded into thinking that
some really monumental tragedy had hit the South East – for which the people of
the area should be in deep mourning by now.
Since the presidential election which the Chairman of the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof Attahiru Jega, told us
was won by the APC’s General Muhammadu Buhari, one has lost count of articles ecstatically
celebrating how the “wrong voting” of majority of South Easterners has now put
the zone to a “great disadvantage.”
Some solutions have also been “kindly” proffered by quite a number
of people to “help” the South East out of its predicament, like the very absurd
suggestion that a senator-elect from Enugu State should decamp to the APC so he
could become the senate president; or even the much more off-putting call on a
female Senator-elect from Anambra State to step down for the APC candidate she
defeated, since the man is a “very good material” for the senate presidency. One
could go on and on, but what is of concern here is that Mr. Oyegun’s assertion would
seem to have somewhat elevated these clearly pedestrian views and clothed them
with the false robe of serious discourse.
