‘Only Buhari we’ll give Igbo president in 2023’

A group, ‘One–on-One Nigeria’, which is campaigning for the reelection of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019 has said that its main reason for the support was that only Buhari presidency could guarantee the emergence of a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction in 2013.

Addressing reporters in Awka, coordinator of the group, Chief Chido Obidiegwu observed that only Buhari had truly recognized Igbo as an important segment of the country, recalling that despite losing heavily in the South East during the 2015 election, the president had continued to address the Igbo’s most pressing needs, which bordered mainly on infrastructural development.

President Buhari conferred with the title of Ochioha NdiIgbo 1 by South East traditional council of rulers led by Eze Eberechi Dick during his visit to Ebonyi State on 14th Nov 2017

Obidiegwu, who was Governor Willie Obiano’s senior special assistant on events, recently led a group of Igbo people to the presidential villa to announce their support to the president for the 2019 election.


He said: “Post Biafran war kept Igbo in a despondent debilitating status whereby they were relegated to the 4th class status from their hitherto 1st class status in the .Nigerian traditional tripod.

“Successive military and civilian administrations could not do much to elevate the Igbo spirit as desired and deserved. It only took President Buhari who Igbo rejected at the polls, to address some of their key desires abandoned by previous regimes. President Buhari’s other national socio-economic and political interventions have also endeared him to well meaning Igbo people.

“In the light of the foregoing, we humbly and effusively invite and implore our brothers and sisters all over Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, Imo, Delta and Rivers State, as well as those in Diaspora, to join us in this noble and laudable cause for the total emancipation of the Igbo race and restoration of the dignity of the Igbo man.

“We believe in Igbo cause and what we are doing is how to achieve the Igbo presidency. As far as we are concerned, the Igbo presidency will be achieved fastest if Buhari wins the president in 2019.”

According to him, through Igbo pitched tents with former President Goodluck Jonathan and humiliated President Buhari at the 2015 polls, a school of thought expected President Buhari to pay Igbo back in their own coin, but he did not do that.

Rather, he added, Buhari began serious work on the long abandoned second Niger Bridge, the long abandoned Enugu- Port Harcourt express way, the Zik’s mausoleum and Aba Independent Power plant, among other projects, which Igbo yearned for over 16 years, but could not realize.

Obidiegwu said the One-on-One Nigeria group was resolute and unequivocal in its support for the president’s second tenure, adding that its action plans were already unfolding in the 1694 political wards in South-Eastern Nigeria, 95 local government areas, 15 Senatorial zones, the five South East states and parts of Delta and River states.