Prof. Anya expresses confidence in leadership of Ohanaeze Ndigbo

Tue, Aug 3, 2021
By editor
6 MIN READ

Featured, Politics

says the pan Igbo group must reprioritize
By anthony Isibor

PROFESSOR Anya O. Anya, former director-general of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, NESG, has expressed his support and optimism in the leadership of Prof. George Obiozor as the leader of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide.

This was made known during an exclusive interview recently held with Realnews to address the current state of the South East and the role of the apex Igbo social-cultural group, Ohanaeze Ndigbo in Lagos.

Recall that the election of Prof. Obiozor as the leader of Ohanaeze Ndigbo was greeted with lots of disenchantment, Anya, however, believes that Prof. Obiozor remains the best man for the job.

“Let me say this, I encouraged George to run for the office because the times we are in are dangerous and uncertain. Therefore, you need a man who has the experience and who is well educated, and who understands what strategy is all about.

“George Obiozor fulfills all three conditions. He has been the ambassador of Nigeria to Israel. He has been the ambassador to the United States. If you have been an ambassador to those two countries, then you know something about how the world runs better than any other person, and because of that, that is the kind of person Ndigbo needs now.

“But I have told George to pursue the priorities we defined as the needs of Ndigbo now. The results will convince those who doubt him. This is the time that Ndigbo requires their very best in every position.

He stated that Igbos must go back to prioritize education, which according to him, is responsible for bringing “Ndigbo to the commanding heights of Nigeria”.

“We should be the one investing and celebrating education. But what do we have now? It is becoming clear that the less educated and moneyed ones do not even know how to use their money.

“So if the people have only those to recruit as their leaders where do you think we will end up.  Nigeria is not different, Igboland is not different. How things are done and done properly are very well known. They are no longer secrets.

“We have to work to reclaim our youths and re-educate them, their psyche. Because it is the lack of education about how the world runs, that’s how the vacuum was created and many of them embraced Nnamdi Kanu’s ideology.

“You see, Biafra demonstrated the capacity of the Igbo man to overcome all odds, but we did not build on it.

“Second, the achievements in Biafra were also by the educated. Whether it is the science and technology people that created new weapons and so on, whether it was some of us who got involved in the international diplomatic area; whether it was even those of us who got involved in the information dissemination and management, the educated advantage that Biafrans had was what helped us to survive.

“We were not meant to survive. And to now have a situation, where those who benefited most from education, are now the ones now turning their backs on education, it doesn’t make sense. But it is also our creation.”

Anya said that the problem in the southeast has been created due to a long period of neglecting the youths of the zone to their devices while everyone was engrossed with trying to solve their personal problems.

According to him, the development of the zone still depends on educated youths as the Igbos have been responsible for bringing the country out of huge foreign debts in the past and should be encouraged to replicate this in the zone.

“We got so engrossed in trying to solve our personal problems that we forgot that there were communal problems. But we must find a way with how to reengage with them.

“What Aligbo needs is to create out from that little dot, a Singapore. And it can be done. After all, the people who made it possible for Nigeria to be forgiven of all the debts it owed are from the east, the people who managed the Central Bank resources when it mattered most are from the east, the people who as it were managed relationships both internationally and otherwise are from the east.

“We now need to harness them to serve the purposes of the east and recreate a completely new picture in which we will reengage Nigeria not because we want to separate or anything, but we want to live peacefully with everybody because Igbos are not sedentary, we are nomadic like the Fulanis. The difference is that they have no central place from which they take off, but we have our home.

“So the challenge is to make that our home as comfortable as possible so that people will want it; and to build it, we must engage with other people. The entire West Africa is available to the Igbos. Even now most of the money that is made in Anambra comes from all those other countries. And the way the African development is going; with the establishment of the AfCFTA with the way it is going means in-fact that both East and Central Africa are also available to develop a well-organized Igbo society. These are the priorities,” he said.

Anya, however, added that the distrust that greeted the election of Obiozor may have risen out of wrongly perceived impressions that he was a candidate of the Eastern state governors.

But I blame him for two things, he said. “First, when he told the governors that he is interested in this, he should have ended with question of, well, a matter of courtesy. But consciously or unconsciously, he may have given the impression that they were the ones who were supporting him.

“They may have supported him, but they could not really have recruited him. Because which of the eastern governors will not (man to man) not respect George Obiozor. So when it looked as if he was a candidate of the governors, it immediately created doubts in the minds of some people. And when of all the governors, his governor, given the circumstance of his emergence and all that, again, he is the wrong person to be seen with.

“He needs his support alright, but it shouldn’t be in the open, but there it is. And that is why there are still people who are saying that the election was illegitimate and so on. I do not agree with that and the reason is simple; the election that brought out Nwodo, I was chairman of the committee that conducted it, and I don’t see what we did better than the people who saw over this. But once with the social media, and the wrong kind of misinformation is planted, you create a different atmosphere,” he added.

-August 03, 2021, 12:55 GMT|

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