Former President Goodluck Jonathan has been cautioned by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) to abandon his aspirations to run for President in 2023.
Rumours are circulating that the former President has not to register his interest because the All Progressives Congress, APC, has not assured him that he will run as the party’s consensus candidate.
According to other rumors, Goodluck Jonathan is seeking President Muhammadu Buhari’s endorsement or consent to join the APC and run for the party’s only ticket.
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Jonathan did not deny his ambition to run for president in 2023 when he addressed his supporters in Abuja a few weeks ago, telling them to be on the lookout.
Jonathan declared unequivocally that the political process around his plan to run for president in 2023 is still underway.
Many Nigerians feel Jonathan was used as a weapon by Northern APC chieftains to shorten the time the South would be in power, despite the fact that he had previously spent four years as an elected Southern president.
Jonathan was the first casualty of the APC’s 2014 merger of several political parties and political bigwigs, as he became Nigeria’s first democratically elected President to be defeated in an election and ousted from office by a new administration in 2015.
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But HURIWA is warning the Old Rivers-State-born politician to avoid such a move, adding that contesting the election would be seen as reversing what happened to the Igbo in River State after the Nigerian-Biafra war.
“Our parents who had houses in the State lost all houses during the war. But my father had so many houses in the North, but they were all taken care of by a Northerner,” HURIWA’s Emmanuel Onwubiko said in a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday.
“After the 30-month-old war, my father came back and collected the old rent and he got all his houses back. But River State took all the housing assets belonging to Igbo people in Rivers.
“So, Goodluck Jonathan should not replay that hatred that they showed to the Igbo after the war because if he accepts to be candidate of APC and become the president, it means he has short-changed the Igbo who gave him their all.
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“If he does that, the South-South and the South-East will never have peace or trust each other for life. Because what happened to us after the war in the 60s, when we lost so many housing assets, they have not been forgotten.
“So, if he tried a second betrayer by accepting APC’s enticement to become President for only four years, he is doing it because he wants to short-change the Igbos,” he said.
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