Ohanaeze Youths Deny Involving Gowon in Campaign for 2023 Presidency

The apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, has distanced itself from the report making the rounds that it had chosen a former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon (rtd), to spearhead the campaign for the emergence of a president of Igbo extraction in 2023.

The organisation also denied that it was planning to have an interface with some prominent political figures in the country towards achieving its objective of producing an Igbo president.

It reiterated that there is no organisation as Ohanaeze Youth Council recognised by Ndigbo, describing the leader of the group, Okechukwu Isiguzoro, as “a warped, egocentric and power-hungry mind, who obviously is living in an incontrovertible state of mental delusion.”

In a statement made available to journalists in Enugu on Wednesday by the  National Publicity Secretary of the organisation, Uche Achi-Okpaga, Ohaneze described the allegations as mendacious, adding that it never contemplated or had any meeting where the issues were considered.

The organisation noted that the purported actions exist only in the imagination of the ‘miscreants and enemies of the Igbo nation’ who are the purveyors of the unfortunate concoctions.

"If nothing else raises doubts about his bifurcated mind, how come not long ago he was the ‘president’ of the group, but has suddenly metamorphosed to its ‘president-general’," it stated.

Ohaneze also regretted what it termed the unpatriotic acts of some Igbo politicians sponsoring these "equally unpatriotic irredentists shamelessly flying the kite for them towards 2023."

It said the emergence of an Igbo president in 2023 would not be midwifed by an inconsequential group whose only mission and preoccupation is personal aggrandisement and not the collective interest and aspiration of Ndigbo.

According to the apex Igbo group, "Ohanaeze Ndigbo, once more, calls on prominent Igbo sons and daughters to stand up and call these recalcitrant boys to order because it could have gone to court to stop their irreverent behaviour but for the same reason it refused to face other Igbo recalcitrant groups headlong in its mild skirmishes with them, as a responsible father does not quarrel with his children in the public."

The group called on members of the public and the media to desist from using its official logo of a red cap and a feather when writing about or referring to the errant group, saying it will be a great disservice to Ohanaeze Ndigbo worldwide.