Igbo Political Elites Play “Bread And Butter Politics” - Ngige

Senator Chris Ngige representing Anambra Central Senatorial Zone in the Senate, has said one of the major problems militating against Ndigbo in Nigeria politics is that their political elites play “bread and butter politics”. Ngige, who stated this when he spoke to newsmen in Awka, the state capital, said that is the reason there are a lot of prominent Igbo political elites in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and when they return home, they come with deluge of policemen and security men to protect themselves.

He said: “They go back again to join politics and do their federal business. In All Progressives Congress (APC), we don’t have Federal business to dish out, so you won’t see them”. He lambasted the PDP for always being the first aggressor by always painting APC with “dark tar as a terrorist party” when it was not even necessary to do that, saying that this was a joke taken too far.

The APC governorship candidate in the last November governorship election in the state said every Nigerian should condemn the Boko Haram insurgents in the North East and at the same time, put on his thinking cap on how to resolve it.

He said the solution to Boko Haram insurgence was good leadership at all levels but most importantly, good leadership must flow from the top to the bottom.

Ngige stated that Boko Haram was a fall -out of the fact that Nigerian leaders failed to do the needful because for a long time, security report has shown that there was growing Islamic extremism in the North but our leaders paid deaf ears to such reports, advising PDP to change their philosophy of governance for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Said Ngige: “Today, we are now facing terrorism. We didn’t do the needful. There is unemployment everywhere. There is mismanagement of resources, misapplication of resources everywhere, full blown corruption everywhere because the ideology has changed. The ideology in PDP is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. If you talk, they will quote the Bible for you but that is not what Jesus said in the Bible. He’s talking about spiritualism. He’s talking about ‘rich’ in moral context. To get richer is doing the right thing and do it more and more. But these people now equate it with crass materialism. That is not what Jesus was talking about. The PDP has to change their philosophy”.

Ngige blamed the woes of this country on Nigerian leaders, both past and present, who he called “reluctant Prime Ministers and Presidents” as well as reluctant citizens, saying that a good leader must always have vision where he is taking his compatriots to, which is a scarce attribute in Nigerian leaders.

“Prime Minister Mahathir.Mohammed of Malaysia had the vision of where he was taking his people. There is no developmental leader that doesn’t know where he is taking his people. Charles De Gaulle of France knew where he was going, Kim of Korea knew where he was going. It is only here that we now have very reluctant presidents, we had reluctant Prime Ministers, reluctant presidents all over the places. And people who are also reluctant usually have no future”.

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