“No Anambra governor has been elected by slightly more than one-tenth of registered voters in the state. That has nothing to do with IPOB, which is a relatively new thing,” he said. “Anambra has historically had very low voter turnout. For its part, the Federal Government has been on a war footing, deploying more policemen and soldiers that could outnumber the ratio of registered to actual voters.Ī board member of the election monitoring group, YIAGA Africa, Ezenwa Nwagwu, who has been in Awka, the Anambra State capital for about a week, told me on Wednesday that concerns about potential low voter turnout as a result of insecurity were largely media inventions. The decision of IPOB sympathisers in the past to abduct school children who defied its sit-at-home orders from examination centres, is an indication of the extent it would go to enforce its insanity.
Even worse, government’s incompetent handling of the situation has stoked violence, silenced the legitimate demands of moderate groups, and pushed IPOB to a lunatic fringe.īut will that affect Saturday? It depends. The scorched-earth politics of this group has sowed discord and raised tensions in the region. In the last three years, the South East has been in a state of war, partly as a result of political banditry by Abuja-based politicians determined to hijack power at all costs. And to show how much it meant to have IPOB in his corner, for example, Ifeanyi Ubah, the Young Progressives Party (YPP) governorship candidate who couldn’t spell IPOB to save his life, rushed to court for a pass to visit Kanu in DSS custody in Abuja. If they couldn’t win IPOB sympathisers over, they can’t risk making them mad. They know that how far they could go may depend on what they say about IPOB. But the leaders of the 18 political parties, especially the four major ones – APGA, APC, PDP and YPP – know that where they stand on Kanu may hinder or promote their chances.Īs they struggled to extract their feet from their mouths during the televised debate on Monday, you could sense that Charles Soludo (APGA), Andy Uba (APC) and Valentine Ozigbo (PDP), desperately trying to appease IPOB members and their sympathisers. IPOB is not a political party and Kanu, its leader, is not on the ballot. The Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), the separatist group demanding an independent homeland, has declared there would be no election on Saturday not only to press its separatist demand, but also to demand the release of its leader, Nnamdi Kanu, currently in his 17th week in detention in Abuja for alleged treason among other charges. Just hours before voters in Anambra State decide the next governor, a party not on the ballot is getting serious attention.
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