Deputy Senate President Slammed Over South-East Summit

The Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has been lambasted over his comments about the maiden South-East political summit taking place in Enugu, Nigeria.

The convener of the summit, Chief Mbazulike Amechi, described Ekweremadu’s  remarks that the summit has been postponed or overtaken by events as childish.

Speaking to reporters in Enugu at the kick-off of the summit early this morning, Amechi, a First Republic minister of Aviation, who is also one of the few surviving members of the defunct popular Zikist Movement of the First Republic, said that Ekweremadu has no locus whatsoever to make such inflammatory and wild comments about a meeting he was never part of, as one of the organisers, but was only an invitee.

He wondered, “who is Ekweremadu, or any of his co-travellers among the committee of established Igbo leaders and elders?  What has he done or achieved for his people even at the village level, other than using armed security personnel to run them off the roads the few countable times they pass by the zone, all in the name of leadership?”

Amechi noted that instead, “they shamefacedly stayed away in Abuja and such other places in the confines of their unfortunate opulence at the detriment of the hapless and helpless people they all claim to represent, claiming to be afraid of being kidnapped.”

He insisted that Ekweremadu has no part or input to the organization of the meeting which he said was at the instance of some committed sons and daughters of the zone who were not amused at the way things have been going on under the watchful eyes of people like Ekweremadu.

The Senator, therefore, has no much part to play other than  any such role graciously assigned to or allowed him by the organizers, and in this case, nothing!

He insisted therefore that Ekweremadu has no locus to stop or postpone the meeting where he was a mere invitee, adding that he was, therefore, expected to keep quiet for the true sons and elders of the zone to brainstorm on the way forward and out of the present political quagmire and near-irrelevance people like him have driven the zone into.

Amechi was livid over the widely reported comments at the weekend that Ekweremadu said the summit had been postponed indefinitely because the outcome of the ruling PDP’s meeting of last Thursday had rendered the political summit convened by Amechi unnecessary.

Meanwhile, a political group within the PDP, under the aegis of PDP Grassroots Mandate, has disagreed with the party’s leadership over the outcome of last week’s NEC and NWC meeting which said President Jonathan could run for the presidency in next year’s general election.

In a 15-paragraph four-page letter signed on their behalf by Mazi Njoku Uwa, Comrade Onyemauche Chime, Anthony Ugwu and Prince Ken Emeakayi, they urged the Dr Okwesilieze Nwodo-led secretariat of the party to be conscious of their actions and to ensure they conform with the provisions in the party’s constitution as amended.

This, they also noted, was to avoid policy summersault and inconsistency.

The group noted in particular the party’s rotational power agreement of 1998 which it said was reaffirmed at the national caucus of 2 December, 2002 with President Goodluck Jonathan in attendance as well as Chief Solomon Lar, Dr Alex Ekwueme, Chief Tony Anenih, Prof Jerry Gana, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu, former president Olusegun Obasanjo, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Chief Audu Ogbe, etc.

The letter in part noted that “the office/position of president under our party arrangement is zoned to PDP members in the North for 8years, 2007-2015, and not to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua.

“That if the late President Yar’Adua were alive and contesting, it wouldn’t have stopped other PDP members from the North from contesting against and possibly defeating him at the primaries because the position /office was not zoned to him as an individual but to the entire PDP members in the North.

“Also that the Yar’Adua/Jonathan ticket was for four years, 2007-2011, and if Yar’Adua were alive, contested and won, he should have been at liberty to choose Jonathan or any other person from the South as his running mate, for the 2011-2015 election…”

By Stanley Chinedu/ Enugu