Senator Abaribe The Minority Leader in the Nigerian Senate, Mr. Enyinnaya Abaribe has said that in a hypothetical referendum for Biafr...
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| Senator Abaribe |
The senator representing Abia-South Constituency in the
Senate, however, warned that the Nigerian constitution does not have a
provision for a referendum. “Which means, if you want a referendum, you have to
go outside the constitution,” he continued. “Jettisoning the 1999 constitution
requires having a meeting of all the different groups in Nigeria and having
them agree to set that constitution aside and have a conference to agree on a
new thing.” He said those who are benefiting from the current structure would
always ignore that suggestion.
Mr. Abaribe challenged different Biafran groups to come
together under one umbrella to avoid dissipating energy needed to focus and get
to a particular position. “While we look for getting out of Nigeria, we should
also, at this time, use the resources that we have to be able to make our
homeland a better place for us,” he insisted. “Because if we are not doing
anything with the resources that we already have, what is the guarantee that
going into Biafra will give us a better frame of mind?”
On the issue of Fulani herdsmen attacking communities across
the South and the influx of Northern youth to the South, the senator
acknowledged that elected officials from the East are worried about some of the
young people coming in from outside Nigeria. “They don’t speak regular Hausa,
they don’t speak English, they don’t speak Pidgin,” he said. “Some of them just
speak French, some speak other languages and those are the ones that we are very
very bothered about because we think that these people may just be people who
are coming as sleeper cells and can be activated anytime.”
The Leader of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the
Senate said it would be good for people in the East to come together and have
one response to the situation. He suggested that it would be better for the
East to respond using the tools available to elected Chief Executives in
government houses across the region.
“What we don’t want is a situation where you take your own
personal action and it is tagged something else,” Mr. Abaribe said. “The type
of stigmatization that they did to IPOB and all that, will also apply if we
don’t go through the formal networks that the governors would have to
institute. It will be seen as something else and when you now have a clash with
the police and the army, of course, we know what follows.”
He reminded his constituents that, “everything that happens
in the South East is regarded as a different thing.” He warned that, “We do
really want to solve a problem not to create another problem while solving it.”
When pushed back on why everything that happens in the East
should be regarded differently, the former Deputy Governor of Abia State told
Irokpost TV’s Rudolf Okonkwo that, “The civil war has not ended in some
people’s mind in Nigeria,”
“The government in power seems to have that mindset that
whatever they do, that they are doing Saraka (a favor) to us, that it is not
our right, that we are just giving you what you don’t deserve.”
He said that the mindset of people in the corridors of power
in Nigeria is that nobody elected them and as such, they owe the people nothing
and could not be held accountable. “Sorry to say, in the North, there is a
feudalistic mindset in which you have people up there and the rest of the
people on the ground and whatever they do for them, they are just doing them a
favor and when they extend it to the rest of us in the South and see our
reaction, they cannot understand it.”
Mr. Abaribe urged young people to get involved in the
political process, to put heat on elected officials to compel them to do the
right thing. When reminded that when young people get involved they are killed
by security agencies, he said, “Getting involved demands sacrifices. Sometimes
it is easier to do it from the cozy rooms in front of your laptop than to be on
the street and march.”
The former lecturer at Edo State University said that the
alternative to agitation despite the risks involved was for bad people to
continue to do the wrong things. “We don’t avoid war because we could be
killed,” he said, deploying an Igbo proverb. “We just have to continue to do
what we need to do in terms of agitation because if we don’t, ultimately bad
people will continue to do wrong things.”
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