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The 2023 Presidential Election: Reflections on ‘Igbo Unity’

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4 years ago

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“Opposition against the political ambition of individuals is guided by political interests, not by ethnic identity” ―Ebuka Onyekwelu

The concept of ‘Igbo unity’ seems to interest all Nigerians of all ethnic nationalities, particularly as it concerns national politics. Discussions on Igbo unity arise only in relation to national politics, especially when the presidential election is around the corner. But also when there is an argument on the propriety of ‘allowing’ an Igbo man to become president. Whatever this Igbo unity means, fascinatingly, it is only relevant for x-raying why an Igbo man is yet to become President of Nigeria since the end of the civil war.

In most recent memory, that is between 1999 and now, no Igbo man has yet to become Nigeria’s president, while the other two major groups and President Jonathan from the minority South-South geo-political zone have governed the country. Having this conversation, most Nigerians tend to agree that the reason is that Igbos are not united politically. For so many years, this narrative about Igbo political disunity has been told over and over, mostly unchallenged to the point that it has been mainstreamed without questions. While it is unclear what exactly many Nigerians mean by Igbo unity in national politics, or Igbo unity within the context of pursuit of national political ambition, the usual line of argument however, is suggestive of singleness of political aspiration and pursuit of a political agenda through a single strategy or through an individual. But the shocking reality is that Igbo people might be the only people group in the world who are expected or indeed, tasked to belong to the same political party or have a consensus candidate for presidential elections. Perhaps adopt an ‘Igbo candidate’ before party primaries, an ideal case of putting one’s cart before the horse.

The argument also bends towards having a one-party system, and without a doubt admonishes Igbo people to become intolerant and hostile towards the individual ambitions of their people. This is not all as the notion of Igbo unity in politics could be extended to accommodate whatever the propagators of this skewed concept mean.  The fact nonetheless, is that this is not the standard through which other ethnic nationalities are viewed in Nigeria by most Nigerians. Then also politics does not thrive on unity because in and of itself, politics is divisive. So there is no such thing as speaking with one political voice or acting in one political direction for people that belong to different political parties or for those in the same party but have different political interests.

Gen. Mohammadu Buhari contested against former President Musa Yar’Adua, both were candidates of the two major political parties, yet, it is not ‘Northern disunity’.

It gives great pleasure to observers and peddlers of this spurious narration on Igbo political disunity to point out just how political disagreement between Orji Uzor Kalu and Theodor Orji is a pointer to political disunity which negates Igbo people’s national aspiration. They allude to the disagreement between Peter Obi and Willie Obiano as a case of political disunity, that hinders the chances of Igbos in the national political contest. But when it gets to other regions, it is different. Gen. Mohammadu Buhari contested against former President Musa Yar’Adua, both were candidates of the two major political parties, yet, it is not ‘Northern disunity’. When Tinubu opposed former President Olusegun Obasanjo and both were locked in a long battle for the soul of Southwest politics, nobody called it ‘Yoruba disunity’. The Minister of Transport Rotimi Amaechi joined the opposition and fought former President Goodluck Jonathan and no one called it ‘South-South disunity or ‘Ijaw-Ikwere disunity’. In fact, Timi Sylva, President Goodluck’s own brother also joined forces with opposition and it is not ‘Ijaw disunity.’ Rotimi Amaechi fought Nyesom Wike to a telling point to stop him from returning to Rivers State Government House, but no one called it ‘Ikwere disunity’. However, Rochas Okorocha and Hope Uzodimma’s disagreement is a classical case of Igbo disunity in politics, which hampers the chances of Ndi Igbo in taking a shot at Nigeria’s Presidency.

In 2019, simply because Peter Obi was made Atiku Abubakar’s running mate, the Southeast gave Atiku remarkable support, but perhaps, because his nomination was questioned by two or three members of Southeast PDP; that is another case of Igbo disunity in politics. But even Tambuwal contested against Atiku in that same primary election and yet, it is not characterised as ‘Hausa or Fulani political disunity.’ Godswill Akpabio fought Emmanuel Udom with everything he has to stop him from being reelected as governor of Akwa Ibom State, despite fighting to make him governor in the previous election cycle. But this is not suggestive of any ethnic or people group disunity in politics. In Edo State, we are all witnesses to how Adams Oshiomole was cut to size by Godwin Obaseki whom he campaigned earlier to succeed him as governor of Edo State. The fight was the most remarkable in recent political memory. Yet, none of these emergency specialists on Igbo politics called that ‘Edo disunity’.

It is obvious that disagreements are part of politics. Opposition against the political ambition of individuals is guided by political interests, not by ethnic identity. No matter how advocates of Igbo disunity in politics may wish to present that false impression, evidence from across the country and elsewhere points to the fact that people are at liberty to pursue their political ambitions that is independent of their ethnic nationality and that politics is inherently divisive which naturally attracts opposition or support, either of which is determined by interests.

While others are expected to belong to different political parties, Igbos are expected to belong to a single political front and present a single political façade.

It is indeed disingenuous to talk of political unity, worst still when the standard for measuring such political unity applies only to Igbos. What is mere political disagreement for other ethnic nationalities in Nigeria is interpreted as disunity for the Igbos. While others are expected to belong to different political parties, Igbos are expected to belong to a single political front and present a single political façade. Meanwhile, former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Falae can belong to the two major political parties and become their presidential candidates and it is not a sign of Yoruba political disunity, just as Former President Musa Yar Adua and President Mohammadu Buhari can become candidates of the two major political parties and it is not a case of Fulani political disunity.

Now, without the PDP or APC having picked a candidate for the 2023 presidential contest, people talk of the number of Igbos already expressing interest to contest the presidential election. Even though President Buhari contested the 2015 APC primary with Rabiu Kwankwaso and Atiku Abubakar, just as Atiku did in PDP with Bafarwa, Dankwambo, Kwankwaso, Lamido, Makarfi, Saraki, Tambuwal, in 2019. But it is now a sign of disunity for Orji Uzor Kalu to contest against David Umahi in APC or Anyim Pius to contest against Ohuawumba in PDP. Those who want to test Igbo unity should test it by giving Igbo man presidential ticket in the two major political parties or forming a formidable third force and then granting Prof. Kingsley Moghalu the presidential ticket of the third force. That is how to test the resolve of the Igbo to see if they are politically united, not offering baseless advice on how Igbos should put their political eggs in a single basket. Nobody does that!

In 2023, Igbo people will support one of their own who will emerge from a formidable political platform that stands a chance in the election. If this option is not available, then, they will align with any of their closest neighbours who have emerged from a party that stands a chance at winning. For now, every Igbo man or woman who is capable of contesting and winning the election should not delay in joining the contest. At least, if Igbo people will emerge candidates in PDP, APC, and third force, then, that will offer lessons on the Igbo man’s desire for excellence and fairness. The election will be about real issues and about the candidate who is most qualified and prepared for the job. This is what 2023 must be about. Igbos do not need to rally around one man to be able to win a presidential ticket or the Presidential election.

♦ Ebuka Onyekwelu, strategic governance exponent,  is a columnist with the WAP

 

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Kaduna Governor Commissions Nigeria’s First 100-Building Prefabricated Housing Estate

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1 week ago

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November 14, 2025

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Kaduna, Nigeria – November 6, 2025 — In a major milestone for Nigeria’s housing sector, the Governor of Kaduna State has commissioned a 100-unit mass housing estate developed by Family Homes and executed by Karmod Nigeria, marking the first-ever large-scale prefabricated housing project in the country.

Completed in under six months, the innovative project demonstrates the power of modern prefabricated construction to deliver high-quality, affordable homes at record speed — a sharp contrast to traditional building methods that often take years.

Each of the 100 units in the estate is designed for a lifespan exceeding 50 years with routine maintenance. The development features tarred access roads, efficient drainage systems, clean water supply, and steady electricity, ensuring a modern and comfortable living environment for residents.

According to Family Homes, the project represents a new era in Nigeria’s mass housing delivery, proving that cutting-edge technology can accelerate the provision of sustainable and cost-effective homes for Nigerians.

“With prefabricated technology, we can drastically reduce construction time while maintaining top-quality standards,” said a spokesperson for Family Homes. “This project is a clear demonstration of what’s possible when innovation meets commitment to solving Nigeria’s housing deficit.”

Reinforcing this commitment, Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State emphasized the alignment between the initiative and the state’s broader vision for affordable housing.

“The Family Homes Funds Social Housing Project aligns with our administration’s commitment to the provision of affordable houses for Kaduna State citizens. Access to safe, affordable and secure housing is the foundation of human dignity. We have been partnering with local and international investors to frontally address our housing deficit,” he said.

Also speaking at the event, Mr. Ademola Adebise, Chairman of Family Homes Funds Limited, noted that the project embodies inclusivity and social progress.

“The Social Housing Project also reflects our shared vision of inclusive growth, where affordable housing becomes a foundation for economic participation and improved quality of life.”

Karmod Nigeria, the technical partner behind the project, utilized its extensive expertise in prefabricated technology to localize the process, employing local artisans and materials to enhance community participation and job creation.

Industry experts have described the Kaduna project as a blueprint for future housing initiatives nationwide, capable of addressing the country’s housing shortfall more efficiently and sustainably.

With this pioneering development, Kaduna State takes a leading role in introducing modern housing technologies that promise to reshape Nigeria’s urban landscape.

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Books

The Pioneer’s Burden: Building the First Private Network in a Vacuum of Power

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3 weeks ago

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November 4, 2025

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  • Book Title: The Making of Bourdex Telecom
  • Author: David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex
  • Publishers: Bourdex
  • Reviewer: Emeaba Emeaba
  • Pages: 127

In the history of Nigerian entrepreneurship, stories of audacity often begin with frustration. A man waits hours in a dimly lit government office to place a single overseas call, his ambitions held hostage by bureaucracy. From that moment of exasperation, an empire begins. Such is the animating pulse of The Making of Bourdex Telecom, David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex’s sweeping autobiographical account of one man’s effort to connect the disconnected and to rewrite the telecommunications map of Eastern Nigeria.

At once memoir, corporate history, and national parable, the book reconstructs the emergence of Bourdex Telecommunications Limited—the first indigenous private telecom provider in Nigeria’s South-East and South-South regions—against a backdrop of inefficiency, corruption, and infrastructural neglect. Its author, a businessman turned visionary, narrates not merely how a company was built but how a new horizon of possibility was forced open in a society long accustomed to closed doors.

Bourdex begins with a stark diagnosis of pre-deregulation Nigeria: a nation of over 120 million people served by fewer than a million telephone lines. Through a mix of statistical precision and personal recollection, he paints a portrait of communication as privilege, not right—of entire regions condemned to silence by state monopoly. His storytelling thrives in such contrasts: the entrepreneur sleeping upright in Lagos’s NET building to place an international call; the Italian businessman in Milan conducting deals with two sleek mobile phones. That juxtaposition—between deprivation and effortless connectivity—serves as the book’s moral axis.

From these moments of contrast, Bourdex constructs the founding myth of his enterprise. What began as an irritation became a revelation, then a crusade. “I saw a people left behind,” he writes, “a region cut off while others dialed into the future.” His insistence on framing technology as a means of liberation rather than profit underscores the moral ambition that threads through the book. The Making of Bourdex Telecom reads not like a manual of business success but like an ethical manifesto: to build not simply for gain, but for dignity.

As the chapters unfold, Bourdex’s narrative oscillates between vivid personal storytelling and granular technical detail. He recounts his early business dealings in the 1980s and ’90s, the bureaucratic mazes of NITEL, and the daring pursuit of a telecommunications license under General Sani Abacha’s military government. There is a cinematic quality to his recollections—the tense midnight meetings in Abuja, the coded alliances with military officers, the improbable friendships that turned policy into possibility.

These sections recall Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria in tone and intention: both works diagnose the systemic failures of governance but find redemption in individual initiative. Yet Bourdex’s narrative differs in form. Where Achebe offered moral critique, Bourdex offers demonstration—an anatomy of perseverance in motion. He documents the letters, negotiations, and international correspondences with Harris Canada, showing how an indigenous company emerged through sheer force of will and global collaboration.

Such passages risk overwhelming the reader with acronyms, specifications, and telecom jargon—R2 signaling, SS7 interconnection, E1 circuits—but they also lend the book an authenticity rare in corporate memoirs. What might have been opaque technicalities become, under Bourdex’s hand, instruments of drama. The machinery of communication becomes metaphor: wires and waves as extensions of faith and tenacity.

To situate The Making of Bourdex Telecom within Nigeria’s socio-political history is to confront the paradox of private enterprise under public decay. The book chronicles the twilight of NITEL’s monopoly, the hesitant dawn of deregulation, and the emergence of entrepreneurial actors who filled the void left by government paralysis. In this sense, Bourdex’s story parallels that of other indigenous pioneers—figures such as Mike Adenuga and Jim Ovia—whose ventures in telecommunications and banking transformed the national economy from the late 1990s onward.

Yet Bourdex’s tone is less triumphant than reflective. He does not romanticize deregulation; he portrays it as both opportunity and ordeal. The government’s inertia, the labyrinthine licensing process, and the outright extortion by state agencies form the darker undertones of his tale. His clash with NITEL’s leadership—recounted with controlled indignation—stands as one of the book’s most gripping sequences. When a senior official demanded an illegal payment of ₦20.8 million for interconnection rights, Bourdex’s defiant reply, “You are not God,” rang out like an act of civil disobedience. In such moments, the narrative transcends the genre of business autobiography and enters the moral theatre of national reform. The entrepreneur becomes citizen-prophet, challenging a corrupt establishment with the rhetoric of justice and self-belief. That blending of economic narrative with civic conscience is perhaps the book’s most compelling feature.

Stylistically, The Making of Bourdex Telecom occupies an intriguing space between oral history and polished memoir. The prose is direct, rhythmic, and often sermonic, reflecting its author’s background as both businessman and public speaker. Anecdotes unfold with the cadences of storytelling; sentences sometimes pulse with the energy of spoken word: “Amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” The repetition of such aphorisms imbues the work with a sense of conviction, though occasionally at the expense of subtlety.

Where the book excels is in its evocation of atmosphere—the dusty highways between Aba and Lagos, the sterile corridors of power in Abuja, the crisp air of Calgary where the author first glimpsed technological modernity. These scenes transform what could have been a linear corporate chronicle into a textured work of memory.

Still, the narrative structure is not without flaws. The absence of an external editor’s restraint is occasionally felt in the pacing; digressions into technical exposition or moral reflection sometimes interrupt narrative flow. Readers accustomed to the concise storytelling of international business memoirs—Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog or Elon Musk’s authorized biography—may find the prose dense in places. Yet such density mirrors the complexity of the terrain Bourdex navigated. His sentences, like his towers, are built from layers of persistence.

Beyond its entrepreneurial chronicle, the book doubles as social history—a record of Eastern Nigeria’s encounter with modernization. The chapters on “The FUTO Boys,” a cadre of young engineers recruited from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, offer a microcosm of the new Nigerian professional class emerging in the late 1990s: educated, idealistic, and determined to prove that technical expertise could thrive outside the state. Their improvisations—installing antennas by candlelight, building networks amid power outages—embody the collective grit that sustained Bourdex’s vision.

The narrative’s cumulative effect is generational. Through the story of one company, we glimpse a society in transition—from analogue isolation to digital awakening. The book captures that liminal moment when the sound of a dial tone became a symbol of freedom.

Running through The Making of Bourdex Telecom is a persistent theology of success. Bourdex attributes every turn in his journey to divine orchestration: friendships “placed by the Invisible Hand,” setbacks reinterpreted as “divine redirections.” Such language, while characteristic of Nigerian entrepreneurial spirituality, acquires here an almost literary force. It recasts corporate history as providential narrative, where the invisible infrastructure of grace mirrors the visible architecture of towers and transmitters.

For some readers, this piety may feel excessive; yet it provides the emotional coherence of the book. The author’s faith is not ornamental—it is constitutive. Without it, the story of Bourdex Telecom would read as mere ambition. With it, it becomes vocation.

The foreword by Abia State Governor Alex Otti and the preface by former Anambra Governor Peter Obi frame the book as both inspiration and instruction. They read Bourdex’s career as parable: the triumph of private initiative over public inertia. Yet their presence also situates the work within Nigeria’s broader discourse on nation-building. The Making of Bourdex Telecom is not only the autobiography of an entrepreneur; it is a treatise on indigenous agency—on what happens when Africans cease to wait for imported solutions and begin to engineer their own.

In this respect, the book extends its influence beyond its immediate industry. Its lessons—about courage, timing, friendship, and faith—extend to any field where innovation must contend with adversity.

Judged as a work of literature, The Making of Bourdex Telecom is direct and sincere. Its prose favors clarity over ornament, and its authenticity gives the story a compelling sense of truth. Bourdex writes not to embellish, but to bear witness—to a time, a struggle, and a conviction that technology could serve humanity. The result is a hybrid work: part documentary, part sermon, part memoir of enterprise.

As a contribution to Nigerian business literature, it deserves serious attention. Few firsthand accounts capture with such detail the messy birth of private telecommunications in the 1990s—a revolution that reshaped the country’s economic and social fabric. In its pages, we hear both the crackle of the first connected call and the larger resonance of a people finding their voice.

Bourdex’s central message endures: progress begins when frustration becomes purpose. His journey from the backrooms of NITEL to the boardrooms of international telecoms is not merely personal triumph; it is a chapter in Nigeria’s unfinished story of modernization.

In the end, The Making of Bourdex Telecom stands as more than the history of a company. It is an ode to enterprise as nation-building, and to the stubborn optimism of those who refuse to let silence define them.

See the book on Amazon: >>>>>

_________

♦ Dr. Emeaba, the author of “A Dictionary of Literature,” writes dime novels in the style of the Onitsha Market Literature sub-genre.

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Houston

Houston and Owerri Community Mourn the Passing of Beloved Icon, Lawrence Mike Obinna Anozie

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2 months ago

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October 3, 2025

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Houston was thrown into mourning on September 19, 2025, following the sudden passing of businessman and community advocate Lawrence Mike Obinna Anozie, who peacefully joined his ancestors. Immediate family member in Houston, Nick Anozie, confirmed his untimely death and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of love and condolences from both the Houston and Owerri communities.

Lawrence was born to Chief Alexander and Lolo Ether Anozie of Owerri in Imo State, Nigeria, and will be dearly remembered by family members, friends, and the entire Houston community.

An accomplished accountant, the late Lawrence incorporated and successfully managed three major companies: Universal Insurance Company, LLC, Universal Mortgage LLC, and Universal Financial Services. Through these enterprises, he not only built a thriving business career but also created opportunities for countless individuals to achieve financial stability. His contributions to entrepreneurship and community development will remain a lasting legacy.

According to the family, arrangements for his final funeral rites are in progress and will be announced in due course.

Lawrence will forever be remembered as a loving and compassionate man who dedicated much of his life to uplifting others. He helped countless young Nigerians and African Americans overcome economic challenges by providing mentorship, financial guidance, and career opportunities. His generosity touched the lives of many who otherwise might not have found their footing. A devout Catholic, he was unwavering in his faith and never missed Mass, drawing strength and inspiration from his church community. To those who knew him, Lawrence was not only a successful businessman but also a pillar of kindness, humility, and faith whose legacy of service and compassion will continue to inspire generations.

For more information, please contact Nick Anozie – 832-891-2213

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