By Uduak Akpan Edward
Ask me the best choice among the motley crowd of aspirants seeking to get the nod of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) for the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria and I will point to the current Minister of Science, Technology, and Innovation, Dr Ogbonnaya Onu, who on Friday, May 6 declared to run for the presidency of Nigeria.
But President Muhammadu Buhari may have been boxed into a dilemma by elements seeking to widen the gulf of national disunity with continued ostracization of a section of the country, which the deluge of aspirants from all the other parts of the country, may suggest, but he has an honourable legacy to leave for the country and the world.
Agreed that the dozens of aspirants who have already purchased the expression of interest forms are eminently qualified to occupy the office of the president, but Onu as the second most senior member of the APC and one of the frontline visioners for the formation of the party beginning from 2010, is the best candidate to easily galvanise the respect, unity, and harmony within the party as it confronts the task of the 2023 elections.
The first-class doctor of chemical engineering is at the forefront of restoring Nigeria’s industrial potentials of the 70s and 80s through a knowledge economy that will safeguard Nigeria’s viability in the new era of less oil-dependent Fourth Industrial Revolution.
As fate would have it, Onu ticks all the boxes as he is superbly equipped to respond to the main issues bedeviling Nigeria today. Being from the Southeast zone, which alongside the North East, currently faces some of the most vicious and devastating forms of terrorism, his affirmative choice is in the national interest to begin a healing process and restoration of national development.
His choice will be comparable to the decision of Canadians to elect a Quebecan in Joseph Elliott Trudeau as Prime Minister at the peak of the French-speaking region’s violent secessionist agitation in 1968 led by the Quebec Sovereignty Movement, Parti Québécois, and other groups. Trudeau not only suppressed the crisis such that in a referendum of 1980 the people of Quebec rejected secession, but in the 1970s he laid the foundation for Canadian prosperity. His son, Justin Trudeau is today also the Prime Minister.
Just like the senior Trudeau was endorsed majorly because he was a non-separatist Quebecan in the ruling Liberal Party of Canada, Onu is an unrepentant and infectious nationalist and a ranking member of the ruling APC. He will be the roaring legacy of the national renewal of President Buhari which all nationalists and patriots should support.
Uduak Akpan Edward writes from Karu, Abuja.
