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By Madu Obi
Members of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Elders Forum in Anambra State have strongly defended the existing zoning arrangement for the governorship election in the state.
Rising from a meeting in Awka yesterday, the forum, comprising mainly of top and experienced politicians, businessmen and university professors, insisted that going by the zoning arrangement, the next governor of the state must come from Anambra South, which is currently occupying the office of governor through Professor Chukwuma Soludo of All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA.
The state chairman of the forum, Sir Innocent Obi told reporters after the meeting that those who fail to respect the zoning should be ready to bear the consequences.
So far, the only person from Anambra South in APC who has indicated interest to challenge Governor Chukwuma Soludo who is also from Anambra South in Senator Ifeanyi Ubah representing the zone in the Senate.
Obi said: "Whatever decision we take on zoning, we will be ready to bear the consequences. Governor Soludo is there today because there is a zoning arrangement.
There was an agreement by the elders of Anambra State, including Emeka Anyaku, the late Dr Chukwuemeka Ezeife, late Mbazulike Amechi and many others, who met and decided that power should be rotating among the three zones.
It was not a political party decision as such."They considered the interest of Anambra State in taking that decision to put the state on a better footing for smooth power transition.
It’s a written arrangement that power should be rotating and anybody denying it is not telling the truth.
But you know that in politics, power is not given on a platter of gold. In the last election, the party that pretended that there was no zoning suffered for it because someone who contested on its platform failed because he didn’t come from the zone where he was supposed to come from.
Our prayer is that our party, APC, should not tamper with the zoning arrangement and we believe that any zone which had taken its turn, should shift. Anambra South still has four years to produce the governor".
Obi said that APC elders in the state have already started mobilizing at the grassroots in readiness for the November 2025 election.
"We are also proffering solution to some knotty issues as elders of the party. Incidentally, we have cordial relationship with the state executive of APC, which makes our work easy," he added.
He pleaded with President Bola Tinubu to give the people of Anambra State more appointments as a way of making APC more popular in the state, especially with the governorship election drawing near.
"In 1999, the South West didn’t vote for PDP, but it got everything: In a game, people play different roles. If you judge us from the role we played during the 2023 election, you should realize that other parties-APGA & LP- had advantages over APC here, but with our little capacity, we were able to checkmate them", Obi said.
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