Legal Icon and chairman of the Igbo Leaders of Thought, ILT, Professor Ben Nwabueze, SAN, has cautioned against the boycott of the 2019 elections to avert a costly mistake.
Some groups in the South-East including the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, have been canvassing a boycott of the election in the South-East and South-South geo-political zones to press home their demand for the Republic of Biafra through a referendum.
Leader of the IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, in his broadcast on Radio Biafra, London, on Sunday restated his call for the Igbo to boycott the election.
He said among other things that IPOB is not interested in anything else other than for the government to set a date for a referendum.
“We will not relent till referendum is conducted. We stand for the truth. It’s referendum or nothing else,” he noted.
‘’My stand on the boycott of election is that it is a suicidal mistake. For this reason, I am totally opposed to it and have repeatedly advised against it,’’ he said.
However, reacting to Kanu’s broadcast, Secretary of the Eastern Consultative Assembly, ECA, Evangelist Elliot Ugochukwu-Uko, said the IPOB leader’s comments would excite ‘’millions of Ndigbo all over Nigeria because an average Igbo man sees him as a hero except the political class, who sees him as a threat and want him dead.”
Noting that Kanu could influence the course of the 2019 elections because the masses love him, the ECA leader urged the authorities to look for Kanu and talk to him, and address the issues that gave rise to the Biafra agitation by IPOB.
