An associate of former President Goodluck Jonathan and convener of the group advocating for the South-South Presidency in 2023, Chief Dikivie Ikiogha, said the ex-Nigerian leader has not accepted to join the 2023 presidential race.
He also refuted media reports that the recent meeting the group held with Jonathan in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital was to evolve strategies for his joining the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to pursue his presidential ambition.
Ikiogha, who is the founder of the group, told newsmen in Yenagoa, that it was “mischievous” for the media to report that the group was formed and met with Jonathan in order to map out strategies to return him to the presidency on the platform of APC.
Ikiogha, who is a political associate of Jonathan and a member of the state chapter of the APC, said the visit to the former president in his home like many others they had embarked on, was to intimate him with the group’s plan and reasons for advocating for South-South presidency in 2023.
OBSERVERSTIMES recalled that some National Daily’s had last weekend reported that Jonathan met with South-South leaders who are coordinating his return to the presidency in 2023. It claimed that the meeting was held on December 27, 2021, at Aridolf Hotels and Spars in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State owned by the former first lady, Dame Patience Jonathan.
While clarifying the essence of the meeting, Ikiogha said, “The report is not fair to our group. It is also not fair to Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. That is not investigative journalism. It is something they just concocted and went to press with it. If they had wanted to do balanced journalism, they would have contacted me and known our (the group) position before publishing the story.
“Our functions and our responsibilities are well spelt out in the constitution of the South-South Presidency 2023. We are an advocacy group and we cannot be talking on air without making consultations and meeting people. We have met several persons and no link was made that they are contesting elections. For more than one year, we have been operating and just one visit to Jonathan, they misrepresented our intention. They claimed Jonathan agrees to contest for the presidency.
“Jonathan did not agree to run and we did not go there to persuade him to run for the office. We told him that we are an advocacy group championing the South-South Presidency. And that we have been speaking and he must have been reading about us. And that we have been unable to see him. We told him that what the group wants is that the next president of Nigeria should come from the South-South.
And we gave him our reasons and he said, ‘well as a politician and a father, I have heard you’ and urged us to go ahead because every region is agitating for the presidency. He encouraged us to go ahead based on our reasons. We have visited places and they encouraged us based on the reasons we presented.
“And we left the place. The shock came the next day linking our group with President Muhammadu Buhari, Goodluck Jonathan and the APC. That we are campaigners of Jonathan’ return. Yes, we are campaigners but we have not known the person. We are campaigning for South-South Presidency but we never met Goodluck and APC because of the presidency. What about the PDP members in our fold? The PDP has reacted. They are right. Jonathan is not even ready to dump PDP for APC because of the presidency,” he said.
