Ohaneze Youth Council (OYC), the youth wing of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, has called for an end to what it called the orchestrated attack on the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, with the objective of removing him from office.

OYC maintained that being the Igbo man holding the highest political office in the present dispensation, removing Ekweremadu from his present office would amount to totally eliminating Ndigbo from the political calculation of Nigeria. It warned that this would generate reactions that would heat up the polity.

For the present tranquility in the polity to continue to prevail, OYC urged President Muhammadu Buhari to halt all actions tailored towards uprooting Ekweremadu from the office of Deputy Senate President.

The group accused All Progressives Congress leader, Alhaji Bola Tinubu, of being behind the plot to remove Ekweremadu from office. It advised the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Solomon Arase, against arresting Ekweremadu on any trumped-up charges of forgery.

“We advise the IGP, Mr. Solomon Arase, to desist from being used in this cheap battle against Ndigbo by attempting to arrest the Deputy Senate President over some spurious forgery allegations,” OYC said in a statement issued yesterday in Umuahia, the Abis State capital.

National President of OYC, Mazi Okechukwu Isiguzoro, endorsed the statement which was made available to News Express.

Said Isiguzoro: “We are aware that President Muhammadu Buhari is under intense pressure to endorse the ‘Ekweremadu-Must-Go’ plot. This is therefore the time for him to prove that he belongs to nobody but that he belongs to everybody (Ndigbo inclusive).”

OYC asserted that if the President maintains his neutrality in the National Assembly crisis as he had promised, he would “regain the confidence of Ndigbo and other Nigerians who may have had any earlier misgivings about his good intentions.”

The group sounded it clear that it “can no longer tolerate the ongoing provocation being meted out to Ndigbo by the continued attack on Senator Ike Ekweremadu, CFR-the Deputy Senate President, Federal Republic of Nigeria.” It added that such unwarranted attacks translate to an attack on Ndigbo who enjoy the collective representation of the embattled Senator today.

According to OYC, “Power belongs to God. Senator Ekweremadu’s emergence as Deputy Senate President was by divine providence. Any attempt to snatch that divine mandate from us shall be treated as a ploy to eliminate Ndigbo from Nigerian political equation and that will be dangerous.”

•Photo shows Ekweremadu.

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