Senator Ned Nwoko
By Our Reporter
Senator Ned Nwoko, representing Delta North in the Senate has stated that he will return to the Senate come 2027. Nwoko is one of the most visible and vociferous senators in the current National Assembly.
Outstanding as much for his strong views on national issues as it’s for his long standing advocacy for the creation of Anioma State.
In the last APC senatorial primary election, former Delta State governor Okowa was declared winner in a controversial circumstances but Nwoko insisted that he won the election by a margin of 123, 000 votes, saying that it was the current governor of Delta state and his people that just wrote the results in Asaba.
” We are in court”, he said in a recent interview with Hit 95.4 FM Calabar, noting that “What happened is a travesty of justice. We are in court, and there are various other options. I’m sure that I’ll contest the general elections, I’m going to come back to the Senate. What happened is that my governor and his people are trying to impose Okowa. I won the primary, I won with over 123,000 votes but they had a different plan. They wrote the results for Okowa in Asaba.They bribed the people that were sent from Enugu, they didn’t even bother to go to the fields.
He noted that everyone familiar with Delta politics knew that the results were altered.
He said ” I beat Okowa completely, he can not defeat me in any public election in Delta state.
” Don’t forget that Okowa was a governor when he contested to as vice presidential candidate to Atiku. As a sitting governor he lost Delta state and even lost shamefully in his own local government as a governor.
There’s no way he can defeat me in any election. We have the videos and pieces of evidence, and if there’s still justice in Nigeria, I will be back in the Senate “, he said.
Advocacy for Anioma state
Nwoko is very much concerned with creation of Anioma state out of Delta state. His long drawn advocacy for the creation of Anioma for his people culminated in 97 Senators supporting the creation of Anioma .
In the radio interview, Nwoko gave a graphic, historical background to the struggle for the creation of Anioma state, noting that the advocacy dates back to 1949 when his grandfather who was the king of his place along with like minds such as king of Agbor made a strong case for inclusion of Anioma people in Igbo Union.
He said ” I must state without equivocation that we are Igbo, Anioma is made up of nine local government areas in Delta state. We are what they call us.
He noted that There’s been some misconceptions about who we are, whether we are Igbo or not. I can take you back to 1949 when my grandfather who was the king of my place with the king of Agbor advocated for our people to join the Igbo Union, and since then others like Chief Denis Osadebay advocated for the creation of a separate Igbo state. This was before I was born. The advocacy is a long drawn historical quest for self determination and inclusion in the Igbo nation; for us, there’s just one Igbo nation.
According to him, ” there’s no Anioma person without an Igbo name, at least Igbo as middle name.
He noted that Anioma people have also paid a high price for their Igbo identity as over 3000 Anioma people were massacred by the federal troops during the Biafra war in the infamous Asaba Massacre, saying that” I talk as a witness and as historian, noting that ” I was brought up as an Igbo.
He stated that when the massacre of Anioma people began, his family moved to Aba thinking that the killings would not reach the heartland of Igbo only to discover that Aba would become one of epicentres of the killings.
He said the situation became so bad that after the war many people began to deny their Igbo identity because of the Nigerian factor.
For Nwoko, the Igbo have been shortchanged and oppressed, saying his people have cultural, historical and linguistic sameness with the heartland Igbo, noting that the creation of Anioma is a necessity to right the historic wrong.
He said as a member of the National Assembly joint committee on constitutional amendment he was happy that about 97 Senators signed up for the creation of Anioma state.
He averred that ” there’s no people more qualified to take up that offer of one more state for the southeast than Anioma people”, noting that Anioma land is bigger than Bayelsa, Ekiti and some other states.
” We have so many natural resources, and the Igbo in Edo are with us in the quest , so if they join us we can form up to 20 local governments”, he concluded.
” We are part of the Ohaneze , and we have always been part of them.
