By Ochereome Nnanna
AS I said before, those elected into various political offices must understand the meaning of their mandates. When we say votes must count, we are not just saying the election should not be rigged.

We are emphasising that those we voted for should understand the message behind the vote. Why did Nigerians choose Dr Goodluck Jonathan as their President and not retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari or Malam Nuhu Ribadu?

Why did the Igbo electorate choose Jonathan over Buhari and Ribadu? It was not because they do not like Northerners. The Igbo have a long history of productive political partnership with the North. The Igbo electorate of the South East gave Jonathan nearly five million votes, just about 200,000 less than the haul that GEJ procured from his native South South zone.

Add the rest of Igbo votes in other parts of the country where they rank as the second largest group after the indigenes, and the Igbo might have accounted for not less eight million of the 22.5 million votes that catapulted Jonathan to a landslide victory.

Clearly, the Igbo votes won the election for Jonathan because if you remove them from the president and give them to Buhari who scored over 12 million votes, the latter would have won with a comfortable majority. The Igbo people have never been so instrumental to the victory of any political leader in the history of our nation. This is a heady moment for Igbo to bask in their rediscovered electoral might and reassertion of their majority stake in the Nigerian political commonwealth.

This election must have shut the mouths of those who, before the polls, declared that the Igbo had no electoral worth. I speak pointedly of our loose-talking elder statesman, Chief EK Clark, to whom this statement was credited.

It was a very deliberately trodden political path by the leaders and people of the South East. At the outset of the last transitional process, a consensus was reached that the Igbo would not present a presidential or vice presidential candidate, as all efforts were saved for the envisaged date with history in 2015, when the Igbo expect Nigerians to concede the presidency to the South East.

At first there was a choice between going with the North under the zoning arrangement and supporting Jonathan who hailed from a cousin geopolitical zone. The South East governors, Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo and other Igbo interest groups such as Ndi Igbo Lagos, mobilised consensus around a block vote for Jonathan.

It, therefore, came as a shock to many that Jonathan, the leader of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, did not seem to reckon with the contribution of the Igbo people to his emergence and did not consult its leadership before acceding to the removal of the post of National Chairman of the Party from the South East and zoning the Speaker of House of Representatives to the South West.

The President has thus treated the Igbo like people whose votes did not count. However, we are not here to condemn him because power sharing is yet to be concluded. But unless certain home truths are brought back to him on time he may end up making very costly mistakes and alienating his next-door neighbours.

The Igbo people voted for Jonathan for two reasons. Number one: To bring the civil war, which has been raging in the minds of the Nigerian political establishment for over 40 years, to a final stop. Number two: To mend fences with their cousin geopolitical zone: the South South, which also harbours a number of Igbo speaking ethnic groups.

The emergence of an Easterner as the elected president of Nigeria was a vision put together by the Council of South East and South South, COSESS, led by Ambassador Matthew Mbu and retired Commodore Okoh Ebitu Ukiwe in 2001.

It is over 41 years since the Biafra-Nigeria war ended with a fraudulent “No Victor, No Vanquished” official declaration. Any wonder that fraud has become an integral part of the Nigerian political personality?

Part of Jonathan’s historic challenge is to restore the integrity and credibility of leadership in this country by keeping his promises and ensuring that no part of this is ever again left out in the cold. Buhari, being a combatant during the war, might not have been totally purged of the prejudices arising therefrom.

Added to his narrow-minded ideas of political leadership, he did not present a credible choice for the people of the South East.

But Jonathan, not having that kind of background, has a better psychological platform to ensure that that ugly chapter of the nation’s history is brought to a close without any further delay.

The late President Umaru Yar’ Adua, who was also not a combatant at the war front, took a bold step when he appointed the first ever Inspector General of the Nigeria Police from the South East, Mr Ogbonnaya Onovo. Jonathan built on it when he also broke a crucial barrier by appointing the first Chief of Army Staff from the zone since the end of the war, Major General Azubike Onyeabo Ihejirika.

A lecturer of political science at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Dr Afolabi Olugbemiga, put it intelligently in a recent television programme when he asserted that President Jonathan ended the “military blockade” of Igbo nation when he appointed Ihejirika as Chief of Army Staff.

He advocated that he (Jonathan) should also end the “economic blockade” put in place during the civil war, by appointing an Igbo man as the next Accountant General of the Federation, a post no Igbo person has every held since independence. No Igbo has ever been Minister of Works.

GEJ’s challenge is to remove these no-go areas. He must end not just the civil war but also all other wars we can feel but can’t see.