Chika Onyeani
Wednesday February 18th, 2009
But then, the controversial online blog, Saharareporters.com, decided to inject ethnicity into the issue, painting the Ambassador as an saint and aggrieved party. The site is a big thorn on the Nigerian government, especially the Yar’Adua administration, as it has published many unflattering exposes on the members of that government, and its greatest followers are the Igbo. What irked most of its readers was quoting somebody the Igbo have come to regard as “Igbo-hater,” and an Yoruba tribalist, Prof. Bolaji Aluko, an prominent prominent political activist himself.
Saharareporters.com wrote, “Also a US-based Professor, Mobolaji Aluko, told Saharareporters that the minister, while he campaigned for former dictator Sanni Abacha to transmute into a civilian president in 1998, told him that they will have to solve the “Yoruba problem”
“Aluko said he still has Maduekwe’s “final solution to the Yoruba problem in Nigeria” ringing in his ears since 1998. “Tell him that I said so, and ask him whether I did not confront him with it right there in New York at the Council of Foreign Relations”. Abacha died soon after those events and Maduekwe moved to the new power brokers. His search for strong authority brought him to the top of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2007.”
