Delta Governorship race: Zoning not throwing up best candidate

The Centre for Research and Democratic Governance has expressed worry that the continuous zoning of the governorship seat in the Delta state is not paving the way for the best candidate to emerge.
Executive Director of the centre, Dr Akpesiri Eghwujovbo, said in a statement on Monday that only the party in power in the state had thrived on the foundations of zoning.
Eghwujovbo pointed out that zoning, going by the way the parties primary elections were conducted, is difficult to give the desired results.
“Zoning as a concept often employed by many politicians in both its theoretical and practical categories, is a negative phenomenon that conveys the ideological notion of a hegemonic superstructure.
“The very idea of zoning in Delta State therefore conflicts with its known assumed characterisation, as its content is attuned to the realisation of the objectives of a single individual.
“It is never designed as a consensus of vested stakeholders who are equally more concerned for an upward mobile development of personnel and infrastructures of Delta State with Asaba as capital.
“Construction of a maze of roads for the capital city as well as drainages which should naturally attract governmental intervention for a state capital that shares a similar geographical destiny with Lokoja, a city situated below the river level of the lower Niger, only began with the government of Governor Ifeanyi Okowa.
“This obvious indifference to Asaba reflects the idiosyncratic attitude of what the zoning agenda is intended to accomplish,” the statement quoted Eghwujovbo as saying.
He frowned at the situation where an ethnic group would continue to preach marginalization where such does not exist.
“Ethnicity is the product of actions undertaken by ethnic groups as they shape and reshape their group definition.
“It utilizes identity and culture as basic building blocks for both national and sub-national development.
“What makes the issue of identity particularly acute, is that it touches not only on politics but also on economics and the organizational capacity for a self-generating and sustainable development from within.
“So, more than anything else, ethnicity serves as a dynamic, constantly evolving property of both individual identity and group organization.”
He called on those clamouring for zoning to desist from doing so as even the sitting Gov. Ifeanyi Okowa never emerged as a product of a 2015 PDP zoning as clamoured in some quarters. (NAN)