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Afenifere Berates Northern Elders Over Consensus Candidates
The Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere has kicked against the Northern Elders’ purported endorsement of two Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential aspirants as consensus candidates for the 2023 election.
It said that while the leaders have the inalienable rights of choice, the group, however, pointed out that, “the overriding interests of the continued corporate existence of Nigeria requires more reflective statesmanship.”
The group’s General Secretary, Chief Sola Ebiseni, in a statement in Akure, said that it was a plan to execute their northern agenda in the PDP which controls only five of its 19 states.
“The announcement that the Northern Elders have settled for two of the PDP Presidential aspirants as consensus candidates for the 2023 election shows clearly the quagmire of conscience in which these statesmen find themselves in the critical question of moving Nigeria forward.”
Ebiseni, however, declared that “the resolves of the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum that the next President of Nigeria, after Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years full term, should be a person of Southern Nigeria origin, in the interest of equity, national sense of belonging and cohesion in national consensus and unity.
“No group or section is greater than Nigeria, and the compelling interest of its corporate existence.”
The statement reads: “We observe that since the issue of succession to the office of the President assumed the front burner in the national discourse, some of the leaders from the north have orchestrated several schemes at keeping the office of the President in Northern Nigeria after the eight years tenure of President Buhari from the zone contrary to the popular and prevailing mood of the nation in favour of the emerging political culture in favour of Southern Nigeria.
“In the opinion of some, Buhari’s Presidency has not met their much-coveted sectional interests.
“In another breadth, they condemned the decision of President Goodluck Jonathan to exercise his constitutional right to seek the maximum second term in office as a deliberate denial of the rotational turn of the North which they vow to recoup as if the Nigerian State is their personal estate.
“At another time, they canvass open contest in vain confidence in the undue advantage which the Nigerian military constitution bestows on a section of the North.
“In their present exercise, it is intriguing that the Northern Elders inconsistently set aside all their vaunted factors in preference for equity.
“In their sermons, they settled for aspirants from the North-Central and North-East against that of the North-West only on the ground of adjudged equity that the zone had produced Presidential candidates and presidents.
“They are deliberately oblivious of the indubitable history of Nigeria that the first executive ruler of Nigeria, Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, August 1957 – January 1966, was from the North-East and specifically Bauchi State and that most of the military Heads of the Nigerian State were of the North-Central origin.
“They are obviously not as perspective as the leader of the Afenifere who has insisted, in spite of the preponderance of aspirants from its zone, that the net of equity be widely cast to fish from the sea that has never produced the ruler in the real sense.
“It beats the imagination that the Northern Elders would fervently seek to execute their northern agenda in the PDP which controls only five of its 19 states.
“The nation weights in the wings to see the outcome of this gerrymandering.
It added that “The abysmal failure of the Buhari administration, accentuated by sectional interests based on this kind of scheming to perpetuate a particular region in power, the boomeranging effect of which now holds Nigeria comatose, should have been enough lesson that the fortunes of any region are not necessarily directly proportional to having its people in power.”
