By Baron Ike
The North may have resolved to stop the South West from determining who emerges the president of Nigeria going forward.
It is believed that the South West has been the region crowning Nigeria’s president since former President Olusegun Obasanjo took his turn and handed over to late Umaru Yar’Adua, and later Goodluck Jonathan.
Chairman of Arewa Youth Consultative Forum (AYCF), Shettima Yerima, who has hinted about what to expect from the North said that the choice of who becomes Nigeria’s president in 2019 can no longer be the business of the South West as it did in 2015 and the years before.
Yerima was particularly worried that the Northwest has become the centre of the market where political stooges of the South West are traded.
Yerima however said AYCF had observed that Nigeria was being pushed back to the political scenario of 2015, in which the Southwest dominated the decision-making process as regards who should be Nigeria’s president.
He said in a press statement on Thursday that, “even though the North, out of modesty, merely allowed that historic imposition, the consequence of such action has become wasted years of poverty, hunger, unemployment, general underdevelopment and disturbing levels of stagnation.”
The AYCF said: “We will no longer tolerate the kind of imposition that brought the nation’s economy to its knees and all we now get is empty propaganda instead of performance. This is an insult on the sensibilities of all Nigerians who struggled to drive away the military in order to pave way for democracy.
“We cannot fathom why people outside the North should turn our region into their political experiment field, choosing a candidate who would take orders from them and abandon his own people’s wishes and aspirations. This is primitive, unacceptable and a smear on well-known democratic principles of a modern, independent nation that we have been in over 50 years.
“The earlier this shameful manipulation of our hopes in democracy is stopped, the better for our relationship with our neighbours.
“On no account should anyone take the North for granted again, especially on the matter of 2019 presidency. We are no fools and the world has come a long way from the era of political obscurantism and harmful patronage.”
Yerima regretted that the North, particularly the Northwest was now slowly drifting into the hands of those he called “toxic political class, whose political madness has now reached alarming levels.”
Then he questioned: “How else can anyone, in his right senses, explain the emergence of nine presidential candidates all from one geopolitical zone? What has gone wrong with the North’s sense of decency in politics? Imagine the exemplary style of the Northeast, which has just two candidates! Isn’t that a lesson for the scattered and uncoordinated Northwest?”