Northern group faults Arewa's bid for Presidency in 2007
From Saxone Akhaine, Kaduna
CONTRARY to the position of a prominent northern association, the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), the Coalition of Northern Progressives (CNP) yesterday canvassed the emergence of a South-Easterner as the nation's President in 2007.
The group urged northern elders to review their quest to produce the next president in 2007 and support the Igbo.
According to the CNP, a President of an Igbo extraction in 2007 will be a catalyst to national cohesion, since he will be aware that his relations are living in different parts of the country.
The position of the CNP was contained in a 14-point statement signed by the group's secretary-general, Malam Abbas and the publicity director, Alhaji Khali Umar Mohammed, at the end of their emergency meeting in Kaduna.
The group said: "We the progressive forces in the North hereby caution our elders, representatives and other over-ambitious politicians in the North to rise above political pettiness and treat the issue of Igbo presidency and the insistence on power shift to the North at all costs with a sense of reasoning, equity and restraint."
It urged northerners to consider the Igbo bid to produce the next president as legitimate.
"An Igbo president would view Nigeria as one indivisible entity because he knows that his kith and kin are scattered in every Nigerian city and will therefore not exhibit an unguarded parochialism and lopsidedness in political administration," it stated.
The CNP noted that if an injury was inflicted on the people of the South-West when the June 12, 1993 Presidential election was annulled and they were compensated through an Obasanjo Presidency in 1999, then "in the spirit of equity, fairness and social justice... it will be fair enough to give the Igbo a chance to produce the next president in 2007."
The group said that the Igbo had not been able to produce a president for the country for decades due to some parochial reasons.
It added: "An Igbo presidency in 2007 will be a clear acceptance of the Igbo as truly part of Nigeria and this will consequently serve as a psychological end of the civil war."
Other resolutions of the group are:
- the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is not and should not be the only determinant of the political power equation in Nigeria. It is not possible to treat the issue of power shift as an exercise between the North and South only, while the Federal Government and even a Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria recognises the essence of geo-political zones in power sharing;
- even under military rule, there was always a geo-political consideration in power sharing, an initiative that informed the emergence of Ebitu Ukiwe, Augustus Aikhomu and Alex Ekwueme as occupants of the second highest office in the country;
- the only way to bring about and sustain national unity and stability of the country is to work towards and ensure that all geo-political zones in the country are given a fair representation in the political power sharing;
- the fears by a section of the country that any person who must rule the country without disintegration and war can only be from the Hausa-Fulani ethnic group has been proven wrong by the presidency of Obasanjo, a non Hausa Fulani, whose demonstration of cohesive leadership, nationalism and patriotism in five years of his tenure is unparalleled in the history of the country; and
