A pro-North social political grouo, Arewa Economic Renewal Forum (AERF), on Tuesday vowed to throw its weight behind any candidate with a viable economic blueprint for the restoration of the Northern region of Nigeria.
According to the AERF Chairman, Ibrahim Shehu Yahaya, who addressed the press conference media alongside his members, the group made the demand at a press briefing in Abuja.
Their position, coming barely four weeks before the general elections, is a clamour for the harnessing and utilisation of resources in the region to address the huge economic and human development challenges there, and in turn, enable the collective growth and prosperity of the entire country.
The AERF is specifically demanding a strategic blueprint for rapid renewal and economic transformation of Northern Nigeria from the aspirants vying for the nation’s top job.
Such a blueprint, it said, must clearly indicate strategies to tackle the huge number of our school children, as well as the quality of education in the region; under-utilisation of its resources, particularly for agriculture; high level of insecurity, including terrorism, banditry and kidnapping; high poverty levels and poor human development indices.
“Failure to do so will be at the detriment of candidate electoral bid as we await to pledge our unalloyed support and galvanise massive vote for any of the contenders who brings forth the most viable and acceptable blueprint in line with our demands”, it stated.
Yahaya said over the years, Nigeria and especially the North have suffered epileptic form of leadership borne out of what he called a lacklustre attitude of elected persons to engineer the much-desired economic prosperity by exploiting regional assets, demographic potentials, geologic advantages and agricultural benefits for economic, infrastructural and human development.
He noted that the resultant consequence for the region is poverty, substandard education, lack of asses to credit financing and other negative underdevelopment indicators.
