Ø Asks APC,PDP to zone tickets to South-East
Ahead of the 2023 general elections, some northern elders have thrown their weights behind the clamour for an Igbo presidency, insisting that Nigeria’s 2023 presidency should rotate to the South-East zone and not to any other.
The elders, operating under the aegis of ‘Coalition of Northern Elders for Peace and Development’, in an issued statement by their National Coordinator, Engr. Zana Goni and the National Women Leader, Hajia Mario Bichi, insisted that the Igbos of South East extraction should produce the next president, in order to maintain the culture of rotational presidency between the North and South, which they said has “helped to douse the political tension in Nigeria”.
Their position, they explained, was borne out of the need for all component parts of the country to be fairly and equitably treated in the nation’s political affairs.
The northern elders who said the Igbos have been marginalized in the scheme of things in the country, appealed to both the ruling All Progressives Congress, (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party, (PDP), to field candidates from the South East geo-political zone.
In this regard, the Northern elders appealed to all other zones in the country to back the Igbos in their long quest to produce a president even as they vowed to canvass their position to all stakeholders in the Nigerian political projects with a view to achieving Igbo presidency.
The elders said since President Buhari is from the North, the right thing was that “after his eight-year tenure, the next president should come from Southern Nigeria; and that since South-West and South-South have occupied the office in the current dispensation, the South-East is next in line, in the spirit of the rotation principle, fairness, equity and justice.”
“This will bring an end to the manifest marginalisation of the South-East. This will foster national unity and also bring to a close the bitterness of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, which has lingered for 50 years since the end of hostilities and engender unity”, it added.
“We, therefore, recommend that it be continued for now for the good of the federation”, the statement quoted the northern elders as saying.
