 |
| Prof. Ango Abdullahi |
By Reuben Buhari
The north Tuesday disagreed with South-south and Middle Belt
leaders who are urging President Goodluck Jonathan to seek a second term in
office in 2015.
Leaders from the two zones, led by Chief Edwin Clark, had
during a visit to the president on Monday urged him to run again and criticised
those against the president’s second term bid for not promoting justice and
equality.
However, the Northern
Elders’ Forum (NEF), said moral consideration and the alleged incompetency
exhibited by Jonathan in discharging his responsibilities should forbid him
from contesting in 2015.
NEF spokesman, Prof. Ango Abdullahi, said the north would
search for a consensus presidential
candidate just as it did prior to the 2011 presidential election to vie with
Jonathan.
He also assured the Middle Belt that their welfare would be
better secured within the north than with the Niger Deltans.
Although Abdullahi, in an interview with THISDAY, agreed
that Jonathan as a Nigerian has the
constitutional right to contest, he said moral obligation should make him forgo
that right in compliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) zoning formula
that ceded the presidency to the north.
“What I am referring to here is a situation of his party,
the PDP, which adopted certain rules or guidelines. Even if they are not legal,
but they are still traditional practices of the party, which ordinarily, as
humans, we should be able to respect. If you have a memorandum of
understanding, it may be outside the law but it still applies to you. You have
that moral obligation to respect it,” he said.
According to him, the PDP has a zoning formula, which should
have brought the presidency back to the north in 2011, but for the death of
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in office that truncated the geopolitical zone’s
turn.
“The north started in 2007, then President Umaru died midway
in his term. The constitution allows Jonathan to carry on to the end of the
first term, and after then, morality demands that based on the agreement that
is known to everybody, the north should get the presidency.
“But for some various reasons that perhaps include the one
that Chief Edwin Clark and others are working on, some decided that Jonathan
should contest the election in 2011.
Whether he won it free and fair is another matter,” he added.
Speaking on the supposed alliance between the South-south
and the Middle Belt, Abdullahi accused the Middle Belt of trying to create
disunity in the north.
However, he added that the north would wait and see whether
Jonathan could win the presidency with only the votes of the South-south and
those from the Middle Belt alone “in spite of his incompetence and despite the
moral background that he comes from.”
On how the north would arrive at a consensus candidate for
the presidency for the 2015 general election given the rancour and the
subsequent defeat of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, who was picked by
the zone in the run up to the last presidential election, Abdullahi said there
was no cause for alarm.
He explained that part of the problem they encountered in
2011 was insufficient time aided by “selfish interest, divide and rule and
corruption,” adding: “but now that we have two years ahead of us, we are not
leaving anything to chance.”
No comments:
Post a Comment