2023: Northern groups drum support for Ndigbo Presidency

Five Northern groups have appealed to Ndigbo to boldly come out and save Nigeria from her present predicaments by vying for the 2023 Presidency.

The groups are the Arewa Youth Coalition (AYC), Northern Youths Progressive Forum (NYPF), Northern Youths Initiative (NYI), Arewa Women Consultative Forum(AWCF), United Arewa Change for a Better Nigeria.

The northern groups made their position known in a press statement jointly signed by their spokespersons, Ibrahim Ndanus (AYC), Illyasu Bingham (NYPF), Liman Katsina (NYI), Hajia Bilma Alheri (AWCF) and Dan Musa Mohammed,(Arewa Change).

It called on the Northern extraction to fully back an Igbo candidate to occupy Aso Rock in 2023 and opined that it would address the insecurity in the country, as well as the economic hardships afflicting the people of Nigeria.

The groups recalled the political understanding between Ndigbo and the North in the past and hoped it would endure in the future.

Similarly, the South-East All Progressives Congress (APC), Integrity Group, on Monday backed Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai’s position that Nigeria’s President must come from Southern Nigeria in 2023.

El-Rufai had declared that power should move to Southern Nigeria after President Muhammadu Buhari has completed his second and final term in office.

Reacting, convener of the political pressure group, Dr Chinedu Jideofo-Ogbuagu, who addressed journalists in Enugu, said that Governor El-Rufai, being a reasonable and morally upright man, knows that rotation of presidential power between South and North has become an established convention since 1999, and as such, after President Buhari has served out the North’s turn from 2015 to 2023, it must be the turn of the South to produce president from 29th May 2023.

The APC group further stated that presidential power must not only shift to the South in 2023 but must be zoned to the South-East.

“That is because on the two previous occasions since 1999 that presidential power rotated to the South, South-West (President Olusegun Obasanjo) and South-South (President Goodluck Jonathan) took the South’s turns, both supported heavily by the South-East,” the group said.

It noted that South-East must not only produce the president of Nigeria in 2023 but, it wants South-Easterner to become president of Nigeria on APC platform, adding that PDP has exhausted its goodwill in the South-East in particular and the South in general.

The group stated that as a strategic, advocacy and pressure group within APC, it has been having to strategize and pushed for sanitization, popularity and rapid growth of APC in the South-East.

“In good time before 2023, we want South-East to have more APC card-carrying members than any other geopolitical zone in Nigeria. And with the massive support of the other five geopolitical zones, a South-Easterner will become president of Nigeria in 2023, thereby ensuring justice, peace and continued oneness of Nigeria.

“With a South-Easterner as president of Nigeria from 29th May 2023, we also foresee outstanding governance of Nigeria and prosperity’s the state for all Nigerians,” it declared.

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