Northern groups on Tuesday hit out at the decisions of 17 southern governors.
The governors met last week in Lagos. In their resolution, they demanded power shift to the South in 2023, reiterating their anti-open grazing position, and demanding a raise from three percent to five percent in revenue to oil producing communities in the proposed Petroleum Industrial Bill, PIB.
Commenting on the governors’ stance, Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) said the North would not accept the imposition of any candidate on the region.
“We are running a democratic government and decisions over where the next president comes from will be made by voters exercising their rights to choose which candidate best serves their interest,” NEF, through its Director of Publicity and Advocacy, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed said.
“The Southern governors’ resolutions in that regard have further exposed a deliberate attempt to impose a contentious system of a rotational presidency that turns all democratic norms and accepted indices of our national demography on their heads; a rotation system that is clearly aimed at achieving dubious political goals; and one clearly designed to weaken the North,” CNG in a statement by its spokesperson, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, wrote.
