With about nine days to the 2023 general election Elders from the northern part of the country said yesterday that the region will not be pressured to support a presidential candidate based on non-democratic principles.
The elders under the auspices of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) noted that since 1999, the South has ruled the country for 14 years and the North for 10 years, and therefore there would be a deficit of four years in favour of the North.
The director general of NEF, Prof Doknan Decent Danjuma Sheni, made the point during the General Assembly of Northern Elders at the Shehu Yar’Adua Centre Abuja.
According to Sheni, constitutionally, any Nigerian is free to contest elections and the north will continue to accept any candidate that wins the elections fairly, on the terms of one-man one vote.
He pointed out that the region does not intend to be intimidated by improper or uncivil utterances or threats of violence.
“Nor will we be coerced to supporting a candidate based on non-democratic principles,” he asserted.
He also reiterated that Nigerians and particularly the people who love democracy will not accept any contraption of governance that is non-constitutional, saying if this happens it will create an unnecessary fault line that will challenge our management skills.
“Thankfully there are Nigerians with similar stances and perspectives from other parts of the country,” the DG added.
On the redesign of the Naira notes he said the elders are encouraged to note that the National Council of State has asked the Central Bank of Nigeria to print more new notes or allow the use of both the old and new side by side to alleviate the suffering of Nigerians.
He stated: “Today the 15th February may be the last day for the old currency to be legal tender. The last few weeks have been traumatic for the ordinary Nigerian. We are happy to learn that the Central Bank of Nigeria is going to print more new notes.”
Sheni further noted that while politically the North holds the presidency, this however did not shield the people from the rigours of the challenges, if not more than the rest of the federation.
On the spate of poverty in the country, he said the multidimensional poverty index measures the percentage of households in the country deprived along three dimensions of wellbeing, including monetary poverty, educational poverty and basic infrastructure services poverty, adding that this gives a more complete picture of poverty.
“The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), in 2022 listed the multidimensional poverty index of Nigerian states, mentioning the lowest with 27% in the southwest and the highest with 91% in the northwest of the country. NBS also stated that 65% or 86 million poor people live in the North, while 35% or 47million poor people live in the southern part of Nigeria,” he added.
The DG said this is worrisome since the North holds the presidency and in Nigerian context, is in power, and ought to have addressed this, even as he noted that of the top 6 poor states listed by NBS, 5 of them are from the north.
He also spoke about the growing population of the North, warning that if nothing is done about it to improve the quality of life of the people, the country may be helping to widen the fault lines between the poor and the rich.
He said several factors could be responsible for this population increase, including but not limited to early marriage, lack of birth control, land space, and polygamous marriages in the whole region.
“This could lead to the north being unable to feed itself, even though it produced as much as 80 percent of the nation’s food. Even Benue State alone can feed the whole of Nigeria. This will be a fault line between the hungry and the well fed,” he noted.
Citing the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), he stated that the lowest literacy levels are found in the North, adding that most of the states have lower than 50% literacy rate.
“When this is compared to the southern states, no state has a literacy rate of below 70%. That means half of the population in the north is literate. This has caused a major dislocation between the literate and the non-literate.
“One consequence has been the appearance of agents of misguidance by people who are clearly outside the domains of any religious faith. They burgeoned the Boko Haram evil and the insurrection against the state being contended with. This is a challenge that we must face frontally through education, education and education,” he said.
On security, he noted that in 2015, only the Northeastern states of Nigeria had significant internally displaced persons (IDPs).
He added that the international Organisation of Migration (IOM) said there were 2.1 million IDPs in the region and that by 2022, a conservative figure of more than 1.1 million IDPs had been added from both the North West and the North Central regions.
Sheni continued: “No state in the north is free from IDPs. This creates a fault line between the former landowners and the new landowners. The consequences of hunger, crime and continuous conflict are left to the imagination.
We have to address and bring to a closure this consequence of insurrectional dislocation”.
He cautioned about recent political utterances by both politicians and religious leaders threatening to widen religious fault lines in the region.
“Our strength is in our diversities. As NEF we must remind our politicians to continue to imbue the stance of one of our founding political fathers in our utterances,” he said.
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