Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) said it is perplexed by a recent shamefaced remark by the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) that tends to threaten the North against demanding what is due to it from the president-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
CNG addressing a press conference in Abuja, yesterday, by the spokesperson, Abdulazeez Suleiman said without the need to give the OPC more reasons to feel important, the group is however compelled to respond for the fact that both the self-professed leading Yoruba groups, OPC and Afenifere never worked for the victory of the Asiwaju.
“While Afenifere, through its leader, Ayo Adebanjo, openly, directly and actively opposed the Tinubu contest, the OPC was complicitly silent throughout.
“For any of these groups to now turn around and assume the right to speak against the North, from where the President-elect extracted the bulk of his winning votes, is the accurate personification of crass opportunism,” he said.
He reminded OPC that Tinubu got more votes from the north-west – the largest voting geo-political grouping in the country — than from the south-west, his home zone.
“In raw numbers, Tinubu beat Atiku in the north-west, scoring 2,652,824 votes compared to his opponent’s 2,197,824. Not only were Atiku’s margins in some of the states, narrow, Tinubu took a whopping half a million votes in Kano alone.
“In fact, Tinubu got 30 percent of his total votes from the north-west alone. That is almost one-third. The entire south-west gave Tinubu 2,542,979, second to the north-west. Another vital context is that his second highest votes came from Kano where he also came second. The third was also from a state where he came second: Katsina.
“Coming second in certain states is better than coming first in others. Tinubu was first in Ekiti state, for instance, but he got only 200,000 votes while he got more than double the figure in Kano to place second. Tinubu got a miserable one percent of his total votes from the south-east with a total of 127,605 votes from the five states and did not score 25 percent in any of them,” he added.
He said if these verifiable figures mean anything to OPC regional jingoists, they should by now understand that the North is only making a legitimate case for appropriate recognition of its efforts, adding that no one expects that the incoming president will run an administration that will give to the North what it does not deserve, but no one also can deny the North the right to speak for what is legitimately due to it.
He said in this context, no amount of threat or hooliganism will stop such northerners as Abdulaziz Yari, Abbass, Betara, Gagdi, Wase and Jaji from exercising their right to contest for the positions of their choices. “Likewise, any other interested candidate from whatever section of the country should be free to contest so that in the end the matter is sorted through democratic election by the legislators themselves,” he said.
He said while the North will continue to support the incoming administration of Bola Tinubu in the task of rebuilding a nation united around the values of justice and honest enterprise, those northerners who insist on fair sharing of positions are not his enemies.
He noted that the vast majority of them are people who voted for him because they shared his belief that we can live secure lives; that leaders do not have to steal our resources and that our children can live in, and work in a nation they can be proud of.
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