BY ERNEST NZOR, Abuja
The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has blamed the country’s security challenges on southern politicians who are demanding for power shift to south.
The group also sensed a weakness in the federal government’s will to deal decisively with the instigators of the insecurity being felt, especially by northerners in their region and elsewhere across the country.
Spokesman of CNG, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, stated this during a press briefing yesterday in Abuja. He said the North’s response to the situation was an unwillingness to remain at the receiving end of any attempt to force a transfer of power by shattering its cohesion or by agitating for the violent breakup of the country.
He said, “We note the alarming rise in political militancy by a desperate self-serving section of political leaders that believe the only path to gaining the presidency is by threatening other sections of the country and in particular, targeting the overall viability of Northern Nigeria.
“The general and pervasive insecurity being felt by northerners in the North, and elsewhere across the country, manifesting with the deliberate profiling and systematic alienation of particularly the Hausa/Fulani ethnic group essentially represents a plot by unscrupulous politicians to force a transfer of power by whatever means and tactics.
“The indiscriminate attacks on northerners that have left untold numbers of dead and displaced persons are symptoms of the disquiet in the southern plank that has been exacerbated by political opportunism and power corruption in build up to the 2023 presidential ambition of southern political interests and their northern collaborators.
“The resurgence of ceaseless antagonism against the North is also part of a wider agenda aimed at causing greater instability and rendering the country practically ungovernable, and the setting in of anarchy as
the strategies employed to achieve the results that the coupists of
the First Republic failed to realise.
“This is compounded by the failure of the federal government to deal
decisively with the instigators of these dastardly acts of ethnic
cleansing which leaves the only conclusion that authorities have lost
the political will and some of the necessary courage to enforce the
fundamental rights of all citizens to live and flourish anywhere
without discrimination or molestation.
“The persistence of the general insecurity across the land with the
targeted devastation of northern Nigeria, are in the continuum of a
southern agenda with its roots in our history and pursued vigorously
since the onset of the Boko Haram insurgency more than a decade ago.
“We invite the desperate southern political power seekers who feel
that their only path to gaining the presidency in 2023 or in the
future, is by fomenting trouble and inciting hatred against other
components of the country, to note that their actions will not go
unnoticed and no section of the country, would succumb to any form of
shift of power under threat.
