El-Rufai, the Governorof Kaduna has given further clarification on why the Northern Governors Forum seemed to be against power shifting to the South come 2023.
Recalled during the meeting on Monday in Kaduna, the Northern Governors had opined rotational presidency was against Nigeria’s constitution.
Their opinion was in reaction to the position of their Southern counterparts who have demanded that their region “must” produce Nigeria’s next president.
From all analysis and inferences made by political experts so far, the basis for all the bickerings boils down to the grammatical semantics of the word “must” used in the communique issued by the Southern Governors.
However, in a chat with select journalists Governor El-Rufai said that no one should assume that they can sit in Lagos or Port Harcourt and decide what the north should do or who the north should vote for.
He posited that if the South wanted power, it should be prepared to sit with the North, dialogue and negotiate then agree on who should be voted but not use compulsion to demand power shift.
His words: “We are not saying there cannot be rotational presidency, it can be done but you have to come and sit with the politicians in the north and dialogue and then we agree to give our support to the south but no one has the right to sit in Lagos or Port Harcourt and say whether northerners want it or not, they must relinquish power to the south, that is wrong, it is not how we do politics and in fact, it is foolish.”
It would be recalled also that El-Rufai was one of the first governors to suggest a power shift to the South in 2020, noting that it would be in the interest of fairness and unity for the North to relinquish power to the South after eight years under President Muhammadu Buhari.
In the same vein, similar statements have been made by other northern governors such as Babagana Umara Zulu of Borno State, Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State and Aminu Bello Masari of Katsina State.
However, some of the governors were part of the meeting of the Northern States Governor’s Forum in Kaduna which on Monday.
