Leader of the pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, has said that the South-South have never tasted Presidency in Nigeria.
According to him, it should thus be their turn in 2023.
Adebanjo said this in a statement on Monday in which he explained his position of not supporting fellow Yoruba candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress.
Adebanjo stressed he was Obi-Datti complaint, meaning that he was supporting Peter Obi and his running mate in the Labour Party, Ahmed Datti.
He said in the statement: “In this quest for peace, based on equity and inclusiveness, the Yoruba took the first turn at the zoning arrangement in 1999, and that led to the emergence of Chief (Olusegun) Obasanjo, the current Vice President is a Yoruba man and equity forbids us for presuming to support another Yoruba person for the presidency in 2023.
“The current President is a Fulani from the North-West and by virtue of the zoning arrangement that has governed Nigeria since 1999, power is supposed to return to the south imminently. The
“The South-West, as I have pointed out, has produced a president and currently sits as VP, the South-South has spent a total of six years in the Presidency, but the Igbo people of the South-East have never tasted presidency in Nigeria, and now that the power is due back in the South, equity demands that it be ceded to the Igbo.
“We cannot continue to demand that the Igbo people remain in Nigeria, while we at the same time continue to brutally marginalise and exclude them from the power dynamics.”
Adebanjo, therefore, condemned the ceding of the PDP presidential ticket to “a Northern Fulani Muslim to succeed General Muhammadu Buhari, another Fulani Muslim, who will soon complete eight years of uneventful and disastrous rule. One can imagine such a high degree of political insensitivity.”
The Afenifere leader also stated that the group would not jettison equity, inclusiveness and justice just because one of their own — Asiwaju Bola Tinubu — was in the contest.
“We will not compromise this principle of justice, equity and inclusiveness because one of our own Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is a frontline candidate,” Adebanjo said.
Adebanjo, who said Afenifere had “no apologies but due courage of our conviction that Nigeria can only prosper in righteousness,” reiterated that, “To keep Nigeria one, everyone should be Obi/Datti compliant,” and advocated that that should be the slogan henceforth.
