Nkrumah Bankong-Obi/Abuja
To sustain equity, balance and national cohesion, the Senate Presidency of the 10th senate shSenatee zoned to the Southsouth part of Nigeria. This was the position canvassed by the Coalition for Governance and Economic Justice in Africa. Addressing a press conference in Abuja on Monday, Kasim Afegbua who led Honourable Cletus Obun and Ayo Oyalowa said the zone contributes tremendously to the economic basket of the nation and thus should be deliberately pacified for the sake of equity, fairness and inclusivity in the distribution of positions of national leadership.
Afegbua, a former commissioner for Information in Edo State noted that the All Progress Congress, APC and its candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu won the February 25 general election on the strength of the votes that came from the Southsouth, even though the region is a traditional stronghold of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. “In Rivers[State], the APC came third and in other five states, the APC came second. That contributed in no small measure in ensuring that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was able to meet the constitutional requirement of a 25 per cent distribution of votes cast in the 28 states before he was declared the president-elect.”
Against the backdrop of some other zones, especially the Southeast clamouring for the office of the senate presidency, Prince Afegbua said the zone needs to shirk that ambition because of the political position it took in the just concluded election. Potential candidates from the region and indeed the entire region did not appreciate Tinubu before or during the election and thus cannot genuinely seek to be a partner in the project they refused to identify with at the most critical point. The zone didn’t come to equity with clean hands, he said “The Southeast did not come with clean hands in the support of the candidate of the APC before the contest, during the election and even after the election.”
A known political communication specialist, Afegbuatrashed the claims in some quarters that Nigeria is erected on a tripod. And thus, the three nationalities of Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa rank above others in the consideration of the sharing of national leadership offices. This he said, led to the acquisition of a sense of entitlement by these regions. “We don’t want to be bogged down by the usual narrative of some kind of sense of entitlement fueled by the wrong notion that the country is sitting on a tripod. This country is sitting on more than a tripod. those who would call Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as sitting under a tripod are only being selfish, parochial, self-serving and do not understand the concept of sub-regions in the larger nation in building and sustaining egalitarian politics.”
In pleading with the Southeast to give the Southsouth a chance by supporting her aspiration to the senate presidency, Afegbua recalled that the Southeast led the senate with five different senators from across the five states in the region between 1999 and 2007 as well as the deputy senate presidency from 2011-2019. The law effective, he posited, dictates that another region which made huge sacrifices to the emergence of the incoming administration should be supported to also partake in the decision process of sharing proceeds from soil.
It is imperative, he added to find a common balance for the political leadership setup after inauguration in May this year. On that score, Afegbua said the APC Muslim-Muslim ticket which became apolitical hot potato during the campaigns and after the elections can be evened-up with the election of a person of a different faith as senate president and speaker of the House of Representatives. And that such heads of the legislative arm of government should be people who share in the vision of the President-elect, to forestall a reoccurrence of the frosty executive-legislative relations that impeded governance between 2015-2019.
Afegbua also praised the governors of Northen Nigeria who supported the return of the presidency to the southern of Nigeria and working assiduously towards the election of Tinubu. He implored them to complete the project by supporting the emergence of a senate president who will help to complement Tinubu’s vision of Renewed Hope through effective legislative cooperation.
Also speaking, Cletus Obun admonished the senators-elect to jettison the backward political rhetoric which hides under the banner of religion and rather work towards repositioning the nation for the greater of all. Racing down memory lane, Obun recalled that in 1993, faith didn’t consist a basis for electing national leaders but it has suddenly become an important consideration for this. This he said, is a mark of retrogression. According to him, “this is one other moment in which stability of this nation is on tenterhooks. There was no time in which religion became an issue in an election like now. The last election repeated the 1993 election. In 1993 it[religion] was not an issue, in 2023, it became an issue. Our political class have deliberately found something to hypnotize us into those divisions in order for them to continue in that oppression. This has to stop and the only it has to stop is to tell ourselves the truth.”
A former member of the Cross River State House of Assembly and top shot of the APC, Obun asked admonished the incoming senate to look beyond the narrow considerations of the so-called tripod in selecting the new senate president. “The sentiment about entitlement, about the tripod is insulting. You have two hundred and forty ethnic nationalities in Nigeria, three hundred and sixty-five linguistic groups in Nigeria…so when you bandy these linguistic divisions into one nationality, we are not helping the nationalities,” he argued. He called for a proper management of these difference to enhance the nation building process. One of way to do that, he posited is to elected a senate president of the Southsouth extraction when the next national Assembly is convoked.
On his part, Ayo Oyalowo said other geopolitical zone can not under emphasize the contributions of the Southsouth zone to the success of the APC presidential candidate at the polls. To be n sync with the law of natural justice, he advised that deliberate efforts must be put in to replicate the gesture exhibited by the region. He also noted that there is need to elected a senate president who is loyal and committed to the Party and shares the ideology of the incoming President.