Those who once planned an 18-year hegemony, cannot now wait to get ‘their’ power back after just six years!!
What I just said to a now ‘pro-zoning’, South-Eastern Facebook friend of mine who was waxing angrily about the Northern ‘born-to-rule’ mentality!
“It is obvious that your sense of history (even as recent as the last zoning debacle had been) is terribly obscured by ethno-regional bias! So now at long last, what went around has gradually come around! It was the North that stood firmly for zoning in 1999 with the election of Obasanjo. And even when Atiku (Abubakar) -as VP- wanted to challenge his Principal, Obj (Olusegun Obasanjo) in 2003, the same North prevailed on him to allow the man complete his eight years. Yet even after that when Obj was contemplating handing over to one of Peter Odilli and Donald Duke, there is no record that the North cared a hoot! Obasanjo on his own, at the last minute, changed his mind and settled for an ailing (Umaru) Yar’Adua.
If you have a poor sense of history, let us educate you; it was the way and manner Yar’Adua was treated like a plague when he was sick that angered the North, after his death, to demand that (then Vice President Goodluck)Jonathan should only exhaust his late principal’s first term’s unexpired residue of two years and allow another Northerner to enjoy Yar’adua’s unassumed second term in 2011. That was when the issue of zoning came up, and virtually all of the South openly and brazenly repudiated zoning even though it was provided for in the constitution of the PDP.
What have you people (especially South Easterners) not said against zoning? You said that it was undemocratic and that those angling for it were lazy. Jonathan, as President then, was in Canada, and from there he spoke for the first time on the North’s agitation for the PDP to respect it’s zoning principle; and he said that the North was “lazy and afraid of competition”! You guys have now conveniently forgotten all these abi? You forgot when you said that democracy was choice-driven and that only the people had the electoral right to decide who should govern them.
A Southern Obasanjo had done eight years, a Northern Yar’adua had barely done two years before he died; a Southern Jonathan completed his two years, so that the South altogether had done 10 years to the North’s two years. Yet you people insisted in 2011 that the PDP should ignore its own zoning principle and still field Jonathan, for another four years, to make it 14 in all. Or should we say, another eight years, to make it 18 years. Because, you wanted Jonathan too to have an uninterrupted two terms. Or was that not why after he won 2011 and served his first term you still prodded him to go for a second term in 2015. What you wanted was 18years of Southern hegemony had Buhari not truncated that plan in 2015!
Buhari was not a product of a Nort-South zoning agreement! APC’s Buhari in 2015 had won in spite of the largely Southern gang-up against zoning; a gang up to perpetuate a two-decade Southern hegemony. But what had the North done while all these plans were cooking? Virtually nothing! The North did not issue threats. The North did not give conditions. The North did not issue ultimatums! The North did not call Southerners power mongers. We did not name you people ‘born-to-rule’. But like true democrats we merely bidded our time and did some realignment. I have said it before, that I am for power shifting to the South West; if the very South Westerners in APC who had put in their all to make this realignment work, are the ones to benefit from it. Nor am I averse to the PDP fielding a South Easterner and working hard like the APC did, to get him elected!
They should cut this crap about intimidating the North on the grounds of zoning! Because when it was time for the North to benefit from the very zoning that she fought to initiate, she was called lazy and uncompetitive -by those who had already put in 10 years in power and wanted to put in 8 more!
And to even think that you are talking about a South Eastern candidate! So the Fulani man and the Hausa man in the Janjaweed Islamization party should now ask all Northerners with presidential ambition in APC to shelve it, because it is the “turn” of the South East. The Igbos like you so shamelessly put it, “have the right of first refusal”. Now I am convinced that some people have no iota of shame at all in their system!”
