By Umar Sa’id Moh’d Bauchi
A youth group known as New Northern Initiative for Growth (NNIG), has rejected against the endorsement of the PDP presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar by the Arewa Consultative Forum and Northern Elders Forum as a northern candidate in the forthcoming presidential election.
Addressing Journalists on Tuesday at the NUJ Secretariat, Bauchi, the President General of the group, Lawal Sahabi challenged the Northern Elders to prove they are truly leaders and well-meaning elders of the Northern region by telling the people what the former Vice President has ever done in the interest of or for the promotion and protection of the well-being of the region and its people.
Represented by the Bauchi State Coordinator, Alkasim Nuhu, Sahabi alleged that, by every reasonable assessment, Atiku has never ever had any concern for the North beyond exploiting the region’s resources, its goodwill for his personal political capital.
“It is in his blind desperation to secure the presidency that Atiku Abubakar is sponsoring capitalist northern leaders with no record of achieving anything for the region to manipulate the conscience of the northerners into believing that he is a true northerner with good intentions for the region whereas the opposite is the case.he said
“We are asking the so called elders to explain to northerners where they derived their mandate to impose a single candidate on the entire region. We also challenged them to explain what criteria they used to arrive at Atiku to be consensus candidate for the North and to define his contributions to the growth of the region that qualifies him as such.
“Supporting Atiku as northern candidate on the basis of sentiments will put the region out of political circulation permanently which is what the so called northern leaders out of desperate greed for self-perpetuation are opting for. Atiku who has risen on the goodwill of the northerners can today not boast of any development project he has ever influienċed personally or through the high offices he has held, courtesy the
North.
He observed that it is important for the people of the North to refuse to be drawn into the lost battle of pitching all its eggs in one basket, especially since Atiku’s antecedents of non-pérformance throughout his tenure as vice president have made him unreliable and a major risk for the North to romance with.
