The only way the APC can redeem its
perception as a supporter of APC party is by
putting forward a South-South man as its
presidential candidate in 2015.
The Northern Elders Forum, the apostles
of “the North is born to rule,” finally
played their joker. They maintained that if
the government does not #Bring Back Our
Girls by the end of October, 2014,
Jonathan should forget about running for
re-election.
This again reveals that there is more
political mischief to the kidnapping of the
Chibok schoolgirls than initially meets the
eye. As a matter of fact, it shows
conclusively that #Bring Back Our Girls is
simply another instrument of #Bring Back
Our Northern Domination.
The First Lady understood this clearly
from the onset; which is why she declared
that: “There is God o!” The people of
Borno understood this. They have always
known that their own feudalist leaders are
behind the kidnapping of the girls. With
the statement of the NEF, Nigerians must
no longer be in two minds about this. The
kidnapping of the Chibok girls is part and
parcel of a cynical plan by some Northern
elements to embarrass the government
and militate against Goodluck Jonathan’s
re-election plans.
For this very reason, Goodluck Jonathan
must not only run for president, he
deserves the support of every Nigerian
determined that this country should not
be surrendered to the Boko Haram. It is
unfortunate for the APC that its interests
are in the short-term the same as those of
the Boko Haram. Indeed, the only way the
APC can redeem its perception as a
supporter of APC party is not by its insistence on
fielding a Northerner, but by putting
forward a South-South man as its
presidential candidate in 2015.
Nevertheless, it would still lose the
election.
New and old North
In the Nigeria of today, there are two
discernible Norths: the new North and the
old North. The new North is perennially
progressive. It is the glue that holds
Nigeria together. While the South-South
threatens secession; the South-East is still
reluctantly Nigerian and the South-West
would rather keep Nigeria at arm’s-
length; the new North remains the only
truly nationalist component of the
country. It never threatens secession but
is preoccupied with national unity.
The new North is the North of men like
our most successful industrialist, Aliko
Dagote, now the 23rd richest man in the
world. It is the North of men like Ibrahim
Gambari; our point-man and intellectual
giant at the United Nations. It is the North
of men like Nuhu Ribadu; whose courage
in going after thieves and robbers in the
EFCC led to his being hassled out of the
police.
It is the North of men like Father-
Reverend Matthew Kukah, a Catholic
priest with a national social conscience. It
is the North of men like Mohammed Buba
Marwa, the most dynamic governor in
Nigeria during the Abacha regime.
But subsisting beside this new progressive
North is the old North of decrepit old men
who have lived for long as parasites on
Nigeria’s oil wealth. This old North is the
North of #Bring Back Our Northern
Domination; a North of indolent political
has-beens; looking for pensions from
national coffers. It is the North of
recalcitrant yesterdays men who had lived
large at the country’s expense and are
hankering after an inglorious past where
they spent the national patrimony with
the profligacy and abandon of
irresponsible firstborn children.
This is the old North that ran down the
nation’s resources. It is the North that
built nothing and grew nothing. It is the
North that ate up our groundnut
pyramids. It is the North that, despite
being in power for 38 years, failed
grievously to educate Northern children.
It is the North that paid lip-service to the
North but cared nothing about the welfare
of Northerners. It is the North of those
who kept their fellow Northerners in the
bondage of abject poverty under a feudal
system where, like dogs, they fed them
from the crumbs that fell from their table.
This old North is the North of men who
are now reduced to pathetic bluster and
blackmail. It is these same Northerners
that are now crying #Bring Back Our
Northern Domination. But they can no
longer fool the new emergent North; and
they certainly cannot fool the rest of the
country, except perhaps a few gullible and
power-hungry Yoruba chieftains.
The new progressive and nationalist
North has long rebelled against the old
feudal North, but the #Bring Back Our
Northern Domination brigadiers have yet
to receive the memo. When as far back as
the 1993 presidential election, the old
North presented yet another feudal lord in
the person of Bashir Tofa, as successor-
prince of the Niger, the new North refused
to play ball. Although Tofa was a
Northern favourite-son and Abiola from
the South, the new North opted massively
for Abiola; refusing to be persuaded any
longer by the lie that Northern interests
are best served by Northern feudalism.
Back-fired coup
In desperation, the old North hatched its
most audacious coup d’état yet: it
annulled the 1993 election. But then,
suddenly, it found itself naked and
isolated. Its traditional sources of support
melted away. It took it another six years
of Abacha’s recalcitrant regime for the old
North to realise that the centre could no
longer hold. But it comforted itself in the
belief that it could continue in power by
choosing a pliant Southern successor to
hold fort for a few years while tempers
cooled and then relaunch its #Bring Back
Our Northern Domination project just as
before.
The choice of Northern feudalism in 1999
was Olusegun Obasanjo. His credential
was that in 1978, when fate handed him
the position of Head-of-State, he was very
mindful of Northern feudal interests and
dutifully handed over power back to a
clueless Northern feudal lord, in the
person of Alhaji Shehu Shagari.
But it soon dawned on the old North that
the second-coming of Obasanjo would be
different from the first. Obasanjo’s first
task in regaining power was to demolish
feudal Northern power first and foremost
in the army. Once he started that, the old
North was up in arms.
In spite his limitations, Obasanjo was a
nationalist. While he was nominated for
president by the feudal North, Obasanjo
recognized that he was elected by
Nigerians and especially by the new
North. Therefore, he refused to play
second-fiddle to Northern feudalism. All
Obasanjo would agree to was that power
would ultimately return to the feudal
North, but even that only after he might
have remained in power for a wishful-
thinking period of twelve years.
Nigerian good luck
However, Nigerians sent Obasanjo
packing after his statutory eight years. He
then dutifully handed over power to
another Northerner of the old school,
Musa Yar’Adua. But this time, it was not
only fate that intervened; it was also
Nigerian good luck.
The illness of President Yar’Adua made
the return to Northern domination short-
lived. While Yar’Adua was incapacitated,
the #Bring Back Our Northern
Domination feudalists conned he nation,
flagrantly raiding the treasury by
fraudulently forging cheques in
Yar’Adua’s name. But they would soon
pay a penalty for this. Goodluck Jonathan,
a South-South man, was sworn in to
complete Yar’Adua’s unexpired two years.
After that, he became eligible for another
eight years; making it a possible total of at
least ten years of political wilderness for
Northern feudalists.
Up in arms, the feudalists shopped for a
Northern Goliath to oust Jonathan from
contention in the 2011 presidential
election. Their choice of Atiku Abubakar
suffered ignominious defeat by Jonathan
in the PDP primaries. All hope then
rested on Buhari, another apostle of
Northern domination. However, the old
North could only mobilize 11.8 million
votes for him from Northerners in the
2011 election.
Instead, the new North gave Goodluck
Jonathan of the South-South a massive
8.4 million Northern votes in 2011; in
preference to its Northern regional
champion of Buhari. At the same time, the
outright rejection of Northern feudalism
by the rest of the country was evident in
the fact that out of over 38 million votes
cast nationwide; Buhari could only obtain
391,922 votes from all the states in the
entire South put together.
Last gambit
Having finally realised that a major
segment of the North is no longer
amenable to feudal manipulation, the #
Bring Back Our Northern Domination
brigade has now decided to enter into a
marriage of convenience with certain
gullible elements in the South-West who
are inclined to sell the Yorubas into
slavery, for the sake of their personal
political ambitions. In their greed for
power, these naïve Yorubas are blind to
the plan of the Northern feudalists to use
them merely as stepping-stones to Aso
Rock.
But this plan has already come to grief.
Things have quickly fallen apart in the
backyard of their ACN alliance partners in
the South-West. In 2011, ACN obtained a
measly 0.8% of the PDP vote in Cross
River. In Rivers State, it obtained only
0.9% of the PDP vote. That is how you
know these states are PDP strongholds.
The opposition is not just defeated; it is
decimated.
Fast-forward to today, on the eve of the
2015 election. The ACN (now APC) loses
the gubernatorial election to the PDP in
its so-called stronghold of Ekiti, losing in
all the local government areas in the
process. It then struggles to win in Osun,
conceding 42% of its vote to the PDP. And
yet, this same APC would like us to
believe that it is going to be a problem for
the PDP in the 2015 election. Pull another
leg!
With the game clearly over before it has
even begun, the #Bring Back Our
Northern Domination brigade has now
resorted to its backup plan: to use the #
Bring Back Our Girls campaign as a tool to
force Goodluck Jonathan not to run for
re-election.
However, this has turned out to be one big
blunder. All it has succeeded in doing is in
raising cynical questions about the very
kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls, the
so-called assassination attempt on the life
of Muhammadu Buhari and the despicable
extent to which the #Bring Back Our
Northern Domination vanguard of the
APC would go in their desperation for
political power.

Source:
www.vanguardngr.com/2014/08/bring-back-northern-domination/