As idiotic as this statement sounds, the reality is, this is the mentality, the mindset of these people. They see the presidency of our country as their birth right. While other sections of the country remain their colonies. However, the bad news for the Northern ruling cabal is that the Niger delta of the 21st century has ceased to be anyone’s colony. The course of history is changing and the north must be prepared to live with what would become to them a sad reality. Blacks in America used to be slaves. However, today, the President of the most powerful nation on earth is black.
Former vice president Abubakar Atiku is reportedly so desperate to become president that he has threatened to violently overthrow President Goodluck Jonathan should he fail to realize what has become for him, a lifetime ambition. He is further reported to have said : “ If Jonathan makes peaceful transition impossible, he should be prepared for the inevitability of a violent change”. Atiku’s supporters were also reported to have issued a “fatwa” saying : “ we wish to state that we support the position of our mentor, Turaki Abubakar, that what Nigeria needs is not a peaceful change. This is no threat. Boko Haram will be a child’s play compared with the action our members can take. We have been patient enough. And enough they say, is enough”.
Aside from their idiotic claim of ownership of the presidency, the Atiku-Babangida camp is claiming that President Jonathan has usurped their (north’s) chance to produce the president. They contend that the PDP arrangement had zoned the presidency to the North, after President Obasanjo’s tenure. Yes, I believe in the principle of power rotation. But the northern agitators have a warped notion of power rotation. To them, power rotation is between the North and the South. By their own calculation, since a Southerner, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has just been president , so the next president should come from the North. Or at least , as they argue, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has what looks like a gentleman agreement ,for rotation of the party’s presidential ticket, between the North and South.
However, the country is divided into six geographical zones. The South-South geo-political is one of the six zones, and for the records, this zone has not produced the president of Nigeria, EVER. Of course, President Goodluck Jonathan , an Ijaw, is from the South-South geo-political zone. He is therefore eminently eligible to contest for the presidency of Nigeria, being our best chance of producing the president at this time. In other words, President Jonathan would be filling in the slot of the South-South. If President Jonathan do not go in now when is our turn in the South-South going to come !. Surely, no sane person can argue that President Jonathan is being greedy for power, having been in power for just a year as president or acting president .
It is arguably the turn of the South-South whose oil wealth has continued to sustain the country and who has continued to bear the brunt of reckless oil exploitation and decades of what the late Ogoni leader Ken Saro Wiwa, aptly described as “political marginalization and economic strangulation”. Denying us this opportunity is the ultimate injustice; not the failure of Abubakar Atiku to realize his inordinate ambition to become another president from the North.
Abubakar Atiku has declared his intention to capture power through violent means should he fail to win the PDP, ticket. Ibrahim Babangida, a notorious violent criminal, and Abubakar Atiku has done their worst in recent times to heat up the polity with their violent rhetoric. And their political response to the spate of bombings sweeping across the country is curiously instructive. They have promptly blamed it on the inability of President Goodluck Jonathan to provide security for the country. Yet, given their antecedence and their consistent call for violent overthrow of the Jonathan presidency, the duo remain prime suspects until proven innocent. Could they have deliberately perpetrated this state of insecurity just to prove how “incompetent” President Jonathan is in handling crisis ?. Or are they just out to intimidate President Jonathan enough to flee from Aso Rock?. They have the wherewithal to sponsor the unprecedented high scale of violence that is being witnessed in certain parts of the country today. They have stupendous amounts of cash they have looted while in power which no one have had the courage to recover from them.
Meantime, it is getting too long for the Nigerian authorities to disclose the outcome of its investigations concerning those behind the intercepted ship load of arms from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Could it be from those who have threatened to violently overthrow the President Jonathan administration if the presidency is not handed to them as a birth right?
Former vice president Abubakar Atiku attempted to turn history on its head when he alleged that injustice has been done to the North, an obvious over- privileged section of the country. These are parasites who produce nothing but who have been pillaging our oil wealth for decades. The real history of injustice in Nigeria is that it is the South-South (Niger Delta) geopolitical zone which is yet to produce the president, but from where the country’s economy mainstay resides, that is the worst victim of injustice in Atiku’s Nigeria.
Atiku is deadly wrong in attempting to compare the present political situation in Nigeria to the Cote d’Ivoire experience. In the case of Cote d’ Ivoire, a sitting president has refused to hand over to the winner of the presidential election. This is exactly what Atiku’s comrade in crime, Ibrahim Babangida, did in 1993, when he refused to hand over to the winner of the June 12 presidential election, Bashorun M.K.O Abiola. Babangida hung on to power until the gale of popular mass resistance flushed him out. Abubakar Atiku must be a very poor student of history if he has so soon forgotten this piece of Nigerian history. On the contrary, President Jonathan has not lost the presidential election and refusing to handover to the winner.
It was General Alani Akirinade (rtd.) who once warned that no nation has survived two civil wars. Abubakar Atiku and Ibrahim Babangida, be warned. By the way, gone are those days when only a section of the country had monopoly over the instruments of violence. But peace, please. Let’s live together as one Nigeria where peace and JUSTICE shall reign