…Gives reasons Tinubu should yield to demands of North
From Okwe Obi, Abuja
The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has given reasons the President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, must yield to the demands of the North, stating that the region gave him the highest number of votes in the 2023 general polls.
This is response to the remarks made by the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) Secretary, Bunmi Fasehun, where he cautioned politicians from the North against blackmailing Tinubu over leadership positions in the 10th National Assembly.
The CNG Spokesperson, Abdulazeez Suleiman, at press briefing yesterday in Abuja, said that OPC lacked the right to intrude into matters of national importance, when it did not support Tinubu during the presidential contest.
Suleiman claimed that Tinubu got more votes from the Northwest, the largest voting geo-political grouping in the country, than from the Southwest, his home zone.
He said that it was repugnant to natural justice for either OPC or Afenifere to stand on the way of the North when it comes to political appointments or democratic dividends.
He said: “The Coalition of Northern Groups is perplexed by a recent shamefaced remarks said to have been made by the Oduwa Peoples Congress that tends to threaten the North against demanding what is due to it from the President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
“Without the need to give the OPC more reasons to feel important, the CNG is, however, compelled to respond for the fact that both the self-professed leading Yoruba groups, OPC and Afenifere never worked for the victory of the Asiwaju.
“While Afenifere, through its leader, Ayo Adebanjo, openly, directly and actively opposed the Tinubu contest, the OPC was complicitly silent throughout. For any of these groups to now turn around and assume the right to speak against the North, from where the president-elect extracted the bulk of his winning votes is the accurate personification of crass opportunism.
“We invite the OPC to stop being lazy and instead dissect the data from the 2023 presidential election to get the idea of how Tinubu was able to overcome strong opposition to coast to victory and where the Northern claim to commensurate reward comes from.
“For a start, Tinubu got more votes from the Northwest – the largest voting geo-political grouping in the country – than from the Southwest, his home zone.
“In raw numbers, Tinubu beat Atiku in the Northwest, scoring 2,652,824 votes compared to his opponent’s 2,197,824.
“Not only were Atiku’s margins in some of the states narrow, Tinubu took a whopping half a million votes in Kano alone. In fact, Tinubu got 30 per cent of his total votes from the Northwest alone.
“That is almost one-third. The entire Southwest gave Tinubu 2,542,979, second to the Northwest.
“Another vital context is that his second highest votes came from Kano where he also came second.
“The third was also from a state where he came second: Katsina. Coming second in certain states is better than coming first in others.
“Tinubu was first in Ekiti State, for instance, but he got only 200,000 votes while he got more than double the figure in Kano to place second.
“Tinubu got a miserable one per cent of his total votes from the Southeast with a total of 127,605 votes from the five states and did not score 25 per cent in any of them.”