- Warns Afeniferi, OPC to guard their utterances
From Okwe Obi, Abuja
The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has given reasons the President-elect, Bola 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 coming on the heels of remarks made by Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) Secretary, Bunmi Fasehun, in which he cautioned politicians from the North against blackmailing Tinubu over the leadership positions in the 10th National Assembly.
CNG Spokesperson Abdulazeez Suleiman, at a press briefing in Abuja, said OPC lacked the right to intrude in matters of national importance when it did not support Tinubu during the presidential contest.
Suleiman explained that Tinubu got more votes from the North West — the largest voting geo-political grouping in the country — than from the South West, his home zone.
He said it was repugnant to natural justice for either OPC or Afeniferi to stand in the way of the North when it comes to political appointments or democratic dividends.
He said: “The Coalition of Northern Groups is perplexed by 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 complicity and 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 North West — the largest voting geo-political grouping in the country — than from the South West, his home zone.
“In raw numbers, Tinubu beat Atiku in the North West, 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 North West alone.
“That is almost one-third. The entire South West gave Tinubu 2,542,979, second to the North West.
“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 south-east with a total of 127,605 votes from the five states and did not score 25 per cent in any of them.”