The Chairman, Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Prof. Ango Abdullahi, says the suit filed by some Southern elders against the President Muhammadu Buhari administration was a plot to blackmail the north into conceding the 2023 presidency to the South.
He disclosed this in an interview published by Saturday Sun.
Admitting that he did not have the full details of the suit, the NEF chairman stated that allegations by the Southern elders that Buhari was marginalising the region were unfounded.
Abdullahi said he was part of a group that conducted a study which found that only 30 percent of the nation’s budget under Buhari was expended on the North.
According to him, the Federal Government administrations since the time of Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa have always respected the Federal Character principle in appointments.
He recalled that Chief Mbazulike Amaechi and others from the south were in Tafawa-Balewa’s government and Chief Edwin Clark made Gen. Yakubu Gowon’s cabinet.
Abdullahi, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, warned against politicising issues of marginalisation.
He said, “The problem is that, when you try to politicise the issue, it would look (like) something else and that is what is going on now.
“If you say north is favoured now, in what aspect? Is it on appointment or what? That I contend strongly because you only need to look at the list and see who is who and who is where.”
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“You see, my interpretation of this move is to start the processes of who becomes what in 2023 and I strongly believe and suspect that is the agenda.
“As we are coming to end of Buhari’s second tenure, some people have already claimed the position will soon be vacant. So you can see the struggle has begun. These are the things that I am seeing now; the beginning of a movement for power game within Nigeria after Buhari’s government.”
Abdullahi added, “We did an exercise for example in 2016, we repeated the same in 2017 and we concentrated on the national budget.
“By the time we finished, we discovered that the North had only 30 percent of the capital and recurrent expenditure in the nation’s budget.
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“The entire North, which gave Buhari the winning vote had only 30 percent. In fact, it is true this was part of our (NEF’s) complaints in those years but we didn’t consider it necessary to take Buhari government to court.
“I think what my colleagues are doing as elders of the South is to start the process of trying to cajole or pressurise or blackmail the North into accepting that the power should move to South.”