Dr Doyin Okupe, a former Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs to former President Goodluck Jonathan, says the two major political parties, APC and PDP, are practising an “open game of insincerity, mischief, dribbling and deception going on at the highest levels of decision making” by failing to categorically state their positions on the zoning of power in 2023.
He stated this in a statement he personally signed and released on Tuesday.
“I watched Pa Edwin Clark today on ARISE TV, where he spoke passionately about the north-south divide. I was moved to tears when he said his coming back to life after 7 days of coma was because God still want him to fight a final battle to restore equity to this land.
Read Also: Anambra woman raises alarm as husband vanishes in police custody
“Pa Adebanjo about a week ago spoke in similar vein at an Igbo forum, when he also alluded to the fact that God in His wisdom may have given him these length of days to enable him accomplish the mission of restoring equity, justice and fairness in Nigeria’s polity.
“Yet quite a while ago, the 17 southern governors after series of meetings and consultations, thrice reaffirmed their commitment to a southern Presidency in 2023 in line with our political conventional practice of rotating power between the North and the South.
“In spite of all of the above and quite strangely, the two major political parties, the PDP and the APC, started to behave as two Siamese twins in terms of making categorical statements on whether the presidency will still be retained in the north after President Buhari’s 8year rule, or it will return to the south, in accordance to established political convention in 2023.
“Up till this present moment neither of the 2 parties have made categorical statements on this all-important issue of national importance.
“Apparently and quite obviously there is an open game of insincerity, mischief, dribbling and deception going on at the highest levels of decision making in the two parties. One begins to wonder whether there is another unseen political leadership that is controlling the souls of the two parties.
“In all of these manipulative shenanigans, these tendencies are totally unconcerned with the dire situation the country is in and the need to search earnestly for someone who can help us out of this quagmire. It is all about acquisition of power for the sake of controlling the fast-dwindling national resource of a country that is bleeding nearly unto death.
“For as long as we continue to play politics without integrity or scruples and for as long as the leadership is driven by greed and protection of sectional or personal interest, so long will it take for our nation to find its way out of the deluge into which it has crashed.”
He said that his only regret was for the future of the teeming population of brilliant, highly-motivated and supremely endowed youths trapped in the unworkable political contraption called Nigeria.
“The way out is for the Nigerian people and stakeholders to prevail on the political leadership of the APC and PDP to do what is right, just and equitable by returning power to the south and electing southern candidates at their primaries, just as the APC allowed only northerners to contest presidency in 2015 and the PDP did in Jos in1998.
“Then the Nigerian electorate will decide who they prefer among the two candidates that will emerge from these exercises,” he said.