FORTY-TWO Northern youth groups under the aegis of the Northern Youth Leaders Forum (NYLF) have described southern governors’ demand for a southern president n 2023 as insensitive, offensive and provocative. The national president of the NYLF, Eliot Afiyo, who made the position of the groups known at a press conference in Yola, Adamawa State, after a six-day consultative tour of the Northern-East, said with such a demand, the “Southern governors have exposed their political inexperience and infancy.”
Afiyo said the declaration had established the fact that the southern governors lacked political mastery and planning. “This declaration tends to tell Northerners that the 2023 presidential election would be North versus South instead of the political parties. “We consider this declaration as provocative, insensitive, offensive, challenging and declaration of a political war which must be given thorough and intelligent consideration and action,” he stated.
He therefore challenged the southern governors to summon the courage to specify the geopolitical zone in the south that would produce the next president if they desired the presidency.The group had last month endorsed the Bauchi State governor, Senator Bala Mohammed, as its choice candidate for the 2023 presidential election. Afiyo boasted that the NYLF had been making such choices since 1999 except in 2019 and all the group’s choice candidates had ended up emerging as Nigeria’s president.
Meanwhile, the NYLF criticised the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) for its protest in Kaduna State, warning the workers’ body to desist from holding any form of protest in the state or any other northern state against any government policy except insecurity. Afiyo lamented that many people, including 67 members of the NYLF, died as a result of the protest staged by the NLC in Kaduna through lack of medical attention in hospitals, hunger and the untold hardship occasioned by the strike.
Also, the group commended the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the introduction of electronic transmission of election results in Ondo and Edo states governorship elections. Afiyo said this action had given credibility to the process and eliminated ballot box snatching, falsification of results and other election malpractices.
NYLF therefore urged the National Assembly to include electronic transmission of election results and discard electronic voting in the Amended Electoral Act for now because of the rate of literacy in the country, especially in the North.
