Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai has made it clear that the position of Northern Governors Forum on power shift does not rule out power-shift, but that it cannot be done in the way Southern governors have been going about it.
In a chat with journalists today, September 29, Governor El-Rufai said that no one should assume that they can sit in Lagos or Port Harcourt and decide what the North should do or who the North should vote for.
He said that if the south wants power, it should be prepared to sit with the north, dialogue and negotiate, then agree on who should be voted but not use compulsion to demand power shift.
“We are not saying there cannot be rotational presidency; it can be done, but you have to come and sit with the politicians in the north and dialogue and then we agree to give our support to the south but no one has the right to sit in Lagos or Port Harcourt and say that whether northerners want it or not, they must relinquish power to the south. That is wrong. It is not how we do politics and in fact, it is foolish.”
Only on Monday, September 27, at a meeting in Kaduna, the Northern Governors’ Forum had said that rotational presidency was against Nigeria’s constitution.
The Forum, in reaction to the demand of their Southern counterparts who have demanded that their region must produce Nigeria’s next president, made it clear that presidency can be obtained only through constitutional provisions.
