Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has given reasons the President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, must yield to the demands of the north in sharing leadership positions in the 10th National Assembly
CNG said the region gave him the highest number of votes in the just concluded 2023 general polls.
CNG was reacting to a statement 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.
The CNG Spokesperson, Abdulazeez Suleiman, at press briefing weekend 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 said it was repugnant to natural justice for either OPC or Afenifere to stand on the way of the north when it comes to political appointments or democratic dividends.
He said: “The Coalition of Northern Groups is perplexed by a 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 complicitly 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.
“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 percent 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.
“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 percent of his total votes from the south-east with a total of 127,605 votes from the five states and did not score 25 percent in any of them,” he said .
