2023 ELECTIONS: “Why Southeast Must Produce The Next President” - Femi Okunrounmu, Ex-Afenifere Secretary General

 

A former Secretary General, pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, Senator Femi Okunrounmu, yesterday, insisted that power should return to the South and specifically to the Southeast, as a clarion call for equity, inclusiveness and respect for the abiding covenant of the national engagement.

Okunrounmu said his position on the presidential election was informed by the fact that other parts of Southern Nigeria had taken their shots at the Presidency.

The former Afenifere scribe, in a statement titled ‘The Imperative of Nigerian President from South East Extraction’, said federal character and power rotation were paramount.

He said: “The government of Goodluck Jonathan constituted the 2014 National Conference which I had the privilege of being appointed as Chairman of its Presidential Advisory Committee and a delegate.

“The resolutions at the 2014 CONFAB have since become the new testament of our national political engagement.

One of the fundamental gains from the conference which derived from earlier conferences under Abacha and Obasanjo was the rotation of the office of the President between the North and South and amongst the constituent six geo-political zones.”

On the rotational presidency, Okunrounmu said: “Thus, those who delinquently run their mouths against Ayo Adebanjo, leader of Afenifere, for expressing, in the strongest terms that the denial of the South East its legitimate turn, may sound the death knell of the federation are only being hypocritical or in the uneasy foreboding of losing unmerited privileges in the Nigeria contraption.

“Let it be said that no argument of democracy based on the flawed Nigerian demographic statistics will make a Northerner succeeding Buhari see the light of the day nor will an enactment of Fulani/Yoruba rotation of power through the elections peacefully come to pass. 

Those who gleefully share the nation’s resources based on the federal character cannot hypocritically seek to jettison the principle in the access to the Presidency of Nigeria without dire consequences for its continued corporate existence.”