Call for Buhari to resign: Northern elders under fire

Both Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) and Southern Kaduna People’s Union (SOKAPU) have tackled Prof Ango Abdullahi-led Northern Elders Forum (NEF) for calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign without delay over seemingly endless killings and kidnapping in the country, particularly in the North.

Reacting separately, MACBAN said that the elders should rather proffer solution to insecurity and advise the government on the way out than to calling for the resignation of the president.

For SOKAPU, the position of the northern elders on Buhari was suspicious, pointing out that it was not too long they were shouting Hosanna in favour of Buhari even amid killings and kidnapping of innocent Nigerians.

Expectedly, however, the presidency had immediately replied the northern elders, describing them as failed politicians seeking cheap publicity.

Kaduna State spokesman of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), Alhaji Ibrahim Bayero expressed worry that the northern elders could descend so low to make such unpatriotic call for the resignation of the president.

“Northern Elders asking President Muhammadu Buhari to resign over killings in the country is uncalled for, there is no need for such call.

“The president is trying his best to ensure that insecurity generally comes to an end in the country. He is a citizen too. So calling for his resignation from office is unnecessary.

“The northern elders should rather proffer solution to the problem and advise government on how to go about ending these killings and kidnapping. They should not call for Buhari’s resignation,” Bayero said.

For SOKAPU, the call by northern elders for Buhari’s resignation was suspicious, untrusting and deceptive.

SOKAPU spokesman, Luka Binniyat told Sunday Sun: “We don’t know the cards that the northern elders are playing at the heels of a general election.

“While SOKAPU believes that President Muhammadu Buhari ought to have resigned way back in 2016, because it was apparently clear that he lacked the physical and intellectual capacity to rule Nigeria, why didn’t the Northern elders tell him so at that time or even last year?

“When his nepotism, favouritism in making key Federal appointments and in the award of federal projects favoured the Hausa/Fulani Muslims of the North, to which these northern elders belong, why didn’t they ask him to resign?

“Did the killings start today that they suddenly realised that Buhari is a snoring president in the midst of perennial killings and lawlessness until eight or so months to general elections?”

SOKAPU asked, “Whose agenda are these elders pushing? adding that, “SOKAPU, being a strong family of the Middle Belt will not blindly jump into a project which is curious and suspicious after its people have suffered mass murder and destruction of genocidal proportion and the elders of that North didn’t seem to care all these years.

“The northern elders know that should their call for Buhari’s resignation get popular to instigate a coup, it is the Fulani/Hausa North that will continue with power since they control virtually the entire military, paramilitary and intelligence institutions in Nigeria.

“We suspect that in the imminent threat that the ‘northern’ of the northern elders will lose out power, they want to instigate an unconstitutional means of changing power and still end up the main beneficiaries.

“SOKAPU  would have wished that Nigeria be restructured before the 2023 elections, but if that cannot be gotten, we stand by the existing laws on power change.

“So, as far as SOKAPU is concerned, Nigeria is going into a general election next year and Nigerians look determined to throw away every vestige of this retrogressive government through the ballot. Any attempt to use any trick and subterfuge to undermine the 2023 general polls through such dubious calls does not have our backing”. (Sunday Sun)