says Nigeria’s next president should come from South-East
Former senior special assistant on Public Affairs to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Doyin Okupe, has told the people of Northern Nigeria not to consider fielding a candidate for the office of the president in 2023, and that the South East ought to be given the chance to produce the next president of the country. Okupe, who spoke against the backdrop of the race for the nation’s presidency in 2023 said in Arise Television’s Morning Show on Friday, which was monitored by Saturday Telegraph, that by 2023 the North would have served for eight years and that it is reasonable and justifiable that a Southerner should be the next president.
“Now, my take really is that in the next dispensation, the President of Nigeria has to be a Southerner because all the stories that some people from the North are interested will not fly. “The Northerners would have occupied the position for eight years by 2023. In terms of morality, good relationship and unity, it does not make sense that another Northerner would occupy the office in 2023 and serve for the next eight years; it’s not going to work.
Whoever is on the list published by a national newspaper recently and is a Northerner is out,” he said. Okupe stated that if the truth must be told, the next president of Nigeria should come from the South East, but that politics is a game of number, where a candidate must get the support of the majority.
He recalled that this was how former President Olusegun Obasanjo won the 1999 presidential election, and that it was not that the Yoruba wanted him to be president, but that the North conceded the presidency to the South West then. “You have got to have a situation where the whole country would support a South Easterner for the office because every state in the South is a minority.
“The South West is a minority on its own, the South South is a minority, and the South East is a minority. But you see, if you look at the North West and the North East there is this kind of understanding, we cannot pretend that we don’t know. “They have a kind of understanding that go along the same way and together that’s 13 states already. North West is the largest voting region in the country.
We have got to come to a national conclusion. It will be difficult for anybody to be the President of Nigeria from the South West or South East without concession. We have not reached the stage where your pedigree, qualification or past experiences speak for you throughout the whole country. “Like in the United States of America, people like former President Donald Trump went round the country, he campaigned, he spoke, but it doesn’t work like that in Nigeria.
Nigeria is divided religiously; religion matters in Nigerian politics, ethnicity matters in Nigerian politics. “People want to know who is contesting for Nigerian presidency all because of his ethnic location in the country. We are still at that low level of the political dispensation and we must accept it,” he said.
Okupe, who said that the hatred that Nigerians have for one another is unpredictable, added that the next government must be an interim government “to usher in the Nigeria of our dream.” He stressed that the next government must be a government, which can heal the nation and that if this is not done her economic theories will come to nothing. “We are looking for a politician that is grounded in politics and who has the fear of God and is concerned with the welfare of the majority of Nigerians. Let me give you an example, I have been in government and the budget we do in Nigeria since the last 30 or 40 years is extremely defective, it is not inclusive.
“My mother died at the age of 90 and I asked her a question, I said have you ever benefitted directly from the federal or state government, she said never and that “everything I have done was through my sweat and when I am in trouble nobody came to my aid.” “I asked the same question from my driver and my friends, they gave me the same answer.
I cannot ask some of you because you were in government and you collected salaries. “But those who are not in government never did. 90% of Nigerians never benefitted from the government or from the wealth of their nation. Some 20 or 25 years ago, when I arrived in the United States, my daughter said that she got a cheque of $2,000 from the Federal Reserve Bank. “I think at that time there was a problem in the United States and they wanted to stimulate the economy. Can any Nigerian say that he has collected a cheque from the government from federal, state to local government.
All the projects that we are doing only benefit the presidency, legislators, civil servants, the Doyin Okupes of this world and foreigners,” he said. The former SSA opined that Nigeria must take a decision to take care of the poor, saying that it was the failure to do this that resulted in banditry and kidnapping that the nation is currently experiencing. He warned that unless this is critically addressed there would be problem, and that many Nigerians are only interested in surface issues, pointing out that Nigerian politicians are currently interested in the 2023 general elections. While condemning money politics that is widely associated with Nigerians, he said that people would not vote for anyone unless he has money to spend, and revealed that as a leader of a political party there was a time they were about to go for a governorship election and that the person that came last in the primaries organised for 11 aspirants was a dentist, who was the best of the best, and who meant well for the people and had a fantastic CV.
I asked my people who they were supporting and they said “you know this dentist is the best, but he didn’t have money.” They said that when they were on the road together he bought oranges for only himself and the man came last. “A society that does not have any values, what do you expect? The problem we have in the society today is the poor mindset of our elites. Who are the Nigerian elites, they come from our various communities and these communities are basically corrupt. As they say in Italy, if the College of Cardinals is bad, the Pope cannot be good. That is the problem we have in Nigeria,” he said.