2023: Why we Stand with Obi – Afenifere
By Kabir Akintayo
Elder statesman and Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, has said that a vote for the Labour Party (LP) Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, in the upcoming 2023 general elections, is a vote for peace and unity in the country.
Adebanjo said even though the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is from the Southwest, he will choose Obi over him because since 1999, Southeast has not produced a President while southwest has produced both President and Vice President.
“In the countdown to the 2023 General elections, long before the parties conducted their Conventions to elect their National Executives and candidates, we had insisted and still advocate restructuring before the elections proposing a synthesis of the identical Resolutions of the 2014 National Conference and the APC El Rufai 2018 True Federalism Committee. We did this as Afenifere and on the wider spectrum of the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum (SMBLF).
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“When politicians, in spite of the monumental crises confronting the nation, carried on as if the attainment of power was all that mattered, the SMBLF unanimously proposed that the minimum condition for a peaceful transition from the disastrous 8 years of Buhari’s government headed by a President of northern extraction was to have the next President from the South.
“This position was also supported by all the southern governors, irrespective of their political parties at a meeting held in Asaba, Delta State.
“We cannot continue to demand that the Igbo people remain in Nigeria, while we at the same time continue to brutally marginalise and exclude them from the power dynamic.
“Peter Obi is the person of Igbo extraction that Afenifere has decided to support and to back, he is the man we trust to restructure the country back to federalism on the assumption of office.
“We will not compromise this principle of justice, equity and inclusiveness because one of our own Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is a frontline candidate.” Adebanjo said in a press statement in Lagos on Monday.
Adebanjo insisted that “If we are sincere and honest about keeping Nigeria together in peace, the slogan henceforth should be ‘To keep Nigeria one, everyone should be Obi/Datti compliant.”
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