Ahead of the 2023 general elections, the Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has said that no amount of blackmail and intimidation would deter the region from fielding a presidential candidate.

Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, CNG’s Spokesperson, while speaking with journalists on Wednesday in Abuja, claimed that some southern forces were working to deprive the North of from participating in the exercise.

He said, “CNG has particularly observed the desperate manoeuvres of some southern forces aimed at depriving the North of its inherent democratic and moral rights to field candidates for the presidency under the pretext of a controversial zoning arrangement claimed to exist in some of the major political parties in the country.

“As the representatives of various interest groups from Northern Nigeria, the CNG, no longer disposed to watching with restraint to the point of condoning and accommodating such unreasonable and unacceptable conduct perpetrated against northern interests.”

Suleiman therefore, said “that for the avoidance of doubt, no amount of blackmail, intimidation, brigandage, gangsterism or rascality by any other person or group from whichever ever section of the country and in whichever party can stop the North from fielding and backing candidates for the presidency.

“We categorically warn that the plot to use Ortom’s zoning Committee to deprive the North the opportunity to field candidates for the election would not work, as nothing would stop northerners contesting the presidency in all the parties.”

He urged politicians to realise and accept the reality that whatever zoning arrangement that might “have existed in particularly the PDP, had been jettisoned, discredited, abandoned and utterly destroyed by their own selfish actions in 2011 and 2015.

“That in place of any rotation arrangement that has not and would never work, the North is rather focusing on the necessity of searching for an upright, physically healthy, mentally alert, knowledgeable, detribalized leader free of any moral encumbrances.” (Nigerian Tribune)

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