A Chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), and former Director General, Voice of Nigeria (VON), Mr Osita Okechukwu, has said that zoning arrangement between Northern and Southern Nigeria is meant to “ensure national cohesion, inclusion, equity, peace and justice.”
Okechukwu said this in Enugu while answering questions from journalists on the recent public statement credited to the former Vice President Atiku Abubakar that zoning is “self-defeating”. He dismissed the self-defeating claim as a classic case of self-denial, which does not subscribe to the truth and reality.
Okechukwu also said that in the public domain, throughout history, there has been the law with its legal teeth and the convention with its moral weight, governing human affairs. “If there were no zoning arrangement, could His Excellency Abubakar Atiku have become Vice President?” he said.
Atiku Abubakar
Commenting further on a statement on how a Southern opposition unseats a sitting Southern president, Okechukwu described the remark as regrettably an identity politics.
He said increased political tension or squabbles between the northern and southern parts was the very tendency the zoning convention was designed to minimise. He noted that such rhetoric was least expected from patriots.
He further criticised the argument that by 2027, the Southern part would have held presidential power for approximately 18 years in the Fourth Republic, compared to about 10 years for the Northern part.
Okechukwu said that the statement reflected selective amnesia, as it ignored the historical reality that Northern Nigeria presided over the affairs of the country for more than four decades since our independence in 1960, stressing that “equity cannot be discussed in fragments or based on convenient arithmetic.”
