2023 presidency: El-Rufai gives conditions for North to support southern candidate

Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State has shed more light on the position of Northern Governors Forum on power shift.

He said southern leaders must be ready to have a dialogue with the North on who should contest the 2023 presidential election.

At a meeting in Kaduna on Monday, the northern governors had said rotational presidency was against Nigeria’s Constitution.

They said this in reaction to the demand of their southern counterparts who had demanded that their region must produce Nigeria’s next president.

El-Rufai who spoke with journalists, said no one should assume that they could sit in Lagos or Port Harcourt and decide what the North should do or who they should vote for.

He said if the South wanted power, it should be prepared to sit with the North and negotiate with them, then agree on who should be voted for but not use compulsion to demand power shift.

“We are not saying there cannot be rotational presidency; it can be done but you have to come and sit with the politicians in the North and have a dialogue and then we agree to give our support to the South but no one has the right to sit in Lagos or Port Harcourt and say whether northerners want it or not, they must relinquish power to the South, that is wrong, it is not how we do politics and in fact, it is foolish.”

El-Rufai was one of the first governors to suggest a power shift to the South.

In 2020, he had said it would be in the interest of fairness and unity for the North to relinquish power to the South after eight years under President Muhammadu Buhari.

Buhari’s second tenure will end in 2023.

After El-Rufai, similar statements have been made by other northern governors such as Babagana Umara Zulu of Borno State, Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State and Aminu Bello Masari of Katsina State.

However, some of the governors were part of the meeting of the Northern States Governor’s Forum in Kaduna which on Monday.