VON boss urges Tinubu to resist the temptation to run and find a candidate from the southeast come 2023

VOICE of Nigeria (Von) director-general Osita Okechukwu has urged All Progressives Congress (APC) national leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to abandon plans to run for president and retain his position as a party kingmaker.

In 2023, Nigeria is due to go to the polls and the race for the presidency has already started, with several candidates throwing their hats into the ring. Asiwaju Tinubu is one of the characters widely associated with the race but Mr Okechukwu has advised that the best thing for him to do is back a younger aspirant from the south in line with the country’s zoning convention.

Although not constitutional, Nigeria's component parts have a gentleman's agreement that the presidency will rotate between the north and the south of the country. President Muhammadu Buhari's tenure will end in 2023 and being a Fulani northern Muslim, it is expected that the next president will come from southern Nigeria.

Each half of Nigeria is made up of three geo-political zones, which in the south is made up of the southeast, south-south and southwest geo-political zones. However, since the return to democracy in 1999, the southwest has produced President Olusegun Obasanjo, while the south-south has produced President Goodluck Jonathan, so Nigeria's 18m Igbos believe that the next president should come from the southeast geo-political zone.

While appreciating the huge contributions of Asiwaju Tinubu to Nigeria’s democracy, Mr Okechukwu, said he should resist the temptation of political greed. He recalled President Buhari’s promise to youths in 2018, when he signed the not-too-young-to-run bill into law, saying that Asiwaju Tinubu should throw his weight behind a younger person from the south, particularly the southeast geo-political zone.

Mr Okechukwu said: “If one has the ears our national leader, His Excellency, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu on whether he should run or not for the exalted office of the president of Nigeria in 2023, my candid advice is that he should use his abundant endowments to unite the APC, mobilise the south and our beloved country, by backing a candidate from the southeast. As one of the major participants at the merger talks that produced APC, I am confident that Tinubu’s job as a national leader is well carved out for him.

"He is a strategist and has the eyes to spot excellence and winning ways, so Asiwaju should do the job of a mobiliser by helping to galvanise the party for a compromise candidate. By so doing, he would have united the south forever and dispelled the notion by some northerner stakeholders that their reluctance to support southern candidates is based on lack of cohesion among the two major geopolitical zones in the south.

“If Tinubu widens his search he will definitely find a credible candidate from the southeast that could easily defeat the presumed Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate and former vice president, Atiku Abubakar. So, what am saying is that Tinubu would have wittingly used one stone to kill two birds, namely, uniting APC, the south and by extension, the entire country.”