Former Presidential spokesman, Mr Laolu Akande, says rotational presidency has come to stay in Nigeria, hence it will be difficult to terminate Southern presidency in 2027 .
Akande, a former Senior Special Assistant on Media & Publicity to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) made the remark in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Lagos.
Describing political merger talks and plots to return power to the North in 2027 as a child’s play, Akande said that such was not going to work.
“I think it is just a child’s play (terminating southern presidency in 2027. Nigeria has gone past that.
“The South is going to get its eight years. The North will get the next eight years.
“Politicians are just going to make noise. it is not going to be possible, really (to terminate southern term).
“Rotational presidency has come to stay in Nigeria. There is a national consensus around the idea of a rotational presidency between the South and the North.
“Anybody trying to reverse that is just joking , It’s not going to work,” he said.
On talks among opposition political parties for a possible merger in 2027 against the ruling APC, Akande said mergers would not birth the solutions to the country’s problems.
He said: “All of these political mergers are not going to solve the problems of Nigeria.
“In 2014, there was a merger that led to APC. There was a lot of expectations in this country. APC carried the national wave. Nine years after, where are we?
“We are nowhere different from where we were then because the core issues have been left unaddressed.
“So all of these mergers, even if they (proponents) succeed, what is going to happen is that they will just change the characters of people in the Government House.
“We need to understand that there are fundamental problems that have to be sorted out, and we cannot leave it to politicians,” he said.
Urging Nigerians to unite against common challenges, Akande said that politicians were those benefiting from the system.
“That’s why you hear the noise of mergers all over the place. It is just going to be a repeat of what happened with APC. We must rather unite as Nigerians to deal with core issues,” he said.
He said that the Nigerians ahead of 2027 elections must have discussions around national consensus on rule of law, fighting poverty and corruption, issues about local government autonomy, restructuring and constitution.
“We need to agree that regardless of political parties, regardless of our ethnic differences, regardless of our political differences, all of us agree that this is the minimum that anybody who is running Nigeria or running the state government has to get.
“People that are outside of the political process must rise up and begin to call for this kind of concerted efforts where we develop a national consensus across party lines, across regional lines, across ethnic lines, across religious lines.
“I’m not excited about this merger, it is not going to make a dent on the problem,” he said.
(NAN)
