former Senator representing Kaduna Central Senatorial District, Shehu Sani, says rotating the office of the president between the north and south is imperative to keep Nigeria one and united.
Sani made the statement in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Abuja.
He said that Nigerians should accept the reality of their history and continue with the rotational presidency arrangement, for now.
“We are a country of experience. There are many African countries that never had the kind of experience we had.
“We had been through a period of violent military coup, civil war, different democratic governments and military rules, and we all survived.
“Now we are experiencing banditry, terrorism and I believe we will survive.
“If you look at the multi-ethnic/religious nations such as ours, people feel more comfortable when they see someone from their part of the country in power,” he said.
Sani said that things might change with time but that at the moment, the arrangement was more of giving a sense of belonging to every part of the country to produce leadership.
He said that given the arrangement, no part of the country in power could use either their demographic or geographical advantage to remain in office perpetually, saying that same arrangement was equally applicable at the state level.
Sani recalled that before the emergence of former President Goodluck Jonathan, there were several incidences of attacks on the country’s oil pipelines.
He, however, stressed the need for Nigerians to realise the fact that rotational presidency might not mean that when a president comes from a particular part of the country, that the problems of the people from that zone would automatically be will be solved.
“Former President Muhammadu Buhari was seen by the northerners as a magician and a miracle worker who would solve all the problems of northern Nigeria; he came, saw and left the problems as they were.
“Now it is the turn of the South-West, Jonathan had equally left, maybe other parts of the country yet to be there are the ones dreaming what others had already experienced.
“I believe that it will reach a point in our history where everyone will realise that the ethnic and religious identities of a leader doesn’t mean the solutions to the problems before a nation and that is when we will consider abandoning rotation of the presidential seat,” he said.
The former senator, while speaking on the recent mass killings in Yelewata, Guma area of Benue, said there was the need to solve the problem to avoid a reoccurrence.
Sani noted that the situation in Benue was equally evident in Plateau and Nasarawa states.
According to him, the solution to the problem is for the northerners to see the situation as a collective problem that should be jointly addressed.
“It is time for the political leaders in these parts of the country to sit down and address the problem, to secure both the people and the country.
“How this can be done is simple. For instance in Benue, the Fulani people have been living in there for more than a century and have been well accommodated.
“There is even a folk relationship between the Tiv people and the Fulani people for centuries. So at what point was the trigger for this violence?
“This is what the north needs to dig into and address. The Fulani people are not farmers, they are herders, while the Tiv people and Idoma people are farmers.
“If you allow your cattle to destroy the crops in the farm of someone, you are destroying the person’s life and if you go and spray pesticides that kill my cattle, you are equally triggering an issue,” he said.
The former lawmaker said that it would be wrong to use the solutions to problems in the 20th century to solve problems of the 21st century.
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