Ahmed Lawan? You can’t Be Serious!

By Yakubu Ahmed-BK

Although former Jigawa state Governor Sule Lamido had, about three days ago, named Senate President Ahmed Lawan as President Muhammadu Buhari’s subterranean choice for the APC presidential candidature, it never crossed my mind that it is indeed true.

And when some 11 APC governors released a statement yesterday calling on the party to allow southerners to produce the presidential candidate in the spirit of national unity and cohesion, my mind kept telling me that Lamido’s submission was a mere gaffe. But I and many other Nigerians who thought the President will be statesmanly enough to courier the nation out of troubled waters of ethnic and regional tension have finally been proved wrong.

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How can Ahmed Lawan win it, anyway? You are talking about a man who does not have any considerable political weight, a constituency, the war chest and the national appeal to impress a nation – more than two third of which are sold to the idea that giving the south the ticket was the only way to ensure justice and fairness.

Come to think of it! Are you not giving the Tinubus, the Osinbajos, the Fayemis and the entire South West a good reason to unite and re-strategize, pool resource, intellect and national sympathy to fight this apparent injustice? The mood nationwide is that it is the turn of the South – and it is on this fulcrum that the unity of the country was built and agreed upon since 1999.

For us in the North, what has a President of northern extraction achieved in the last 7 years that having another Northerner there will cement?

What do you expect our brothers and sisters in the south to make of this brazen injustice which only succeeds in disenfranchising them and pitching them against the rest of the country? Are you not, by this unpopular decision, fanning and oiling the embers of separatism in a country that is battling separatists agitation built on perception that they have been cocooned into second class citizens?

Ahmed Lawan, as Senate President is known for pandering to the whims and caprices of the Presidnecy in such a way that the National Assembly became a mere rubber stamp of the presidency. Is this just a pay back and a design to continue to subjugate the country to the apron strings of the political jobbers and contractors who have cornered power, charmed the President and planned this trash of a decision in order to cover up their sordid past and their dirty closets?

The truth of this matter is that the banality and desperation of their plans to cover up has emboldened them to commit this unpardonable and unrealizable gaffe. It will only quicken the destruction of the APC because there is just no way this nonsense will be pushed down the throat of the rest of the country.

It remains the selfish decision of a few who erroneously feel they can do and undo – people who are disconnected with the true pulse of the nation- people who are driven by their warped and mentally deranged carriage.

The next few days and weeks will be very interesting as the rest of the country fights to reclaim the soul of the nation, in the grip of political vampires and slave takers.