From Judex Okoro, Calabar
Former Cross Rivers State governor, Donald Duke, has kicked against the zoning of the governorship position, saying any candidate who meets the constitutional provision is qualified to contest.
Those who have signalled their intention to take over from Governor Ben Ayade include Senator Gershom Bassey, Daniel Asuquo, Sir Authur Jarvis and Senator Sandy Onor. While the rest are from the southern senatorial district of the state, Onor is the only one from the central district.
Speaking while hosting some PDP stakeholders in his house in Calabar, Duke, former Presidential candidate of Social Democratic Party (SDP), declared support for Onor’s governorship ambition, saying zoning has never been practised in the state’s governorship race.
“It is time for a new crop of leaders to mount the saddle of leadership in Cross River as governor. Note that I am not against zoning, but there has never been zoning in the first place in choosing of our governorship.
“But if they have to be zoning, then the political leaders of Cross River State across party lines (both intra party and inter party) should, in a joint meeting, sit down, adumbrate and unanimously draw up the modus operandi and modus vivendi of zoning as commonly agreed by all politicians. Not when it suits you, then you talk of zoning, at other times when it doesn’t suit you, you dispense with it. But even zoning is well contrived, it remains a gentleman’s agreement because the Supreme Court has, in a celebrated judgement between Jerry Gana and Donald Duke (on zoning) ruled that once a person meets the constitutional provisions for contesting any particular election, he or she cannot be stopped from running that election on the basis of zoning. I,therefore, call on all governorship aspirants from the southern senatorial district to go into the public space and rationally market themselves, rather than relying on the whimsical and unsettled sentiments of zoning.”