2023 is pregnant. Even our loquacious prophets have not predicted or can I say prophesied with certainty who the next President of Nigeria will be. Each politician and political block is scheming for the office. The Constitution is very clear that when it comes to the issue of the President, the entire country is one constituency. The fight for the position of the President in Nigeria is understandably fierce because the President of Nigeria is the most powerful political post on earth. The whole powers of the armed forces of Nigeria and indeed all security forces resides in him. He does not share this power with any tier of government. All the executive powers are vested in him and unfortunately, so far, every Nigerian President has proved to be above the law. None of them has been held to account for his actions, either while in office or while outside office. He sits on top of the entire revenue of the Federation and makes all the appointments of the Federation. Not even the judicial positions are insulated from his powerful arm as he is the appointor of Judges. These circumstances make the position very attractive. It is believed that he has the power to turn around the destiny of any Geo-Political Zone he comes from. It is for this reason that every Geo-Political Zone angles to secure the position.

The Constitution realises how powerful the position of the President is and decided that “the composition of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few State or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that Government or in any of its agencies”. As the political parties came into existence, they gave themselves Constitutions that ensured the rotation and zoning of all party and public elective posts. PDP vowed in Section 7(3)(c) of its Constitution to adhere “to the policy of the rotation and zoning of Party and Public elective offices in pursuance of the principle of equity, justice and fairness”. APC is even more elaborate when it mandated its National Working Committee, subject to the approval of the National Executive Committee, in Article 20(v), to make Rules and Regulations for the nomination of candidates for primary elections and “All such Rules, Regulations and Guidelines shall take into consideration and uphold the principle of federal Character, gender balance, geo-political spread and rotation of offices, to as much as possible ensure balance within the constituency covered”.

It is in response to these provisions that the Minister of Labour, Dr Chris Ngige, openly declared that there is an unwritten agreement or convention among all politicians and political parties in Nigeria that when a President from the South has governed for eight years, the power shifts to the North and when it is in the North, it moves to the South. He described anybody that disputes the existence of this agreement as a liar. It is obvious, going by this declaration, that there have been too much lies going around as it concerns the presidential election of 2023 and where it ought to come from. Leaders like Governors El-Rufai, Zulum and Abdullahi Sule of Kaduna, Borno and Nasarawa States are not part of these lies. They, publicly, corroborated the fact that there is an unwritten agreement that the post of the President should be rotated between North and South. Let us add that by the provisions of the Constitutions of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the major Political Parties, there is actually a written agreement that power should not only rotate between North and South but among the Geo-Political Zones. Specifically, the APC Constitution talked about “Geo-Political spread” and ensuring “balance within the constituency covered”. This simply means that if it is agreed that the post of the President should rotate between North and South, the party must ensure that there is the spread of the post of the President among the three Geo-Political Zones in the South of Nigeria, which are the South-East, South-South and South-West by ensuring balance among them.

Let us be clear, what Dr Ngige and the other Governors said has been practised from the inception of our nascent democracy in 1999 and whichever political party or politician that ran contrary to this principle had always paid a bitter price. In 1998, President Olusegun Obasanjo emerged the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party and went ahead to win the election. He was elected based on the zoning and rotation arrangement of the party. Indeed, when the G-34, which later transformed as PDP was formed, Obasanjo was still a prisoner and had become “technically” insolvent. The first Chairman of this group, who later became the first Chairman of PDP, was Chief Dr Alex Ekwueme from the South East. He later became a presidential aspirant under the party. He was obviously the most qualified and made most sacrifice for PDP, but he was jettisoned when it came to the issue of zoning and rotation of the post of President. In all fairness, marginalization and discrimination were not the reasons he was jettisoned, it was because Nigeria had a problem with the nullification of the June 12 election won by MKO Abiola from the South-West, who, unfortunately died in detention. There was an effort to compensate the South-West, which had started losing interest in the Nigeria project, for the loss and subsequently reintegrate them back to the main stream of Nigeria politics. The agreement when PDP and other parties were formed was that power should shift to the South. Ekwueme may have thought that South is South and anybody from the South can be used to compensate for the loss of the South-West. He was categorically made to realise that within the South are three Geo-Political Zones and it’s only someone from the South-West that can compensate for the loss of the South-West. Indeed, to drive home the point, all contesting parties were compelled to choose only South-West candidates.

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That was the first time in history that such a thing will happen in Nigeria. It worked like magic, because the bold step by the Nigeria elites to use the zoning formula to politically settle the issue of June 12 brought the restiveness in the South West to an end, giving credence to the fact that the constitutional provision which states that due compliance to the dictates of zoning and federal character will promote national unity and command national loyalty is germane to the political solution to a lot of problems bedeviling us. We can still use the same zoning system to solve all the restiveness we have today in the South East which stems from the perception of marginalization of the South East by zoning the President to them. Ironically, it was the same Alex Ekwueme that proposed the division of the Country into 6 Geo-Political Zones to cater for the interests of the minority tribes in Nigeria during the 1996 Constitutional Conference.

This event repeated itself in 2003 when Obasanjo recontested for the second term. The same Ekwueme challenged him, reminding the world that their agreement was that every politician from each Zone should do one term so that within 24 years, every Zone would have produced a President and the cry of marginalization would be permanently silenced. Ekwueme was overruled again and Obasanjo went ahead to win the second term, using the power of incumbency. Nigerians vehemently opposed his third term bid because they didn’t want any Zone to spend more than two terms before it goes to another Zone. This was how it was established that the zoning formula should be for two terms when zoned to any Geo-Political Zone.

Subsequently, the North-West produced a President in the person of Umaru Yar Adua, who died after two and half years in office leaving the South-South Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan, the privilege to complete their two terms of eight years. Jonathan’s attempt to extend his tenure beyond the 8-year term limit of his joint ticket with Umaru Yar Adua was resisted by Nigerians, even from his own party, PDP, particularly from the North, who insisted that power should rotate back to the North, in the spirit of fairness. They supported Buhari against Jonathan and he lost. Buhari will spend 8 years by 2023 by which time it is expected to return back to the South, in the spirit of fairness. The question now is which Zone in the South.

Presently, the South-West has produced a President and a Vice President from 1999 till date. The South-South has produced a President and a Vice President since 1999. The South East has neither produced a President or a Vice President since 1999. There’s no need to stretch this argument from which Zone the President should come from in 2023, if genuinely we are talking of equity, justice and fairness. South-East Zone is unequivocally the Zone that should produce the next President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The consequences on the Zone if it fails to achieve this aim in 2023 is untoward. If the South East acquiesces and allows the political parties to zone the President to either South West or South South, it means the Zone will not be President for 40 years, a generation, from the inception of our nascent democracy in 1999, because after the expiration of the 8-year term of the President from the South, it would go back to North, before coming back to the South. This is why every citizen of Nigeria from the South East must think deep before deciding on which candidate to support. Thank goodness we have very qualified candidates from the South East on both sides of the major political parties so there’s no plausible excuse why the major political parties should not zone the President to the South East. For want of space, we have to continue this discourse next week on the best strategy to adopt by the South East to take over the power which is rightly their turn come 2023, subject only to the will of God. The people of South East must realise that no price is too big to pay for the preservation of the honour and rights of their people.