The Arewa group, Joint Action Front of Civil Society Organizations of Nigeria (JFCSON), on Thursday, reacted to the announcement by a Northern Committee purporting that the North has endorsed the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar as it’s sole candidate, saying it’s a big fraud by the usual political scavengers.
A statement by the National President of the Group, Barnabas Bala Yock, said no credible association of concerned northerners or stakeholders is ever aware of such endorsement or, for that matter, the Northern Committee that made the announcement.
Yock said that throughout recorded Northern history, the region has never consciously voted in one direction or deliberately adopted a sole candidate, he described the endorsement claim report as fraudulent, mischievous, unfounded, unwarranted and made in bad taste to contradict the recognised and accepted Northern tradition.
He said: “It is important to point out here that to date, none of the competent representative Northern groups such as the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Northern Elders From and other significant credible Youth Associations has announced the endorsement of a sole candidate for the region, preferring to leave it open to individual preferences.
“Such announcements from unknown entities hiding behind mushroom, obscure and unidentifiable groups should therefore be discountenanced and treated as the frivolities they are.
“It is ridiculous for a group that has never been heard speaking up the North throughout when it was in the stranglehold of dangerous insurgents, rampaging banditry or against the hardships caused by damaging government policies such as the current currency shortage and other conditions that have made life difficult for the northerners to now claim the right to decide the way the North votes.
“As far as the North is concerned and in accordance with the democratic tradition of its people, the region has not adopted or endorsed any of the candidates. We therefore challege this group of scavenging impostors to show wherefrom they derived the competence to take any decision on behalf of the North.
“We also challege them to produce the criteria they used in arriving at Atiku in a race that involves two Northern presidential candidates and one vice presidential candidate. Finally we wish to categorically restate that the North has not, and will not endorse or adopt a sole candidate for the coming presidential polls.”
The group called on Northern voters to come out enmasse to freely exercise their individual rights to choose their leaders and to discountenance such pronouncements by paid agents of distabilization who never cared for the promotion and protection of their interests and have never.