2023: Atiku Can’t be North’s Consensus Candidate – Arewa Group

The Arewa Progressive Women League has disagreed with Northern elders’ choice of the Peoples Democratic Party, standard bearer, Atiku Abubakar as North’s consensus candidate.

The Group had on last Saturday met with selected presidential candidates in a meeting organised by groups including the Arewa Consultative Forum and the Northern Elders Forum in Kaduna.

Reacting to the meetings’ outcome, it said that those posing as elders were inconsequential old people that have stripped themselves of the garb of integrity and credibility.

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It again wondered how the elders arrived at their choice of Atiku.

In a statement by the group’s leader, Hannatu Abbass, it recalled that the meeting was called by the same “old people” who Atiku Abubakar had ridiculed during his days as Nigeria’s vice president.

It said:

“It is the height of lack of integrity and shame for the same old people who were dismissed as non-existent by Atiku Abubakar to now lead the paid campaign for endorsing him as the region’s sole presidential candidate.

“We are living witnesses to the remarks by Atiku in 2010 that the Northern region had no elders referring to the same sate of old men today bandying him as consensus northern presidential candidate.”

The group, pointing to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, cited that the period Nigeria had an “exponential spike” in the number of people living below $1 was during the administration of Obasanjo and Atiku.

They further accused Abubakar and ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo of creating the pathway for Nigeria’s struggle with poverty through their non-transparent privatisation processes.

The group again said:

“The World Bank, which is the body that provides a global poverty headcount had noted that slightly over 98 million Nigerians were living in multi-dimensional poverty, indicating that 60.9 percent of Nigerians, or 100 million people, were living below the poverty threshold in 2010, and 120 million in 2012.

“Interestingly, the period the country had an exponential spike in the number of people living below $1 a day was during the 16 unbroken years that the former Vice-President’s party held sway in Nigeria.”