Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, Senator Abdul’Aziz Abubakar Yari, has appealed to northerners to allow President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to complete his eight-year tenure as a way of respecting the established principle of rotational presidency in Nigeria.
Yari stated this while addressing newsmen at the Kano Government House after holding a closed-door meeting with Kano State Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf on Saturday.
He said the only viable option now was for the North to be gentlemanly in the arrangement and allow Tinubu to complete his eight-year tenure.
The former Zamfara State governor said the North should understand and respect the political arrangement that brought the presidency to the South in 2023, arguing that the presidency had been held by a northerner for several years before the emergence of Tinubu.
Yari said, “Sixty-six years ago, since independence, the country was led by northerners for 47 years,” adding that Nigerians should recognise the importance of maintaining unity and understanding how the country’s political system operates.
He said Nigeria remained a country that all citizens must work together to protect, regardless of regional or political differences.
“As we love this country, we don’t have any country other than Nigeria. Nigerians should understand how this country works. It is also better than many nations,” Yari said.
The APC chieftain explained that his role as Director-General of the campaign council was not limited to promoting President Tinubu but also included promoting national unity and understanding among Nigerians.
Yari said the current political arrangement should be respected, noting that former President Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner, governed the country between 2015 and 2023 before power shifted to Tinubu from the South in 2023.
“Having said this, this country, Nigeria, from 2015 to 2023 was led by a northerner, and now from 2023 to 2026 it is led by a southerner,” he said.
Yari appealed to northerners not to seek to overturn the existing zoning arrangement on the basis of the region’s population, saying the political understanding was important for national stability.
“If we say we want to uproot the zoning arrangement because of our numbers, then my call for northerners is to understand how it works. They even understand more than I do,” Yari said.
He acknowledged that President Tinubu’s administration, like every government, was not perfect, but argued that the challenges facing Nigeria should not solely be attributed to the administration.
“Nobody is perfect. The southerners have also experienced what we are complaining about today when President Buhari was in power,” he said.
Yari also argued that insecurity was not peculiar to Nigeria, saying countries across the world, including the United States, continue to grapple with security challenges despite their level of development.
“No problem of a country is solved by any government, including even in the United States. They are managing insecurity as we are managing it,” he said.
The APC campaign council Director-General further cited gun violence in Chicago as an example of the security challenges faced by other countries, stressing that every nation has its own problems that require continuous efforts to address.
Turning to the economy, Yari said Nigerians should assess the Tinubu administration based on economic indicators and compare the situation when the President assumed office in 2023 with the current position.
“When you look at when Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power in 2023, go and check what was the state of our reserves and what it is today, and what was the rate of inflation in 2023 and what it is today,” he said.
Yari maintained that the administration was making efforts to address the country’s economic and security challenges, while acknowledging that governments at both federal and state levels were working to improve the situation.
He urged Nigerians, particularly those in the North, to give the political arrangement time, arguing that the presidency would return to the region after Tinubu’s tenure if the existing rotation principle was maintained.
“I am calling on northerners to note that by the time Bola Ahmed Tinubu finishes in 2031, it will definitely come back to the North. This is how the arrangement is,” Yari said.
