Pressure mounts on both the ruling All Progressives Congress(APC and the main opposition, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to zone their parties’ Presidential tickets in 2033 to the South as hundreds of protesters stormed the headquarters of both parties on Wednesday.
Chanting solidarity songs, the placard bearing protesters mostly women and youths siezed and occupied the premises of both political parties.
The inscriptions on their placards summed up their anger and anxieties as they called on both PDP and APC to respect the principles of zoning and ensure they gift their tickets to aspirants from South for the sake of equity, fairness, social justice and unity.
For several hours, the protesters demonstrated peacefully outside of PDP National Secretariat trying to draw the attention of the leadership of the party to accept their position.
Their efforts failed. Nobody in Wadata House was willing to addresss the group on the issue of zoning nor accept their appeal letter.
In frustration, the group under the aegis of Concerned Nigeria Citizens left their letter at the front gate of the opposition party before proceeding to the National Secretariat of APC a few metres away in Wuse zone 2 where they were received by members of the National Working Committee(NWC) with a promise to look into their demand.
The issue of power rotation has always been quite knotty in Nigeria and with the next elections around the corner, both APC and PDP look trapped in the same sticky web of zoning.
At the moment, the choice of where to zone the Presidential tickets of the two parties looks more like a “cat and mouse game”, with each anxiously waiting for the others’ next move.
Any permutation in the camp of PDP that favours the North is bound to throw spanner in the wheels of APC that seems to be more fixated to zone to the South after eight years under President Muhammadu Buhari.
This is as groups in the PDP continue to push strongly that the party should forsake the South and look towards the North.
It is a political calculation that has sent the headquarters of APC rethinking its options and may now be possibly shopping for a formidable candidate in the North should PDP go in that direction.
If that happens, Nigeria could see a repeat of 2019 elections when two Northern candidates occupied the ballots of the two major political parties-
It is an arrangement that will surely injure the ambitions of many aspirants in both the PDP and APC in the South- a scenerio the protesters who stormed both party headquarters believe could sound the deathknell on zoning as the country has come to know it since 1999.
(Editor: Anoyoyo Ogiagboviogie)
