Hate or like me, I refuse to be part of a well orchestrated, formidable deceit which gave birth to GEJ’s naivety about the north and his subsequent doom in 2015. Many southerners, even educated ones, are still wallowing in this crass ignorance.
This is the absolute truth: Hausa is the largest ethnic group in the North. And its language is almost the lingua franca of the north. But Hausa people are NOT the majority of the North. They are a minority compared to the rest of the people of the north. Fulani is a minority in every state of the north. The Middle Belt, heterogeneous and large with 14 states, holds more people than Hausa and Fulani put together, and it is mostly Christians. The population figures of 2006 censures is there for confirmation. And, in any case, there are millions of Hausa and Fulani in the ONLY Hausa states of Kano, Jigawa, Katsina, Sokoto and Kano who count as Middle Belters because they are not Muslims and share the same world views as most people of the Middle Belt. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in a leader that will improve the wellbeing of Nigeria irrespective of his religion and tribe. Yes I do! I long for a president who truly loves Nigeria and all its peoples and governs by his promises. Sadly, that is not what we have now. And how did we get here? Unknown to sincere and patriotic Christian followers of PMB in 2015, they were blind to the clear manipulation of Islam, as practiced in core Northern Nigeria. They refused to see that Islam was the sentiment that fuel his populist stature under the subterfuge ‘Mr zero corruption’ wrestling a corrupt ‘demon’ Christian Goodluck . We screamed that the man could not be corrupt-free because the people sponsoring him were savagely corrupt and were direct from the PDP. At that time we warned that he was under-educated, expired, a lair, too frail, a bigot and mainly thinks as a herdsman who did not understand the fundamentals that drive nationhood to greatness. There were better Muslims than him, we had pleaded in vain. Today, everyone can evidently see. What I am trying to arrive is that if religion will be the ruse to be used again in picking a presidential ticket from the north in 2019, then the Middle Belt and its allies in the core north should present a Christian candidate if their votes must be captured. And I also believe that the South-South, South-East, and South-West will groove for him over any other northerner. Again, if the political parties insist that the candidates they will field will be persons of honour intelligence, sound mind and body, patriotic and have overall fine qualities of the human person, and must come from the North, that, to me, is most preferable. The Middle Belt is inundated with such Christians. Any political party that ignores this is doing so at grave negative consequences to itself.
