Calls for Buhari’s resignation insensitive, Doyin Okupe warns Southerners
*Says Northwest must produce President 2019
“We must desist from wrongfully using death and unforeseen happenstance to cheat ourselves politically or administratively. Only honesty, sincerity of purpose, genuine love for one another, fairness and equity can make us get to the promised land together and peacefully.”
It’s very embarrassing and insensitive the way some Nigerians are making unsavoury comments about President Muhammadu Buhari’s illness, former Senior Special Assistant on Public Relations to President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Doyin Okupe, has said.
In a statement on Friday, Okupe said though he’s not a supporter of Buhari, it’s embarrassing how some Nigerians “outrightly deride him, wish him dead as if they themselves are not human.”
“Sickness and ill-health many times are not things you can blame individuals for and certainly not deride them about. Both young and old do fall ill and death certainly is not exclusively restricted to the old, or young, or rich, poor or powerful,” the ex-presidential aide said.
Among many that have called for President Muhammadu Buhari’s resignation is Punch Newspaper as an entity, which was reflected in its Editorial dated May 4, 2017. The Punch Newspaper had said, “If President Buhari really wants what is best for the country, the most important decision of his remarkable life is before him now: resign right away without any more fuss. He should listen to his inner mind rather than the power hawks that surround him.”
Although it has been criticized over its having gone far in what some of the people saw as its style of playing the opposition against the Buhari’s government instead of being the media entity that it is, the newspaper is said to have taken caution to the wind when it resorted to using the core of its editorial content such as its editorial page to call for the President’s resignation.
The attitude of the newspaper is seen as playing outside the place of a media organization to be antagonistic towards a government without justifiable reason just because it has a score it believes it is settling with the President over what his Chief Security Officer (CSO) described as misbehavior of its reporter to national integrity and security and thus caused him to be so treated.
In his statement, Dr. Doyin Okupe said the political implication of President Buhari’s health “is neither simple nor straight forward, in a country as complex and convoluted politically as Nigeria.”
He said political leaders must bear in their minds that since the return of democratic rule in 1999 in the last 18 years, the Southern part of the country has occupied the position of President for approximately 14 years while the North has had only four years.
“This calls for sensitive and careful navigation and negotiation to uphold equity, justice and fairness, if our country must maintain political stability, without which our nation can hardly make progress,” Okupe said.
Okupe said the Northwest should produce the President in 2019.
He said: “This type of political concession is not all together new to our politics. In 1998, because of the perceived injustice to the people of the Southwest, the political class resolved through an unprecedented concessionary arrangement to allow only the Southwest to present presidential candidates so that head and tail the Southwest would produce the President.
“It was not constitutional but it was also not against any law. It was politically right and expedient and it brought the country together.
“We must desist from wrongfully using death and unforeseen happenstance to cheat ourselves politically or administratively. Only honesty, sincerity of purpose, genuine love for one another, fairness and equity can make us get to the promised land together and peacefully.”
