Northern Elders shun national conference

 

Northern Elders Forum, NEF, Thursday, resolved not to be part of the impending National Conference, saying that it had been primed to advance the re-election bid of President Goodluck Jonathan.


The elders, who met in Abuja to review the state of the nation, also lamented the seeming inability of the Federal Government to tackle rising menace of terrorism in the North, which they noted, had caused a lot of havoc and dislocation in the region.

Addressing journalists, the Deputy leader of the NEF, Dr. Paul Unongo, made it clear that although the North was part of the agitation for a Sovereign National Conference, it became suspicious of a hidden agenda when the government suddenly opted to organised a conference with a premeditated agenda capable of causing more confusion rather than solutions to the nation’s challenges

Unongo pointed out that the impending conference would not be able to solve any problem for Nigeria because the delegates were selected by the President instead of allowing Nigerians to elect them as proposed by the Committee raised by the government.

Unongo pointed out: “What they are going to do is not a national conference but a Jonathan conference because almost all the delegates were selected by him and his friends instead of an open election that was adopted for the previous exercises even during the military era.

“This is not fair. The manner of selecting only the friends and associates of the President for the conference does not represent the generality of Nigerians and we cannot be part of such a sham,” the former minister said.

While sympathising with the government over the killings in the North, the NEF official called in the administration to take whatever steps possible to flush the terrorists, whom he said did not represent any religion in the country, as claimed by some ignorant persons.