Nigerians Will No Longer Elect Leaders Based On Primordial Sentiments, Says Niyi Akinsiju

By ABDULLAHI RABIU, Kano

THE Chief Advocate of the Nigeria Agenda Mr Niyi Akinsiju has said that Nigerians have reached the conclusion of Electing their leaders devoid of tribal, Ethnic, Religious sentiments .

Mr Akinsiju made the disclosure on Mo day when he addressed fifty CSOs, at the inaugural edition of the National Sensitisation Advocacy of The Nigeria Agenda held at the MAMBAYYA House, Kano.

According to him, the group decided to chose Kano for the inaugural edition with a purpose .

“Indeed, the Choice of Kano is the outcome of a rationalisation that was premised, not only on the city’s central positioning in Nigeria’s Northwest geopolitical zone, but more significantly, because of its robust history of citizens’ engagements made manifest in the historical sublimity of the Talakawa political culture and tradition that still define the politics of the City and to a large extent, the politics of the State in Contemporary times.

Thus, while citizens, especially of the social and economic category perjoratively described as commoners, in other states of the Nigerian federation, it bemoaned their burden of existence and listless fate under a political system materially dominated by an elite minority, which is usually driven by narrow self interest that mostly bothered on selfish expropriation of collective patrimony, the Kano commoners,”

 He said the Talakawa, had long ago found and aggregated a common social, economic and political identity and purpose in their numbers. And, earlier than any citizens’ movement anywhere in the Country, made commitments to not only the contest for democratic power, but to, by concrete class action, insist on making the people the centre of both government and governance working through the covenant inherent in the Sawaba Declaration of Principles of 1951.

Mr Niyi Akinsiju further explained that the  inaugural advocacy of The Nigeria Agenda is held here, in Kano City, in deference to this precocious act of political self enablement and activation, consumated about 71 years ago under late Mallam Aminu Kano, the teacher, whose boundless humanism inspired a mass based peoples ideological movement and a political trend that is still a reference item in the simplicity of its context and at the same, its conceptual sophistication which helped the ordinary people overcome spurious divisions in their ranks.

“Kano’s political and ideological pedigrees provide a strong ground to host this advocacy, we equally find an alluring proposition in the testimonials of the political activism of its political history, which continues to evolve through contemporary times, as a paradigm of adaptation for The Nigeria Agenda.

history is replete with politicians and peripheral political activists of different hues and characterisations, who, at convenience, and in pursuit of vain political and material gains, routinely verbalise, in vicious excoriation, the challenges and deficiencies of Nigeria’s nationhood and, sometimes, in the most deliquent manners, engaged in brazen revisionism as they fraudulent maneuvre to manipulate public sentiments with the end to set one group of Nigerians against the others, in mind, with primary intent at securing places and advantages within the nation’s political leadership hemisphere.”

He said the nation is treated to cacaphonous scenes of sometimes curious and needless disagreements by these protagonists of our divergence, we continue to witness a unity of a small numbers of individuals on the higher hierarchy of the political platforms sated by privileges of power and offices despite their coming from different ethnic groups and religions.