The southern region has been penciled down to take a shot from president Muhammadu Buhari, come 2023.
The incumbent governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, who declared his support for the presidency to return to the south when President Buhari completes his tenure in 2023, noted that he would not contest for the presidency.
This comes at a time when the political class is still divided on the issue of zoning or not ahead of the 2023 presidential elections in Nigeria.
Speaking in an interview with BBC Pidgin, El-Rufai after ruling himself out of the race for Nigeria’s presidency, said a southerner should become Nigeria’s next leader after President Buhari.
He said: “I have not thought about it at all (becoming the Vice President of Nigeria). I have said it that in the political system we have, after eight years of President Buhari, the presidency should go to the south”.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed on Saturday in Ilorin, Kwara State, noted that they were warned not to support the governor of the state, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq during the 2019 governorship election in the state.
The Minister who was in the state capital to commission the All Progressives Congress new secretariat of the Bashir Bolarinwa led faction disclosed this in public.
According to him, “It has gotten to the point where we have to speak out. We have been pushed to the wall and we have no choice to come out and exposed their lies and pretensions.
“It was immediately after the Governor emerged as the party’s candidate for the election that it dawned on us that we have entered one chance.
“But despite all the warnings from concerned party leaders and others who had reservations about his choice, our reaction then was that no matter what, his choice was better than where we were coming from. But we were wrong”.
