The stupidest thing I have read or heard in 2024 is that the North is fighting President Bola Tinubu because they do not want a Southern President. That is as stupid as a man believing that his own mother is a witch who wants to kill him.
If your mother wanted to kill you, you would not have survived infancy. Killing a child is the easiest thing a mother can do undetected if that were her goal. Preventing Bola Tinubu from becoming President is the easiest thing Arewa could have done if that were her goal.
The Bola Tinubu Presidency is the baby, and the North is its mother, just like the Buhari Presidency was the infant and the Southwest, its mother.
Look, long before the election and primaries, Northern APC Governors gathered in Abuja on June 6, 2022, and said that though they had the delegate power to produce a Northern Presidential candidate for the All Progressive Congress, in the interest of unity, they would be giving a bloc vote to a Southern Presidential candidate.
And then look at the election result. Of the 8,794,726 votes that won Bola Tinubu the Presidency, 5,602,682 came from the North versus only 2,279,407 from the Southwest and a miserly 127,370 from the Southeast.
To cut a long story short, the North is the reason why Bola Tinubu is President today, and especially the Northwest, which gave him 2,652,235.
If the North was really serious about having a Northerner succeed Buhari, only Kano State alone can swing the election whichever way it wanted, Peter Obi or no Peter Obi.
So, my counsel to all those emergency political analysts now using the Russian flag incident to slander the North, is this: Shut up and go and join Gbajue people. You know who I am talking about, with their Arise TV!
There is no Northern plot to stop Tinubu. Whether Tinubu, Buhari, or Jonathan, it is human nature to protest the rise in fuel and food costs. It happens everywhere. In England, they are fighting immigrants because they blame them for the increase in prices, especially rent and food.
The Russian flag is just the result of contagion from Niger Republic, which shares a border with Arewa, and has now foolishly allowed itself to be placed under the Russian sphere of influence.
The Days of Rage protest is not a Northern insurrection against Tinubu. Please, do not take us back to the sixties and seventies.
There is now such a strong bond and mutual understanding between the core North and the Southwest. Let us nurture it and find ways to strengthen the link instead of sitting in Lagos and Ibadan and imagining all kinds of conspiracy theories against Hausa people (to some people, every Northerner is an aboki Hausa Malam).
Reno Omokri
Gospeller. Deep Thinker. #TableShaker. Ruffler of the Feathers of Obidents. #1 Bestselling author of Facts Versus Fiction: The True Story of the Jonathan Years. Hodophile. Hollywood Magazine Humanitarian of the Year, 2019. Business Insider Influencer of the Year 2022.