According to the Arewa Progressive Women League, the Kaduna Jamboree by self-declared Northern elders was a farce and that Atiku Abubakar, the presidential nominee of the Peoples Democratic Party, is too corrupt to be presented as a consensus candidate for the North.
The Group claimed that those posing as elders were irrelevant old people who had stripped themselves of the garb of integrity and credibility. The Group was responding to the meeting with selected presidential candidates held last Saturday in Kaduna, which was organised by organisations like the Arewa Consultative Forum and the Northern Elders Forum.
In a statement, the group's leader Hannatu Abbass recalled that the same persons who had called the meeting had mocked Atiku Abubakar when he was vice president of Nigeria.
“It is the height of lack of integrity and shame for the same old people who were dismissed as non-existent by Atiku Abubakar to now lead the paid campaign for endorsing him as the region’s sole presidential candidate.
“We are living witnesses to the remarks by Atiku in 2010 that the Northern region had no elders referring to the same sate of old men today bandying him as consensus northern presidential candidate,” the group said.
The group wondered how the elders arrived at their choice of Atiku.
Pointing to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, the Group noted that the period Nigeria had an “exponential spike” in the number of people living below $1 was during the administration of Obasanjo and Atiku.
They said Abubakar and ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo created the pathway for Nigeria’s struggle with poverty through their non-transparent privatisation process.
“The World Bank, which is the body that provides a global poverty headcount had noted that slightly over 98 million Nigerians were living in multi-dimensional poverty, indicating that 60.9 per cent of Nigerians, or 100 million people, were living below the poverty threshold in 2010, and 120 million in 2012.
“Interestingly, the period the country had an exponential spike in the number of people living below $1 a day was during the 16 unbroken years that the former Vice-President’s party held sway in Nigeria,” the Group said.