The neglect of zoning ahead of next year may lead to implosion in the All Progressives Congress (APC), a chieftain, Alhaji Alhassan Farouk, has warned.
He said it was strange that certain chieftains were pushing for power retention in the North in post-Buhari period.
Farouk, a chieftain of the party from Bauchi State, warned of the impending doom in a recent statement where he described an elaborate plot, involving several northern figures, to betray a purported power-sharing formula, which he said should ordinarily see the southern bloc of the party produce the next presidential candidate.
Warning of the implications of the plot to the country’s unity, Farouk said unless urgent interventions were made, next year’s election could mark the end of the country’s existence as a union of different ethnicities.
He said: “Unless drastic interventions are made, next year’s general election may prove the final straw for Nigeria’s 62-year experiment as a highly combustible union of disparate ethnic groups, each with an unyielding aspiration to determine its own destiny and a shared suspicion of a nursed domination agenda.
“President Muhammadu Buhari from the Northwest, as incumbent, has received widespread criticism from several segments of the society for what has been termed a lopsided appointment policy in Nigeria’s security architecture and several MDAs where the North has been unduly favoured.
“With the recent spate of insecurity, banditry, herder-farmer violence, IPOB disruptions and separatist group agitations in the Southwest, it is apparent that the nation has never been more divided.”
