Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar says the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) must return to its founding mission of uniting the north and driving a development-focused agenda that reflects the vision of the late Ahmadu Bello.
Speaking on Friday in Kaduna at the 25th anniversary
celebration of the ACF, Abubakar said the forum was established not only to
consolidate regional unity but also to revive the north’s long-standing agenda
of education, agriculture and industrial growth.
Abubakar said the north must confront its developmental
stagnation with renewed urgency.
“The major issue with our unity is our failure to manage our
diversity,” he said.
“The north is not the most diverse part of the world. Our
pristine northern leadership has always recognised and admitted to our
diversity.
“We should be thinking of how to make our diversity work for
our development. We must muster both the courage and the political will to
overcome the many obstacles to our unity, and we know them.
“Some of the obstacles that we may not know very well are
the subtle and sophisticated subversion by our adversaries who are constantly
working to drive a wedge between us, often fabricating stories and capitalising
on our fears of the other, using technology to sow seeds of discord.
“Their target is our God-given wealth. We have seen the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and we must not relent.
“We need to have a leadership with the ability to
accommodate the various ethnic and religious groups, in whose hands all can
feel safe, and who will be fair and equitable in the distribution of natural
resources as well as all other opportunities in the country.
“We have seen how the north remembers its true leaders like
Sir Ahmadu Bello, gone for a long time but still remembered every day.
“Let us ask ourselves, how would we like to be remembered
after we have gone—as people who made the necessary sacrifices for the rest of
us, or as people who seized the opportunities and only buttered their bread?
“If there is any time for the North to unite, it is now, and
it is my ardent hope that we should resist those trying to divide us along
ethnic or religious lines and rise above these differences; look at the
challenges on the horizon and come together as the one people we have always
been.”
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