Arewa Youths Vow To Reject Confab Recommendations

The Arewa Youths Consultative Forum
in northern Nigeria on Friday vowed to
reject recommendations and resolutions
that would come out of the ongoing
National Conference, saying President
Goodluck Jonathan and state governors
handpicked their loyalists as delegates,
rather than allowing the people to
choose those to represent them.
The forum said the mode of selection of
delegates had already discredited the
conference and its outcome, since the
delegates did not represent the interest
of the larger number of Nigerians.
Addressing a press conference at the
end of a two day special summit for
northern youths and student leaders
in Kaduna, the President of the forum,
Yerima Shettima, frowned at the criteria
of selecting the delegates to the
conference that saw the south allocated
272 delegates while the north had 220
despite its large land mass and
population.
They called for the conduct of a fresh
and credible National Conference that
would reflect the interest of many
Nigerians.
“The ongoing conference amounts to a
brutal incursion into the sovereignty of
the constitution that vests such powers
in the National Assembly,” Shettima
stated, insisting that those representing
the north in the conference betrayed true
representation of the youths of the
region as they do not have the support
of the generality of the people.
The youths also lamented the poor state
of education and high rate of poverty in
the north, which it said was as a result
of bad leadership and indifference to
genuine policies and programmes on
agriculture and education.
On the security challenges confronting
the north east and north central zones,
the forum decried the spate of killing of
innocent youths by security agents and
members of the Boko Haram sect while
little or no action had been taken by
past and present leaders of the region to
address the problem.
The group also questioned the
disposition of the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct
free and fair elections in 2015 and
asked the National Assembly to come
up with a law for the reconstitution of
an independent electoral body whose
members would be elected through a
referendum by the people ahead of the
election.