By Abdallah el-Kurebe, Editor
#TrackNigeria: The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG), has described what is happening in Kano as symptoms of a deliberate agenda for the destabilisation of the northern region and warned that it must be resisted.
Giving the warning, the CNG, which became famous in 2017 when it deflated the resurgence of secessionist tendencies by the Indeginous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), said the ugly scenes from Kano are calculated to undermine the political and economic viability of the entire North, beginning with the Northwest.
A statement signed by CNG’s Spokesperson, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman warned that it plans of form a bigger coalition would to involve more civil society organisations in the region to confront the situation and halt the onslaught on the its traditional and cultural heritage.
Consequently, the Coalition revealed its plans to converge on Kano next week to meet with several other civil society groups to review what it called the unfolding dangerous scenario and come up with a definite action plan to check it.
“The typology of the events in Kano and the dimension that they have taken of recent, are a serious cause for concern to all northerners and friends alike. We are accordingly worried and profoundly agitated by the recent trend of escalation of a proxy war against the revered traditional institutions of the North beginning with Kano.
“We are deeply concerned particularly with the way the State Governor Abdullahi Ganduje has turned it into a lawless society by resorting to unleashing bands of drugged thugs to humiliate and suppress lawful civil actions by citizens at the slightest of pretences.
“We are thus concerned because Kano is a strategic citadel of northern Nigerian cultural values, as well as its political hub and commercial nerve center. Any form of destabilisation of Kano must therefore be seen as a direct attempt to diminish the political and economic viability of the North.
“We believe that the internal political forces that are driving this anti-north agenda are instigated by powerful underground interests across some states in order to achieve certain personal objectives against 2023 by decapitating the region’s shared heritage and values.
“It is thus with the utmost concern that we must all resist the efforts now being exerted to destroy the North with attempts at instigating discontent and public anger through exploiting cleavages of religious and ethnic nature to cause disharmony and facilitate widespread uprising and unrest.
“We are convinced that the current proxy war waged against the revered Kano emirate by Governor Abdullahi Ganduje and his haste to deploy state sponsored thugs against any form of opposition to any of his harmful politics and policies, are not isolated incidents, but ones that are linked to a wider design to destabilize the North and bring her people to their knees by first bastardising its strong cultural bond to pave the way for the spread of internal strife.
“For too long, external enemies of the North, with active internal collaborators, have worked strenuously to ensure that the region remains backward, divided, weak, confused and bewildered by myriads of challenges and problems.
“It is no longer in doubt that the general and pervasive insecurity currently being experienced across the Northern region are part of a mega but clandestine plot spanning several years with the unfolding onslaught by proxies like Ganduje on the region’s traditional home of political dynamism forming another part of the distabilization agenda.
“From the recent events in Kano, every one can see a clear pattern drawn from the strategies employed in the 60s to achieve the decapitation of the North and in particular, bringing its traditional symbol of unity down as a first major step towards its ultimatel political and economic incapacitation.
“Unfortunately, this conspiracy is actively perpetrated with the connivance of some politicians from the North, accommodated by the docility of those that present themselves as northern socio-cultural leaders and fed by the uncomfortable silence of a presidency with a fellow northerner as head,” Suleiman said in the statement.
