Diri reveals South needs North to achieve 2023 Presidency

No region, according to Bayelsa State Governor Douye Diri, could produce the country’s President without the help of other regions.

On Thursday, May 5, Diri received Bala Mohammed, a Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate and Governor of Bauchi State, at the Government House in Yenagoa.

Mohammed visited Bayelsa State to formally declare his desire to run for president in the general election of 2023.

The Southern governors’ desire for the president to be zoned to the South, according to Diri, could not be met without the North’s support, and vice versa.

In a statement issued by his Chief Press Secretary, Daniel Alabrah, Diri urged PDP members to work together to ensure the party’s victory in next year’s presidential election.

As an opposition party, he believes the most important thing to focus on is how to grab power from the ruling All Progressives Congress, which he claims has lost control of governance in all areas.

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While restating the call for the PDP to zone the presidency to the South, the governor stressed the need for political offices to be rotated among different parts of the country to ensure equity, fairness and justice as exemplified by the PDP in its last national convention.

Diri, however, while commending Mohammed for starting his presidential declaration from Bayelsa, said that God remained the ultimate decision maker on who becomes the PDP flag-bearer and that he would support whoever emerges as the party’s choice.

He told his guest to speak on issues about the party and how to better the lot of Nigerians, saying that the world and Nigerians were looking up to the PDP to salvage the country from total collapse occasioned by the bad governance of the APC.

Diri said, “Nigeria is waiting for the PDP. Our party must be united and support whoever emerges. Even in our quest for a Southern President, we need the North. We have to court the North, speak with the North and whoever that God so appoints to be the President.

“But let us all caution ourselves that we are in opposition. It appears some of us still do not understand that fact. We should be talking about ‘we’ and not necessarily ‘I’. At the end of the day, the final decider is God. If God decides it won’t be a president from the south, we cannot run away from that decision. We will stand by our party and work with that person.

“I am one person that has said so much about our party’s offices to be rotational. That is what we did in the convention where we zoned offices. That is for fairness, justice and equity. I like to restate and re-emphasise that we need to be at the centre. Nigeria is falling apart and we need to rescue the country. The world is looking up to the PDP for Nigeria to work again.”