In an interview in Abuja on Thursday, Alhaji Farouk, who is also the Director of the youth wing of the Ibrahim Babangida Presidential Campaign Organisation, declared that President Goodluck Jonathan would not be a good presidential material for the nation, describing him as a “chameleon†based on his inconsistency on the zoning arrangement in PDP.
He, however, tipped former President Babangida as the possible consensus candidate of the North and the eventual winner of the 2011 presidential election based on his past experience and capability to hold Nigeria together as a country to be respected among the comity of nations.
Said he: “I don’t think this country can be run again by a novice. When I say that, you can look around and see an example; a good leader that is stable, that has the capacity to hold this country together is still an essential ingredient in our nationhood.â€
According to him, “it was the same situation in 1999 when we all decided in the PDP to rally support for former President Olusegun Obasanjo, certainly not even because that we believed in his policies of development but because we knew at that point in time that the crises the nation was facing needed a stabilising factor like Obasanjo who had the experience and who could keep the country together.
“This country is being faced with stability problems now as we were in 1999, because of the nature of the politics of our elite, the security challenges and the level of poverty in the land.â€
Alhaji Farouk pointed out that former President Babangida possessed the qualities needed to address the multi-faceted problems within four years as the case was in 1999 when Obasanjo was unanimously picked to lead the nation.
