The Chief John Odigie-Oyegun has advised the All Progressives Congress, APC, to consider the North and South Presidency discourse in arriving at a decision concerning its presidential candidate.

Odigie-Oyegun, the former National Chairman of the APC, made the plea on Friday when he submitted the report of the Presidential Screening Committee, which he headed, to the Senator Abdullahi Adamu-led National Working Committee, NWC, at the National Secretariat of the party in Abuja.

The committee pruned the number of presidential aspirants from 23 to 13, allowing some go through due to their young age.

Although it was not immediately possible to get the list of those affected, the committee chairman said his team could have further pruned down the number, but decided to give some of the youthful aspirants a chance.

Odigie-Oyegun told the NWC: “I do not want to read the names. I think we will leave that to you. But we have a shortlist; we brought the number severely down to 13.

“We could have cut it a little shorter but we wanted, deliberately, the younger elements to surface, for them to be seen, for them to be noticed, who knows.

We hand them to the party and it is for the party to decide the preferred candidate. It is also an opportunity to showcase the kind of people that exist within the party.

“Their youthfulness, their kind of experience, let the world know that we care for the young and this is a party that when we say the young can aspire, we really mean it.

This has been showcased in the report that we have written.

“We only drew a word of caution that there is this cleavage that is gradually becoming centre stage in national discourse.

It is between the North and the South as regards presidency and we advised strongly that the party should please think of it in making its decision, address it and let it influence your thoughts because it has its own implications,” he counselled.