The camp of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar on Monday fired a warning at opposition political actors, telling them that insisting on zoning the 2027 presidential ticket to the South would amount to entering the contest “already defeated.”
In a statement issued by his media aide, Olusola Sanni, the Atiku camp described the push for a southern opposition candidate as “self-defeating and intellectually dishonest,” arguing that Nigerian political history offered no precedent for an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc as a sitting president ever unseating that president.
“The first and most obvious question is this: how does a Southern opposition candidate realistically unseat a sitting Southern president? Nigerian political history offers no precedent for such an outcome. No incumbent president has ever been defeated by an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc. To insist otherwise is to enter the contest already defeated,” the statement said.
The camp acknowledged that the ruling All Progressives Congress APC could reasonably retain its southern presidential configuration around incumbent President Bola Tinubu, but argued that the opposition had no business applying the same logic without a cold-eyed assessment of electoral realities.
“Defeating an incumbent president requires realism, not romanticism; strategy, not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory. The opposition must decide whether its goal is to make an emotional statement or to actually win power,” the statement warned.
On the equity argument advanced by proponents of southern zoning, the Atiku camp was dismissive.
It noted that by 2027, the South would have held presidential power for approximately 18 years in the Fourth Republic against roughly 10 years for the North, and that handing the South another four years would deepen rather than correct that imbalance.
“It therefore becomes difficult to understand the justice in an argument that seeks to deepen an already existing imbalance under the guise of equity,” the statement said.
The camp also faulted what it called selective memory among political actors who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 following the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, supporting Goodluck Jonathan’s southern presidency despite the North’s expectation under the informal rotation arrangement, only to now present the same principle as a sacred political doctrine.
“It is intellectually dishonest for those who enthusiastically supported a Southern presidency under Goodluck Jonathan in 2011, despite the North’s legitimate expectation under the informal zoning arrangement, to now suddenly posture as custodians of rotational justice. Principles do not become sacred only when they align with personal ambition,” the statement said.
The Atiku camp was careful to affirm the Southeast’s aspiration to produce a president as legitimate, but drew a sharp distinction between that aspiration and what it described as “transactional political bargaining” or “symbolic tokenism” designed to serve one individual’s ambition.
“The Southeast deserves a sustainable and credible pathway to national leadership — not symbolic tokenism or bespoke arrangements tailored to satisfy one individual’s ambition,” it stated.
The statement urged the opposition to channel its energy into building a credible national coalition capable of defeating Tinubu at the polls, warning that sentiment-driven zoning debates risked inadvertently strengthening the incumbent’s re-election prospects.
Atiku, a northern Muslim from Adamawa State, has contested the presidency multiple times and remains one of the most prominent opposition figures ahead of the 2027 cycle.
