Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s camp issued a warning to opposition political actors on Monday, saying that insisting on zoning the 2027 presidential ticket to the South would be like entering the campaign “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 there is no precedent in Nigerian political history for an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc as a sitting president to ever unseat 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 plausibly keep its southern presidential configuration centered on incumbent President Bola Tinubu but maintained that the opposition had no business using the same rationale without a sober evaluation of electoral reality.
“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.
The Atiku camp dismissed the equity argument presented by proponents of southern zoning.
It stated that by 2027, the South would have held presidential authority for almost 18 years in the Fourth Republic, compared to roughly 10 years for the North, and that giving the South another four years would exacerbate rather than alleviate the 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 criticized what it called selective memory among political actors who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 following President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s death, supporting Goodluck Jonathan’s southern presidency despite the North’s expectation under the informal rotation arrangement, only to present the same principle as a sacred political doctrine today.
“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 cautious to recognize the Southeast’s legitimate desire to produce a president, but it made a clear contrast between that desire and what it termed as “transactional political bargaining” or “symbolic tokenism” aimed to promote one person’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 focus its efforts on forming a genuine national coalition capable of defeating Tinubu at the polls, saying that sentiment-driven zoning disputes could unintentionally boost the incumbent’s re-election chances.
Atiku, a northern Muslim from Adamawa State, has run for president several times and is still one of the most prominent opposition politicians heading into the 2027 election cycle.
