Former Vice President of Nigeria, Atiku Abubabar has expressed disappointment over the way opposition parties have zoned the 2027 presidential ticket to the south ahead of primaries, thereby technically scheming him out.
In a statement by Olusola Sanni, his spokesperson, Atiku, who said he would be contesting for Presidency for the last time in 2027, described the adoption of zoning the presidency to the South as a self-defeating and intellectually dishonest.
According to him, it would amount to political naivety for the opposition to adopt the same logic as the All Progressives Congress (APC), without a sober assessment of electoral realities.
Atiku said that politics must be driven by strategy, coalition-building and hard electoral arithmetic, not emotional talking points or selective moral arguments.
“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.”
Atiku argued that the moral argument being advanced in favor of southern zoning collapses under scrutiny.
“By 2027, the South would have held presidential power for approximately 18 years in the Fourth Republic, compared to about 10 years for the North. If the South retains power for another four years, that disparity widens even further.
“It therefore becomes difficult to understand the justice in an argument that seeks to deepen an already existing imbalance under the guise of equity.”
Atiku also accused some political actors of selective memory and opportunism, particularly those who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 following the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, only to now present it 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.”
He however acknowledged that the South’s aspiration to produce a president remains legitimate and deserving of serious national engagement, but warned against reducing that aspiration to what he called: “transactional political bargaining.”
“The Southeast deserves a sustainable and credible pathway to national leadership—not symbolic tokenism or bespoke arrangements tailored to satisfy one individual’s ambition.”
Atiku called on the opposition parties to focus on building a credible national coalition capable of defeating the incumbent rather than embracing narratives that may inadvertently strengthen President Tinubu’s re-election prospects.
“Defeating an incumbent president requires realism, not romanticism; strategy and not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory. The opposition must decide whether its goal is to make an emotional statement or to actually win power.”
Meanwhile, the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) and other opposition parties have recently zoned presidential ticket to the Southern part of Nigeria.
