Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has explained why
opposition parties in Nigeria should rethink zoning their 2027 presidential
ticket to the south ahead of primaries.
In a statement by his spokesperson, Olusola Sanni, Atiku
cautioned opposition political actors against embracing what it described as a
self-defeating and intellectually dishonest narrative that insists the 2027
presidential ticket must be zoned exclusively to the South.
He said while zoning in on the All Progressives Congress may
understandably be to retain the presidency around the incumbent President Bola
Ahmed Tinubu, it would amount to political naivety for the opposition to adopt
the same logic without a sober assessment of electoral realities.
According to him, 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,” the statement said.
The Atiku camp further 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,” the statement added.
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.”
While affirming that the Southeast’s aspiration to produce a
president remains legitimate and deserving of serious national engagement, the
statement warned against reducing that aspiration to what it 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,” it stated.
The statement concluded by urging the opposition 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, not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory. The
opposition must decide whether its goal is to make an emotional statement or to
actually win power,” he stated.
Thex Nigeria Democratic Congress and other opposition
parties recently zoned presidential ticket to the Southern part of Nigeria.
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