The media office of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has urged opposition parties to reject calls for the 2027 presidential ticket to be zoned to the South. In a statement issued Monday in Abuja by media aide Olusola Sanni, the camp described the push as self-defeating and intellectually dishonest. It argued that history shows no sitting president in Nigeria has been defeated by an opposition candidate from the same geopolitical region. A Southern candidate, the statement said, would face near-insurmountable odds in unseating President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is also from the South.
The statement questioned the moral basis for southern zoning, noting that by 2027, Southern leaders would have held the presidency for about 18 years in the Fourth Republic, compared to 10 years for the North. Retaining power in the South, it added, would deepen an existing imbalance. The Atiku camp accused some political actors of opportunism, pointing to their support for Goodluck Jonathan's Southern candidacy in 2011, which bypassed Northern expectations under informal zoning agreements.
The statement acknowledged the legitimacy of the Southeast's desire for a presidential candidate but warned against treating it as a transactional bargain for individual ambition. It called for a credible, sustainable pathway to leadership rather than symbolic gestures. The opposition, the statement concluded, must prioritize strategy, coalition-building, and electoral arithmetic over sentiment and selective memory. Defeating an incumbent, it said, requires realism, not romanticism.
The Atiku camp criticizes southern zoning advocates for reviving a principle they abandoned in 2011 when it suited their ambitions. This undermines their current claims of moral consistency and weakens the opposition's unity. A divided opposition relying on emotional appeals plays into President Tinubu's re-election strategy. Atiku's own 2023 candidacy from the North makes his camp's stance a tactical move, not a neutral call for fairness.
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