Atiku has warned the opposition against zoning presidential ticket to South in 2027.
NewsOnline Nigeria reports that Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has cautioned opposition parties against zoning their 2027 presidential ticket exclusively to Southern Nigeria ahead of the next general election.
In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Olusola Sanni, Atiku said opposition political actors must avoid what he described as a “self-defeating and intellectually dishonest narrative” insisting that the presidential ticket must automatically be ceded to the South.
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According to him, while the ruling All Progressives Congress may choose to retain power in the South around President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it would be politically risky for opposition parties to adopt the same strategy without considering electoral realities.
The statement stressed that politics should be guided by strategy, coalition-building, and electoral calculations rather than emotions 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,” the statement read.
“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’s camp also argued that the moral justification for Southern zoning does not hold under close examination.
According to the statement, by 2027, Southern Nigeria would have occupied the presidency for about 18 years in the Fourth Republic, compared to roughly 10 years for the North.
“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.
The former vice president also accused some political figures of inconsistency, especially those who abandoned zoning principles in 2011 following the death of former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and later supported the emergence of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
“It is intellectually dishonest for those who enthusiastically supported a Southern presidency under Goodluck Jonathan in 2011… to now suddenly posture as custodians of rotational justice,” the statement said.
While acknowledging the Southeast’s aspiration to produce a Nigerian president as legitimate, Atiku warned against reducing the region’s ambition to what he described as “transactional political bargaining.”
He urged opposition parties to focus on building a strong national coalition capable of defeating the incumbent government rather than embracing narratives that could strengthen Tinubu’s re-election chances.
“Defeating an incumbent president requires realism, not romanticism; strategy, not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory,” the statement concluded.
The development comes amid reports that the Nigeria Democratic Congress and some opposition groups recently endorsed the zoning of their 2027 presidential ticket to the South.
