The camp of former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has cautioned opposition parties against zoning their 2027 presidential tickets exclusively to the South.
NewsWatch Nigeria reports that the camp, in a statement by Atiku’s spokesperson, Olusola Sanni, said opposition political actors must rethink the push for southern zoning before their primaries.
He described the argument that the 2027 opposition ticket must go to the South as self-defeating and intellectually dishonest.
According to Sanni, while it might be understandable for the All Progressives Congress (APC) to retain its ticket in the South around President Bola Tinubu, it would be politically naïve for the opposition to adopt the same approach without considering electoral realities.
He said politics should be driven by strategy, coalition-building and electoral calculations, rather than emotion or selective moral arguments.
The statement read, “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 Atiku camp argued that the moral argument in favour of southern zoning collapses under scrutiny.
It said, “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.”
Sanni also accused some political actors of selective memory and opportunism.
He criticised those who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 after the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, but now presents zoning as a sacred doctrine.
The statement added, “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 affirmed that the South-East’s aspiration to produce a president was legitimate and deserved serious national engagement.
It, however, warned against reducing the aspiration to “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 camp urged opposition parties to focus on building a credible national coalition capable of defeating Tinubu.
He warned that adopting the southern zoning narrative could strengthen the President’s re-election chances.
He added, “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.”
