The political camp of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has issued a warning to opposition parties that conceding the 2027 presidential ticket to a southern candidate would effectively guarantee President Bola Tinubu’s re-election.
In a public statement on Monday, Atiku’s media aide, Olusola Sanni, argued that no sitting Nigerian president has ever been defeated by a challenger from the same geopolitical zone. He described such a strategy as political suicide for opposition forces seeking to unseat Tinubu.
According to the statement, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is expected to retain its southern power base around Tinubu. Matching that with a southern opposition candidate, Sanni said, would leave voters with no historical precedent for an upset.
“To insist on a southern candidate against a southern incumbent is to enter the contest already defeated,” he argued.
Beyond political strategy, the Atiku camp challenged the moral logic driving the pro-zoning argument. By 2027, the statement noted, the South would have held the presidency for roughly 18 years of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, compared to about 10 years for the North. Handing the South another four-year term, it said, would only deepen an existing imbalance.
The camp also accused southern zoning advocates of hypocrisy, pointing to their support for Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency in 2011 after the death of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. Back then, they noted, the North’s informal turn was set aside with little objection from those now championing rotational justice.
The South-East’s ambition to produce a president was acknowledged, but the camp warned against reducing it to a transaction. A sustainable path to national leadership, the statement said, should not be swapped for symbolic tokenism tailored to one individual’s ambition.
The former vice president’s team urged the opposition to prioritise coalition-building over sentiment. “Defeating an incumbent requires realism, not romanticism; strategy, not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory,” the statement read.
The core question, according to Atiku’s camp, is whether the opposition wants to make an emotional statement or actually win power. Their answer was unambiguous: zoning the 2027 ticket to the South would hand Tinubu an easy victory.
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