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Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has explained why opposition parties in Nigeria should reconsider zoning their 2027 presidential ticket to the South ahead of the primaries.

In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Olusola Sanni, Atiku cautioned opposition political actors against embracing what he described as a self-defeating and intellectually dishonest narrative insisting that the 2027 presidential ticket must be zoned exclusively to the South.

He stated that while zoning within the All Progressives Congress may understandably be aimed at retaining the presidency around incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it would amount to political naivety for the opposition to adopt the same approach without carefully assessing electoral realities.

According to him, politics should be guided by strategy, coalition-building, and hard electoral calculations rather than emotional narratives 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 justification being advanced in support of southern zoning does not stand up to 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 former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, but 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 the aspiration to what it described as “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 concentrate on building a credible national coalition capable of defeating the incumbent rather than embracing narratives that may inadvertently strengthen President Tinubu’s re-election chances.

“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.

ZINGTIE reports that the Nigeria Democratic Congress and other opposition parties recently zoned their presidential ticket to the Southern part of Nigeria.

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