2027: Atiku Camp Warns Opposition Coalition Over Southern Zoning

Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar’s camp has warned opposition parties against zoning their presidential tickets to the South alone in 2027.

It was learnt 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 called the argument for the 2027 opposition ticket to come from the South self-defeating and intellectually dishonest.

Sanni said it might be understandable for the All Progressives Congress (APC) to keep its ticket in the South around President Bola Tinubu, but it would be naive for the opposition to do the same without considering electoral realities.

Politics, he said, should be based on strategy, coalition building and electoral calculations, not emotion or selective moral arguments.

“The first and most obvious question is this: How does a Southern opposition candidate realistically unseat a sitting Southern president?” the statement read. In the political history of Nigeria, no such thing has ever happened.

“No sitting president has been beaten by an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc. “To say otherwise is to enter the contest already defeated.”

The Atiku camp argued that the moral case for Southern zoning doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

It read, “By 2027, the South would have been in presidential power for about 18 years in the Fourth Republic and the North for about 10 years. If the South stays in power another four years, the gap gets even bigger.

“So it becomes difficult to understand the justice in an argument that seeks to deepen an already existing imbalance in the name of equity.

Sanni also alleged selective memory and opportunism among some political actors.

He condemned those who jettisoned the zoning principle after the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2011, but now makes zoning a sacred doctrine.

“It is intellectually dishonest that those who supported a Southern presidency under Goodluck Jonathan in 2011, despite the North’s legitimate expectation under the informal zoning arrangement, now suddenly posture as custodians of rotational justice,” the statement added.

“Principles are sacred only when in agreement with self-interest.”

The statement said the South-East’s quest to produce a president was legitimate and should be taken seriously at the national level.

But it sounded a cautionary note against turning the aspiration into “transactional political bargaining.”

“The Southeast requires an enduring and legitimate route to national leadership, not symbolic gestures or special deals crafted to accommodate the ambition of one individual,” it declared.

The camp urged opposition parties to concentrate on building a credible national coalition that can defeat Tinubu.

He warned that embracing the southern zoning story could benefit the President’s re-election prospects.

“Beating an incumbent president requires realism, not romanticism; strategy, not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory,” he added. The opposition has got to decide if it wants to make an emotional statement or actually win power.”