Atiku’s Camp Cautions Opposition Against Southern Zoning

The camp of the former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has warned opposition parties against zoning their 2027 presidential tickets to the South alone.

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 case for the 2027 opposition ticket to be from the South as 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.

He said politics 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. There is no precedent in the political history of Nigeria for such an outcome.

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

The Atiku camp maintained that the moral argument for southern zoning is not sustainable under examination.

It said, “By 2027, the South would have held presidential power for about 18 years in the Fourth Republic, while the North would have held it for about 10 years. If the South stays in power for another four years, the disparity grows even larger.

“It becomes difficult therefore to understand the justice in an argument that seeks to deepen an already existing imbalance under the guise of equity.”

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

He condemned those who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 following the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, but now presents zoning as a sacred 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,” the statement added.

“Principles are not sacred only when they coincide with personal ambition.”

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 note of caution against reducing the aspiration to “transactional political bargaining.”

“The Southeast needs a sustainable and credible path to national leadership, not symbolic tokenism or bespoke arrangements designed to satisfy one person’s ambition,” it said.

The camp called on opposition parties to concentrate on constructing a credible national coalition that would be able to defeat Tinubu.

He warned that adopting the southern zoning narrative could boost the President’s re-election chances.

“Defeating an incumbent president takes realism, not romanticism, strategy, not sentiment, honesty, not selective memory,” he added. The opposition has to decide whether its aim is to make an emotional statement or to actually win power.”