The camp of former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has cautioned 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 argument for the 2027 opposition ticket to come from the South as self-defeating and intellectually dishonest.
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 naïve for the opposition to do the same without considering electoral realities, Sanni said.
Politics, he said, should be based on strategy, coalition building and electoral calculations, not on 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. No such outcome has ever been recorded in the political history of Nigeria.
“No sitting president has been defeated by an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc. “To insist otherwise is to enter the contest already defeated.”
The Atiku camp insisted that the moral case for Southern zoning does not hold up to scrutiny.
It read: “By 2027, the South would have held presidential power for about 18 years in the Fourth Republic and the North for about 10 years. If the South remains in power for another four years, the gap becomes even wider.
“It becomes difficult therefore 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 on the part of some political actors.
He condemned those who jettisoned the zoning principle in the aftermath of 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 only sacred when they are in accord with personal ambition.”
The statement said the South-East’s desire to produce a president was legitimate and should be taken seriously at the national level.
But it sounded a cautionary note 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 urged opposition parties to focus on forming a credible national coalition that can beat Tinubu.
He cautioned that embracing the southern zoning story could help the President’s re-election prospects.
“Beating an incumbent president takes realism not romanticism, strategy not sentiment, honesty not selective memory,” he added. The opposition has got to choose whether it wants to make an emotional statement or actually win power.”
