Atiku Abubakar has faulted the Nigeria Democratic Congress’s decision to zone its presidential ticket to the South, saying the move weakens opposition plans to unseat President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027. He said the arrangement, adopted at the party’s convention at the weekend, was designed to benefit one person and would leave the opposition at a disadvantage if it fields another southern candidate against Tinubu.
In a statement issued yesterday through his media aide, Olusola Sanni, Atiku said Nigeria’s electoral history does not support a southern opposition challenger defeating a sitting president from the South. “It is important to ask how a southern opposition candidate can realistically defeat a southern incumbent president,” he said, adding that “no such electoral outcome had occurred in the country’s political history.”
The former vice president’s objection lands at a delicate moment in the opposition’s efforts to build a unified challenge to Tinubu. The NDC’s zoning formula was adopted to accommodate Peter Obi’s presidential ambition in 2027, with the ticket set aside for the South for one term before power is expected to return to the North in 2031. Under the arrangement, Rabiu Kwankwaso is expected to serve as Obi’s running mate.
Atiku said the politics of sentiment around zoning could cost the opposition a realistic chance of victory. He pointed to the country’s Fourth Republic history, saying that by 2027 the South would have held the presidency for about 18 years, while the North would have occupied it for about 10 years. He also recalled that the zoning principle was effectively set aside in 2011 after the death of former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
The criticism comes as Peter Obi, who defected from the Labour Party to the ADC in December before moving to the NDC two weeks before this article was published, has become the central figure in the party’s latest power-sharing design. The Obidient Movement had said Obi would not accept anything less than the presidential ticket while he was in the ADC and warned the party would lose if he were not fielded, making the latest zoning move one of the clearest signs yet that the NDC has built its strategy around him.
Kwankwaso defended the decision on Monday on Arise Television’s Prime Time programme, saying the party zoned the presidency to the South in the interest of fairness, equity and political stability. “Let me say that I’m so happy that I joined this party, the NDC. I believe so far, so good, we are doing well,” he said, adding that he had met “like minds” in the party, including Seriake Dickson and Obi. He said the leadership agreed to keep the presidency in the South for four years before rotating it back to the North, and that northern members who joined the party accepted the arrangement.
Kwankwaso said the aim was to reduce political tension and clear up the controversy that followed Yar’Adua’s death. Atiku sees the same compromise differently: as a choice that narrows the opposition’s path rather than broadens it. With the NDC now openly tied to a southern ticket and Obi at the center of the arrangement, the real test is whether the opposition can keep its coalition together without giving Tinubu the one advantage Atiku says history has already mapped out.
