Atiku Hands Victory To Tinubu In 2027 Presidential Election

By Adesina Soyooye 

African Democratic Congress, ADC, Presidential hopeful in 2027, Atiku Abubakar, has handed President Bola Tinubu victory in the upcoming election.

In a statement, Atiku, in a bid to rubbish the zoning of the Presidential ticket for 2027 by a number of the opposition parties, to the South said that with a Southern candidate, President Tinubu would win the election effortlessly, almost. 

According to him, no candidate from Southern Nigeria, the same  Zone as the incumbent President Bola Tinubu will be able to beat him (Tinubu).

What to do? What is the solution? 

Atiku said the opposition can only hold a candle to Tinubu if a Northern Candidate confronts him. 

At least, three opposition parties – Nigeria Democratic Congress, NDC, Labour Party, LP, and the Social Democratic Party, SDP, have zoned their tickets to the South.

But in the statement signed by his spokesperson, Olusola Sanni, Atiku slammed opposition parties against embracing, according to him, “a self-defeating and intellectually dishonest narrative that insists the 2027 presidential ticket must be zoned exclusively to the South.” Politics must be driven by strategy, coalition-building, and hard electoral arithmetic—not emotional talking points or selective moral arguments, he posited.

Atiku: “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.

“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.”

He accused some political actors of selective memory and opportunism, especially, those who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 following the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, only to pretend now that it is a sacred political doctrine.

His words: “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.”

Probably with Peter Obi in mind, he  agreed that  the Southeast’s aspiration for  a president from its Zone is legitimate and deserving of serious national engagement, but  warned against reducing that aspiration to “transactional political bargaining.” 

Atiku: “The Southeast deserves a sustainable and credible pathway to national leadership—not symbolic tokenism or bespoke arrangements tailored to satisfy one individual’s ambition. 

“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.”