“Avoid Playing Self-Defeatist Politics” – Atiku Warns Opposition

Atiku Abubakar

The camp of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has fired a warning at opposition political actors. His media aide, Olusola Sanni, recently had his say via a press statement, and Nigerians have been reacting.

Describing the push for a southern opposition candidate as self-defeating and intellectually dishonest, he stated that insisting on zoning the 2027 presidential ticket to the South would amount to entering the contest already defeated.

He concluded by saying that Nigerian political history offers no precedent for an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc as a sitting president ever unseating that president.

His words, “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.

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.

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

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.

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