The camp of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday fired a warning at opposition political actors, telling them that insisting on zoning the 2027 presidential ticket to the South would amount to entering the contest “already defeated.”
In a statement issued by his media aide, Olusola Sanni, the Atiku camp described the push for a southern opposition candidate as “self-defeating and intellectually dishonest.”
It further argued that Nigerian political history offered no precedent for an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc as a sitting president ever unseating that president.
“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,” the statement said.
