Two of Nigeria’s prominent political voices have launched separate but stinging attacks on the Nigeria Democratic Congress over its decision to zone its 2027 presidential ticket to the South, with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo both questioning the wisdom and integrity of the arrangement.

Atiku, who remains the leading presidential aspirant within the African Democratic Congress, was first to publicly challenge the NDC’s zoning resolution, describing the position as self-defeating and intellectually dishonest. Speaking through his media aide, Olusola Sanni, Atiku argued that the opposition’s primary objective must be to defeat President Bola Tinubu in 2027, and that presenting a southern challenger against a sitting southern president ran against every lesson Nigerian electoral history had to offer.

He insisted that no incumbent president had ever been defeated by an opposition candidate from the same geopolitical zone and that the opposition could not afford to build its strategy on sentiments rather than hard electoral arithmetic.

Atiku’s camp also raised the broader question of regional balance in the fourth republic, arguing that by 2027 the South would have occupied the presidency for approximately 18 years compared to around 10 years for the North, making the case for a southern ticket difficult to justify even on equity grounds. The former Vice President’s position is widely understood to be self-serving, given that his own presidential ambition is rooted in a northern candidacy, but his camp framed the intervention as a sincere strategic warning to the entire opposition rather than a factional play.

Keyamo, speaking from within the ruling APC, was considerably less restrained in his language. The minister dismissed the NDC’s zoning decision as an outright attempt to deceive Nigerians, labelling it flatly as political 419. He drew a sharp comparison with former President Goodluck Jonathan’s widely recalled 2011 pledge to serve only a single term a promise that was subsequently abandoned arguing that the NDC’s one-term southern ticket offer carried exactly the same hollow guarantees. Keyamo questioned the enforceability of the arrangement entirely, pointing out that any such internal party resolution could be reversed at any point by the NDC’s own leadership, rendering it worthless as a commitment to voters.

The minister went further, asking pointedly what would stop Peter Obi widely regarded as the likely beneficiary of the southern ticket from either switching parties again after winning or simply using his influence within the NDC to reverse the zoning formula at a later stage. “What happens if Peter Obi changes his party, assuming he wins, or as leader of the NDC he gets the NEC of the party to reverse the decision?” Keyamo asked, describing the entire proposition as nothing more than a joke taken too far.

The NDC pushed back firmly against both criticisms. The party’s National Publicity Secretary, Abdulmumin Abdulsalam, said the mood within the opposition overwhelmingly favoured retaining the presidency in the South, arguing that it made little sense to zone the ticket northward when the country was already living through what he described as the abysmal performance of a northern-backed southern administration. The NDC’s position is that the party’s zoning decision reflects the genuine preference of the majority of opposition stakeholders and not the calculations of any single individual.

The war of words underscores the deepening fault lines within Nigeria’s fragmented opposition as the 2027 election cycle gathers momentum, with the question of who carries the ticket and from which part of the country threatening to become as divisive as the contest against the ruling party itself.