A Southern Conscience Speaks to a Northern Wound
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Let me tell you who I am before I tell you what I know.
I am a southerner. Yoruba, from the ancient red earth of Ekiti. My people did not wait in 2011. My people did not have their political covenant shredded and their presidential years consumed by the appetite of others. I carry no personal wound from what was done to the North in that infamous season of betrayal.
And that is precisely why you should listen to me.
Because when a man with nothing to gain stands up and says this was wrong,that is not politics. That is conscience. And conscience, in a nation where it has become a scarce commodity, is the only currency still worth spending.
So I will spend mine today.
The crime happened in daylight.
The year was 2011. The PDP’s zoning arrangement , imperfect in its informality, perhaps, but real in its moral weight, was detonated by the same establishment that had sworn by it when it served their interests. A political covenant, understood by every serious actor in that room, was set aside so that a southern president who had already completed a southern term could return for a fresh one.
The North’s turn was stolen.
Not misplaced. Not delayed by circumstance. Stolen with planning, with coordination, with the full machinery of political power deployed against a people who had trusted the process enough to wait.
I watched it happen. Many of us in the South watched it happen. And the honest ones among us ,those who had not traded their consciences for ministerial slots or party patronage , knew it was wrong even as the celebration went up around us.
The arithmetic was not complicated: the South had accumulated almost 10 years of the presidency by 2011. The North had managed three , cut short not by any failure of governance but by the death of a president, a tragedy that the nation converted into a political opportunity. When Jonathan, already a sitting southern president completing a southern term, reached for a fresh mandate of his own, he did not just win an election.
He broke a covenant.
And the South celebrated.
I did not celebrate. I could not.
Jonathan did not merely contest the presidency , he stole a turn. The North’s season had come, and he knew it. Ciroma sounded the warning; the elders spoke with one voice; Atiku dragged the injustice before the courts. The courts looked away. And in that moment of judicial abandonment, the South calcified into a posture of indifference , unmoved, unapologetic, and impervious to the North’s entirely legitimate cry for fair play.
Now comes the audacity that I refuse to absorb in silence.
The very political class that engineered that betrayal , that feasted on the North’s stolen years, that built influence and access and structural advantage on the proceeds of that original heist , has now rediscovered the language of zoning.
They have bathed. They have changed their clothes. They have rehearsed the vocabulary of equity and balance and federal character. And they have arrived in 2026 with the straightest of faces to tell the North that it must form an orderly queue behind the reelection of Tinubu for second term and some making case for South East while the wound they personally inflicted is still open and bleeding.
I am a southerner. And I am here to tell you: this is not argument. This is organised robbery asking for a receipt.
The marginalisation of the South East and indeed of the North East , is genuine, and I do not diminish either grievance. Every zone locked out of presidential power through the full cycles of this republic’s democratic life carries a claim this nation must one day face with honesty and resolve. But 2027 is not that day. 2027 belongs to the settlement of a debt already incurred, a turn already stolen, an injury already inflicted on the North. Justice is not a competition. It is a queue. And no queue is served by skipping the one who has been waiting longest
Justice has a queue. And that queue was not written by the North. It was written by history. It was written by the very covenant these men destroyed in 2011.
You do not skip the man who was shot to attend to the man with a bruise. You do not tell the victim of organised theft that his wounds must wait while the thieves negotiate the order of compensation among themselves.
Understand what makes this moment different.
I support Atiku Abubakar not because I have surrendered my southern identity, but because I have refused to surrender my political conscience to it.
His 6,984,520 INEC-certified votes in 2023 ,the single largest individual opposition total in that election, cast against a combined anti-Tinubu verdict that reached 14.5 million , represent something more than electoral arithmetic. They represent a nation’s refusal to normalise injustice. They represent the stubborn insistence of millions of Nigerians that the covenant broken in 2011 must be restored before new claims can be processed. That Obi and Kwankwaso have since found their separate destinations does not dissolve that verdict. It only clarifies whose hands are best positioned to convert it.
A southerner who understands this is not a traitor to his region. He is a patriot to his nation.
There is a difference. Nigeria desperately needs people who know the difference.
And so I say this to the covenant breakers directly.
You broke the agreement. You consumed the years. You celebrated the theft. And now you want the moral authority to adjudicate who gets what next.
No.
Your opinions on zoning equity are not welcome until you have answered for your violation of zoning equity. Your PowerPoint presentations on rotational presidency carry no weight until you acknowledge the rotation you aborted. Your advocacy for the South East or Tinubu reelection,however sincere it may be in isolation ,cannot be separated from the question of why the North’s prior claim remains unsatisfied.
I am a southerner. I am the Director General of The Narrative Force. I have no tribal score to settle in this matter.
I have only a conscience. And my conscience says: the ledger must be balanced before it can be rewritten.
Atiku Abubakar is that balancing.
First things first. Justice before politics. The covenant before the queue.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
13 May 2026
