On Stolen Cycles, Compounding Injustice, and Why the North East’s Claim Stands Above All Arguments in 2027
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a lie circulating in Nigerian political conversation so brazen, so architecturally dishonest, that it requires not a rebuttal but a demolition.
The lie goes like this: Buhari served eight years for the North. The North has had its turn. Now the South, whether by reelecting Tinubu or by handing power to the South East, is entitled to the next cycle.
It sounds reasonable. It is dressed in the clothing of fairness. It uses the language of rotation and balance and federal equity.
It is a lie. A calculated, deliberate, historically illiterate lie.
And I will dismantle it brick by brick.
Begin at the Beginning. Start with Obasanjo.
- Olusegun Obasanjo of the South West assumes the presidency. He serves two full terms, eight uninterrupted, complete, constitutionally maximal years. From 1999 to 2007, the South holds the presidency in full. No truncation. No interruption. Eight years, consumed entirely, banked permanently.
In 2007, the rotation turns. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of the North West assumes office. The understanding, spoken and unspoken, formal and informal, is that the North will now serve its own eight years. One term to Yar’Adua, one to another northerner, and the ledger balances.
Yar’Adua dies.
This is tragedy, not politics. A man died. A nation mourned. And in the constitutional mechanics that followed, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, a southerner, a South South man, completes the remainder of the northern term.
That completion was constitutionally correct.
What happened next was morally catastrophic.
Jonathan Should Have Known When to Stop.
When Yar’Adua died and Jonathan assumed the presidency to complete that term, the honourable, the statesmanlike, the nationally conscious thing to do was to allow the North to complete its cycle. Jonathan’s duty, to nation, to covenant, to the federal compact that holds this country’s centrifugal tensions in check, was to complete that term, stabilise the country, and step aside.
The North’s eight years had been disrupted by death, not exhausted by tenure. The distinction matters enormously. A man whose meal was knocked from his hands by an accident has not eaten. You do not tell him he has had his dinner.
Jonathan chose otherwise. He ran. He won. He served a full additional term, 2011 to 2015. And in doing so, he did not merely win a political contest. He compounded a pre-existing injury. He converted the North’s misfortune, the death of their president, into a permanent political loss. He took the sympathy the nation extended for a tragedy and weaponised it into a mandate.
By 2015, the South had accumulated: Obasanjo’s full eight years, plus Jonathan’s completion of Yar’Adua’s term, plus Jonathan’s own full term. The North had accumulated the fraction of Yar’Adua’s years before death claimed him.
The deficit was enormous. It was architectural. It was deliberate.
Then Came Buhari. And Here Is Where the Second Lie Is Buried.
In 2015, Muhammadu Buhari defeats Jonathan. The North reclaims the presidency. He serves two terms, 2015 to 2023. Eight years.
And the political establishment of the South now points to those eight years and says: “The North has been settled. Balance is restored. Our turn.”
This is the second lie. And it is more dangerous than the first because it masquerades as mathematics.
Buhari’s eight years did not balance the ledger. It was the North’s first full cycle, nothing more, nothing less.
After Obasanjo’s eight years, the North was entitled to eight years. It received three fractured years under Yar’Adua. Buhari’s eight years represents the North finally, after extraordinary delay and disruption, completing what should have been its first full cycle.
It erases nothing. It compensates for nothing. The debt of the Jonathan years, those stolen presidential terms that the South consumed beyond its entitlement, remains unpaid on every page of the national ledger.
If I owe you ten thousand naira, and I finally pay you the five thousand I originally borrowed, I have not squared our account. I have merely stopped making it worse, for a moment.
And now the same hands that picked your pocket are presenting you with a receipt for the coins they returned, asking you to sign it as proof of settlement.
The South wants to not only walk away from the remaining debt. It wants to resume borrowing. And it wants your signature confirming you were never owed anything.
And Now, The Crowning Audacity.
In 2026, two arguments are being made simultaneously, by different southern factions, with the same underlying logic:
The first says: reelect Tinubu. A sitting southern president deserves continuity. Give him his second term.
The second says: after Tinubu, give power to the South East. They have never had it. It is their turn.
Both arguments, whether intended or not, arrive at the same destination: the North’s deficit widens further. Whether Tinubu gets eight years or the South East gets eight years after him, the stolen years of the Jonathan era remain unacknowledged, uncompensated, and increasingly unreachable.
Every year that passes without restoring the North’s equity is a year that makes restoration more difficult to argue for and more easy to dismiss. The strategy of the deficit-deniers is not just to win the next election. It is to run out the moral clock entirely, to create so much temporal distance between the crime and the conversation that the crime disappears into the noise of history.
They are counting on the North’s patience outlasting the North’s memory.
We will not allow that.
If Zoning Is the Language Being Spoken, Then Let Us Be Precise.
If the principle of rotational equity is what governs this conversation, and it should, because no other principle can hold a federation of this complexity together, then the honest application of that principle yields an unambiguous conclusion:
It is the turn of the North. Not the South. Not in 2027.
And within the North, when the internal geometry of rotation is applied with equal honesty, the answer sharpens further: it is the turn of the North East.
The North West has produced Yar’Adua. It has produced Buhari. Two presidents, one truncated, one complete. The North Central has produced none. The North East has produced none.
Atiku Abubakar is from Adamawa State. North East. A man who has waited with a patience that lesser politicians would have abandoned decades ago. A man whose INEC-certified 6,984,520 votes in 2023, achieved despite the full machinery of federal power deployed against him, demonstrate not the hunger of a political opportunist but the endurance of a man who understands that his moment is not manufactured. It is earned.
It is earned by the mathematics of equity. It is earned by the deficit that no one in the South has had the courage to acknowledge. It is earned by the covenant that Jonathan broke, that the PDP establishment celebrated, and that the Nigerian people have not forgotten.
Closing: What I Have Is Arithmetic.
I am a southerner. I say this not as a disclaimer but as the central credential of my argument. I have no zone to avenge, no ethnic account to balance, no regional pride demanding satisfaction.
What I have is arithmetic. And arithmetic does not lie.
The North’s years were stolen. Buhari’s tenure restored the first debt, the first cycle, nothing more. The Jonathan surplus remains on the books, accruing moral interest every day that another southern administration sits in Aso Rock.
Tinubu’s reelection worsens the deficit — pushing the gap to 21 years and 1 month for the South against barely 11 for the North.
A South East presidency worsens the deficit— widening it further to 25 years and 1 month for the South against the same barely 11 for the North, a chasm so deep by then that justice will have no address left to deliver it to.
Only Atiku, North East, proven, pan-Nigerian, constitutionally legitimate, begins the work of repair.
Zoning, if it means anything at all, means this. If it means anything less, it means nothing. And those who invoke it selectively, who wield it as a weapon when it serves them and bury it when it indicts them, they are not advocates of equity.
They are the equity they have been stealing from.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
13 May 2026
