Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
I was watching Prime Time on Arise Television on Monday when Osita Okechukwu asked Atiku Abubakar to abandon the 2027 presidential race and go home. I watched a foundation member of the All Progressives Congress, a man who has drawn breath in that party from its first day, appeal to an opposition candidate in the name of Nigeria’s fledgling democracy. And I watched, in the space of one interview, a case collapse so completely under the weight of its own contradictions that its author never noticed he had buried himself.
Let us walk through the wreckage together, because Okechukwu was kind enough to leave the evidence lying in the open.
HERESY THE FIRST: A LAW THAT IS NOT A LAW BUT BINDS ANYWAY
Pressed on the plain fact that the Constitution of the Federal Republic knows nothing of zoning, Okechukwu conceded it at once. Zoning, he agreed, is not legally binding. It is a convention, he said, that carries only moral weight.
Then, in the very same breath, he demanded that a Nigerian citizen surrender his constitutional right to seek the highest office in obedience to it.
Read that twice, because it is the whole swindle in miniature. A thing that has no force of law cannot create a duty to withdraw. Either zoning binds, in which case show us the section that binds it, or it does not bind, in which case Atiku Abubakar is breaking nothing by contesting, and no man owes anybody an exit from a race the law says he may enter. Okechukwu wants the comfort of calling zoning a mere convention when confronted with the Constitution, and the authority of calling it a commandment when confronting Atiku. It cannot be both. A convention that only one man is required to obey is not a convention. It is a summons with one name on it.
HERESY THE SECOND: THE IGBO MAN PROSECUTING THE IGBO CASE
Here is where the interview stopped being an argument and became a confession.
Osita Okechukwu is a son of the South East. He opened, as courteous men do, by establishing his warmth toward Atiku, recalling how close the former Vice President had been to his late senior colleagues, Dubem Onyia and Chuba Okadigbo. He meant it as a grace note. He did not seem to notice he had just named the murder weapon in his own opening remarks.
For who was Chuba Okadigbo? He was Muhammadu Buhari’s vice-presidential running mate in 2003. He was, in other words, precisely one of the South East consolation prizes that Okechukwu would go on, minutes later, to recite as evidence of his zone being courted and discarded. He mourns Okadigbo the man with real affection, and in the same breath defends the arrangement that wasted Okadigbo the candidate. The name he offered as a token of respect is the first exhibit in the case against everything he came on air to argue.
And when the anchor put to him the awkward matter of the South East’s exclusion from the zoning arrangement in 2023, he did not flinch. He recited the whole roll himself, Okadigbo now joined by the others. Buhari picked Chuba Okadigbo in 2003. Buhari picked Edwin Ume-Ezeoke in 2007. Buhari tried Yoruba land with Tunde Bakare in 2011. And then, he said, in 2015 the APC was formed and Tinubu did what Atiku had done years back.
Sir, do you hear yourself?
You have just recited, from memory and with pride, the complete catalogue of times your zone was shown the vice presidency and never once the presidency. You have named every consolation prize handed to the South East across two decades, and you have offered that roll call as a defence of the system that handed them out. The Okadigbos and the Ume-Ezeokes of your account are not proof that zoning served the East. They are the headstones of every promise it broke. And you said them aloud on Arise Television as though they were a testimonial.
Then came the sentence that should follow Okechukwu for the rest of this campaign. The East, he said, is aligned with the PDP, and it is Atiku that disappointed them.
So the South East has held the presidency for not one day in twenty seven years of this republic, and the man you have found to blame for that is not the party that offered them a vice presidency and lost, not the arrangement that keeps skipping their door, but Atiku Abubakar. A northerner is now responsible for the political homelessness of the South East. Only in the theatre of Nigerian politics could an Igbo statesman appear on national television to argue that his own people’s exclusion is the fault of the one region also locked out with them.
The North East has never produced a President. The North Central has never produced a President. The South East has never produced a President. Three zones, tens of millions of citizens, standing together outside the same locked door. And Okechukwu’s contribution is to turn to the man beside him at that door and tell him to stop knocking.
HERESY THE THIRD: THE PARTISAN CONFESSED IN HIS OWN MOUTH
Okechukwu insisted, more than once, that he speaks not as a partisan but as a patriot worried for the fledgling democracy. Forty years in the business, he told us, not new to this.
We believe the forty years. It is the patriotism that the transcript quietly demolishes.
For in the middle of his lament about the destabilisation of the PDP, Okechukwu let slip the real grief. Had Atiku stepped aside in 2022, he said, someone like Nyesom Wike would have had no need to come to the APC.
There it is. The whole sermon undone by one clause.
The collateral damage Okechukwu mourns is not damage to Nigeria. It is damage to the PDP that happened to profit his own APC. He is not weeping for democracy. He is celebrating a defection, and dressing the celebration as a funeral. By his own testimony, the great beneficiary of the 2022 rupture he blames on Atiku was the party he has belonged to since birth. A man who profits from a fire does not get to appoint himself chief mourner at its ashes. If Wike crossing over to strengthen the APC is a tragedy for Nigerian democracy, Osita, then your own party is the arsonist, and you have spent the interview thanking the flames.
HERESY THE FOURTH: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT VIOLENCE TO THE ROOM
Watch closely now, because this is the ugliest turn, and it is entirely his own.
Throughout the conversation Okechukwu posed as the guardian against ethnic tension, the elder who fears that abandoning zoning will inflame the country. And then, to illustrate the danger, he reached for this image. The worst case, he said, is when you do not yield, and you are going round in the night letting them know that the South has come again.
Going round in the night. Let that phrase sit.
Nobody on that programme had spoken of nights, or of menace, until Okechukwu summoned it. He introduced the spectre of shadowy figures and ethnic fire into a discussion about a lawful election, and then blamed the fire on the man who merely wishes to appear on a ballot. This is the oldest trick in the book of intimidation. Manufacture a threat with your own mouth, attribute it to your opponent’s ambition, and present your opponent’s surrender as the only path to peace. It is not Atiku’s candidacy that carries the language of darkness. It is Okechukwu’s defence of zoning that had to reach for it.
And then the poker table. Atiku, he warned, has called this his last card, and the last card is always dangerous.
We agree it is his last card, Osita. But a ballot is not a weapon, an election is not a game of chance, and a citizen exercising a constitutional right is not a gambler holding something dangerous. The only person who has made this contest sound perilous is the man demanding that one side fold before the cards are even dealt. In every honest democracy the dangerous man is not the one who insists on playing. It is the one who insists his opponent must not.
HERESY THE FIFTH: THE QUOTE THAT ACQUITS THE ACCUSED
Okechukwu’s centrepiece, brandished like a trump, was Atiku’s old line from the Jonathan years. It is either President Jonathan is not a member of the PDP, or he is living in denial of the same principle of zoning which saw his emergence as Vice President in 2007.
Okechukwu believes this quote convicts Atiku of hypocrisy. In truth it acquits him on the spot.
Look at what Atiku actually said. He said Jonathan was bound by zoning because Jonathan was a member of the PDP, a party that had written zoning into its own constitution and was choosing when to enforce it. That is not a man declaring zoning a sacred national law binding on all Nigerians for all time. That is a man saying a party rule binds the members of that party. It is precisely, exactly, word for word, the position Atiku holds today. Zoning is a party arrangement, enforceable within a party, meaningless outside one, and worthless the moment the party applies it to one member and waives it for another.
Far from catching Atiku in a contradiction, Okechukwu has proved his consistency across fifteen years. The man said in the Jonathan era that zoning is a party principle. He says in the Tinubu era that zoning is a party principle. The only thing that has changed is that Okechukwu now finds the consistent answer inconvenient, and hopes you will not read the quote he himself supplied.
SO LET US SPEAK PLAINLY ABOUT THE RESCUE
Strip away the studio courtesies and Okechukwu’s request amounts to this. The strongest opposition candidate in the country should voluntarily leave the field so that a sitting President may run against weaker men. He calls this statesmanship. In every functioning democracy on earth it goes by a shorter name. It is called clearing the pitch for your own side, and Okechukwu, a foundation member of the ruling party, is the last man with standing to request it in the name of neutrality.
Atiku Abubakar is not the threat to this fledgling democracy. He is, at this hour, one of the few things standing between it and the one party state that even Okechukwu pretends to fear. And he does not stand there alone or on his own appetite. He carries the verdict of one million, eight hundred and fifty five thousand, seven hundred and eighty seven members of the African Democratic Congress who queued in the open at that primary and put him where he stands. Behind that number stands a larger and unspoken mandate, that of the three forgotten zones, the North East, the North Central and the South East, that this republic has never once allowed through the door. A democracy is not rescued by the withdrawal of its opposition. It is rescued by the opposition showing up, fully armed with argument and candidate and conviction, and meeting power in the open field where free peoples settle these things, at the ballot.
So here is the reply, and it is not complicated.
Leave Atiku alone, Osita. He is on a rescue mission, and he holds a mandate you cannot talk him out of. Nearly one million, nine hundred thousand of your countrymen have already spoken his name aloud. If you truly believe the South must finish its turn, do not send an errand to the northern challenger asking him to go home. That is not how free men choose a President.
There is a President in this race. His name is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Let him come out from behind his spokesmen and his surrogates and his foundation members, and let him meet Atiku Abubakar in the field. Candidate to candidate. Record against record. Before a free people, on a lawful ballot, on 16 January 2027.
And let the verdict be delivered by the only jury that matters. Not the elders bargaining in the night. Not the foundation members pleading on television. Let the farmer who can no longer reach his farm decide. Let the mother counting what the naira will no longer buy decide. Let the graduate with no work and the patient in the hospital with no doctor decide. The zoning of the elite has fed none of them. Let the Nigerian suffering masses, who have carried this republic on their backs while the powerful argued over its map, be the ones to say who leads them next.
That is what the field is for. And the North is not afraid of it. The only people who fear an election are those who suspect they cannot win one.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
22 July 2026
