Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Let us begin with a correction of geography.
The argument being prosecuted daily against Atiku Abubakar’s 2027 presidential aspiration on zoning grounds is not taking place on AIT or Channels. It is taking place on Arise Television, in the studio where Dr. Reuben Abati, Rufai Oseni, Ojy Okpe, and Ayo Mairo-Ese co-anchor one of the most watched political morning programmes in Nigeria. The distinction matters because Arise Television presents itself as a platform of analytical rigour, international standard, and institutional seriousness. It is precisely that self-presentation that makes what is happening on that programme so deeply troubling.
A network that markets itself as Nigeria’s answer to CNN or BBC is daily propagating one of the most intellectually dishonest arguments in the history of Nigerian political commentary. And it is doing so with graphs, with gravitas, and with the full production values of a well-funded television operation.
THE FALLACY STATED PLAINLY
The argument is this: count every Nigerian head of state from independence to the present, including every soldier who seized power at gunpoint, aggregate them under regional labels, arrive at a number that makes the North look dominant, and use that number to argue that Atiku Abubakar should stand aside.
This is not history. This is arithmetic deployed as a weapon. The methodology changes to fit the conclusion. When the democratic count from 1999 is applied, it produces a result that favours the North East’s claim. So the democratic count is abandoned and a wider net is cast, one that treats coup plotters and elected presidents as equivalent democratic units, inflating the North’s tally to whatever number justifies the programme’s predetermined position.
This is not journalism. This is a conclusion in search of a methodology.
THE COUP PLOTTER QUESTION
Did anyone stop a southerner from staging a coup in those years? Was there a law that said only northerners could plot a barracks takeover? Was there a constitutional provision reserving military adventurism for one region? Was the firing squad reserved exclusively for northern officers who failed?
The answer to every question is no.
The coup was available to anyone with the nerve, the network, and the willingness to die if it went wrong. Your life was the price of admission. Failure meant a wall and a blindfold and men with rifles. If more northerners staged successful coups, it was not because the South was excluded from the gamble. It was because more northerners chose to take it. The South produced its own coup plotters. Ironsi was not a northerner. The officers of January 15, 1966 were not exclusively northern. The barracks, in those years, was a national institution with national ambitions and national casualties.
So here is the question the Morning Show has never asked, because asking it demolishes the entire framework of its argument: why should the North’s democratic rotation claim in 2027 be reduced by the actions of military officers who seized power decades ago, when the South had equal opportunity to seize that same power and chose, in many instances, not to? You are counting years the North never chose. You are crediting the North with power it never asked for through democratic means. You are using the personal decisions of individual soldiers as democratic rotation turns for an entire region. And then you are telling that region to wait.
A soldier who stages a coup does not represent his region. He represents himself, his co-conspirators, and the barrel of the gun. The North is not responsible for who staged coups. The North is responsible for who it elects. Judge it by that standard, apply it consistently, and the argument against Atiku Abubakar in 2027 does not survive its first minute of honest examination.
What did military governance actually deliver to the zones that produced military rulers? Abacha presided over one of the most brutal and kleptocratic regimes in Nigeria’s history. His governance did not develop the North. It looted the nation. Babangida’s years are remembered not for northern development but for structural adjustment, political annulment, and institutional decay. To count those years as the North’s turn is not only logically incoherent. It is an insult to northern Nigerians who suffered under military rule just as southern Nigerians did. The rotation ledger of this republic starts in 1999. It admits only democratically elected presidents. Everything before that belongs to a different, repudiated era.
THE OJY OKPE DOCUMENTARY AND THE ABATI STANDARD
On her What’s Trending segment, Ojy Okpe ran a documentary in which she began counting Nigeria’s heads of state from 1960. Any count that begins in 1960 necessarily includes every soldier who seized power at gunpoint across six decades of military adventurism — men who were not elected, not mandated, not chosen by any constituency. It bundles them under regional labels on and presents the resulting tally as a democratic equity calculation. It is not. It is a methodology designed to arrive at a predetermined number. The question she did not ask before producing it is the question at the centre of this entire conversation: what is the democratic basis for counting a coup?
Ayo Mairo-Ese co-anchors the same programme, and the entire panel shares responsibility for the analytical standard it allows to go unchallenged before millions of viewers.
Dr. Reuben Abati is, at his best, one of the most formidable political analysts this country has produced. His command of Nigeria’s political history is wide. His capacity for surgical observation is, when he chooses to deploy it, genuinely formidable. A man of his demonstrable knowledge is capable of asking the coup-plotter question this essay has asked. He is capable of drawing the 2010 versus 2011 distinction this essay has drawn. The Morning Show’s viewers deserve that standard from a broadcaster of his calibre. On this specific question, it has not yet been delivered.
THE JONATHAN QUESTION THAT EXPOSES EVERYTHING
Jonathan became president in 2010 by constitutional succession when Yar’Adua died. Nobody disputes that. That is not the disruption.
THE DISRUPTION IS 2011. NOT 2010.
Jonathan did not accidentally become a presidential candidate in 2011. He filed nomination papers. He conducted a primary campaign. He toured the country. He built a coalition. He received the PDP’s presidential ticket. He stood before the Nigerian electorate and asked for a mandate. How does deliberate political agency, exercised across eighteen months of active, well-resourced electioneering, become an accident in the retelling? It does not become an accident. It is made into one, retrospectively and conveniently, by analysts whose conclusions were determined before the analysis began.
The Northern Political Leaders Forum did not imagine the rotation covenant. Alhaji Adamu Ciroma did not fabricate his public declaration that the North must complete its cycle. The covenant was real. It was publicly invoked. It was publicly violated. And the violation has never been acknowledged, remedied, or repaid.
THE ATIKU RECORD RUFAI OSENI WILL NOT DISCUSS
The charge against Atiku Abubakar is this: that he invokes zoning when it suits him and abandons it when it does not.
This charge is the precise opposite of the documented record.
In 2007, Atiku contested because it was the North’s turn. In 2011, he did two things that the Morning Show will not discuss. He contested the PDP presidential primary against Jonathan, making his position clear from inside the process. And when Jonathan prevailed in that primary, Atiku did not simply accept the covenant violation and move on. He took the zoning matter to court, challenging whether Jonathan could legitimately contest given the PDP’s own zoning rules. He lost in court because zoning is not enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution. But the principle he defended in 2011 is the same principle he invokes in 2027. Having lost in primary and in court, he did not contest the general election. He stood down. The man accused of abandoning zoning when inconvenient went to court to defend it, contested the primary on its terms, and stepped aside when both avenues closed. Where was the Morning Show’s outrage in 2011 when the Northern elders were publicly declaring that the rotation covenant was being broken?
In 2015, Atiku contested the primary because it was the North’s turn. He did not emerge. He did not contest the general election. In 2019, he contested on the clearest possible grounds: the South owes the North a deficit never repaid. The argument that Buhari’s eight years cleared that deficit does not survive examination. The rotation covenant assigned Yar’Adua’s slot to the North for a full eight years. He served less than three. Jonathan consumed the remaining northern years and added five additional southern years on top. Buhari’s tenure restored what Yar’Adua’s truncated term left incomplete. It could not restore the additional years Jonathan added to the South’s column beyond its agreed slot. That deficit was compound, not simple, and has never been honestly calculated by those who benefited most from creating it.
In 2023 and in 2027, the deficit remains unpaid. The South will have governed for seventeen years against the North’s eleven. Not one moment in this record supports the charge of opportunistic zoning.
Beyond zoning, Atiku Abubakar contests because he believes he has something specific to offer Nigeria. He has watched the naira collapse, the markets cry, and the national dream shrink. He has an economic vision, a governing blueprint, and relationships with international partners that no other Nigerian presidential aspirant can match. He will contest on that conviction regardless of what any morning programme broadcasts about him.
Atiku Abubakar contested in 2007, 2019, and 2023. He will contest in 2027. He contested each time because the North’s rotation claim was active, documented, and unresolved. He will contest in 2027 for the same reason, compounded by the specific and historically grounded claim of the North East, a zone that has never produced a civilian president under any presidential republic in Nigeria’s history. If he emerges as the ADC candidate, no television programme, no morning show analysis, and no documentary that begins its head-of-state count in 1960 will determine the outcome. The Nigerian electorate will.
The zoning argument is settled by arithmetic. The North East’s claim is settled by history. And Atiku Abubakar’s candidacy is anchored in the conviction of a man who has built, governed, and prepared for the opportunity to serve Nigeria at its highest level. Morning shows do not elect presidents. The people do. And the people have already made up their minds.
A WORD TO THE MORNING SHOW
The Nigerian public is entitled to ask the question journalism school teaches in its first semester: where does a broadcaster’s analysis end and their political preference begin? On the subject of Atiku Abubakar and the 2027 zoning argument, the Morning Show’s pattern of analysis points in one direction with a consistency that neutral inquiry rarely produces. Every methodology inflates the count against the North. Every historical period selected produces the same conclusion. What this programme produces on this subject, day after day, is a single destination reached by multiple roads.
The credibility of journalism is its most valuable and most fragile asset. Once an audience decides that a programme’s analysis is indistinguishable from political preference, that credibility is not easily restored. That currency is trust. And trust, once spent, does not refund easily.
Atiku Abubakar has been tested across five presidential contests. He has been fought by incumbents deploying the full apparatus of state power and challenged by opponents far more formidable than a morning television programme with a predetermined conclusion.
He is still standing.
The millions across the North who watched the 2011 covenant violation happen do not need a television programme to reinterpret what they witnessed. The people know the truth. The people have made up their minds. No orchestration can change what the country already understands.
The debt is real.
The debtor is known.
The due date is 2027.
And Atiku Abubakar is not petitioning anyone.
He is coming to collect.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
14 May 2026
