The History, the Convention, the Breach of 2011, and the Debt the North Must Now Collect
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a question that the political class in Nigeria has debated, dodged, weaponised and selectively invoked for more than three decades. It is the question of rotational presidency. And it is a question that, in 2027, can no longer be answered with evasion, elite bargaining, or the convenient amnesia of those who benefited from its violation.
The North wants the presidency in 2027. That demand is not tribal sentiment dressed in constitutional language. It is a documented, historically grounded, arithmetically precise claim rooted in a compact that the political establishment of this republic voluntarily entered, knowingly broke, and has never honestly repaired.
The debt is real. The debt is documented. And in 2027, the debt is due.
WHERE THE IDEA WAS BORN
The concept of rotating the Nigerian presidency between the North and the South emerged from the wreckage of the Third Republic and the fury of June 1993. When General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the freest election in Nigeria’s history and denied Moshood Abiola his mandate, the country lost the last residue of inter-regional trust that had survived military rule. Out of that convulsion, the architects of the 1998 and 1999 transition drew a lesson impossible to ignore: Nigeria could not survive another presidential selection that the losing region experienced as an act of ethnic conquest.
The Peoples Democratic Party, founded at its historic Jos convention in August 1998, embedded the answer directly into its founding framework. Zoning was not an afterthought. It was a load-bearing pillar: the presidency would rotate between North and South, with each zone holding the office for two terms before handing it to the other. It was a compact. It was voluntary. It was binding.
WHY IT WAS NEVER MADE CONSTITUTIONAL
The question opponents invariably raise is this: if the arrangement is so sacred, why was it not written into the Constitution? The answer is not that the framers did not try. At the National Constitutional Conference of 1994 and 1995, rotational presidency was a central subject of deliberation. It ultimately failed on a fundamental objection: that enshrining rotation by geopolitical zone would create a hierarchy of citizens, with some Nigerians constitutionally disqualified from the highest office by region of origin rather than individual qualification.
The 1999 Constitution instead included Section 14, Sub-section 3, the Federal Character principle, mandating that government composition reflect Nigeria’s federal character. That provision is broad but does not mandate presidential rotation with the specificity the PDP’s zoning formula provided. The exclusion was not a dismissal of zoning. It was a decision to leave its administration to the political parties. The PDP accepted that responsibility at its founding and governed the presidency on that basis for the first twelve years of the Fourth Republic.
The absence of a law does not dissolve a compact. It merely tests whether the parties to it have the honour to keep it.
WHY CONVENTION IS AS BINDING AS LAW
Nigeria’s opponents of zoning say: it is not in the Constitution. What they never say is that convention in constitutional democracies is not a lesser form of obligation. The British Constitution, under which Nigeria’s earliest democratic traditions were formed, is built almost entirely on convention. None of its most fundamental arrangements are codified in a single document. All are treated as absolutely binding because a political system that breaks its own conventions destroys the trust on which all governance rests.
One clarification must be made, because it is frequently distorted by those who argue in bad faith. It is a complete fallacy to suggest that the zoning convention makes it mandatory for any president to serve two full terms of eight years, or that it overrides the constitutional right of the electorate to vote against an incumbent. The electorate’s sovereign power to remove any sitting president is absolute and beyond the reach of any party convention whatsoever.
What the zoning compact provides is categorically different. It allocates the rotational opportunity to contest the presidency to a region, not a guaranteed tenure to an individual. The turn belongs to the zone, not the person. When Yar’Adua died in office after barely three years, the North lost its president. It did not lose its zoning entitlement. Conflating the two, as Jonathan’s defenders consistently did, is an intellectual dishonesty that the record must not permit to stand unchallenged.
2010: THE NORTH ASSEMBLED ITS ELDERS
When President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died in office on the fifth of May 2010, having served barely three years, the constitutional transition to Jonathan was clear and the North accepted it. What the North did not accept was Jonathan’s ambition to contest the 2011 presidential election in his own right. That ambition was not a constitutional question. It was a zoning question. The presidency had been zoned to the North. Yar’Adua’s death interrupted the occupancy. It did not extinguish the entitlement.
The Northern Political Leaders Forum, the NPLF, led by the formidable Malam Adamu Ciroma, assembled the heavyweights of Northern democratic tradition and issued a formal demand. Signatories included Dr. Iyorchia Ayu, Alhaji Lawal Kaita, Alhaji Bello Kirfi, Ambassador Yahaya Kwande, and Bashir Yusuf Ibrahim. These were not fringe voices. They gave the PDP a two-week ultimatum to respect its own zoning formula. Their argument was unassailable: Jonathan had no right under the PDP’s rotation formula to contest in 2011. To allow him to do so was to rewrite the compact retroactively in favour of the party that had already benefited most from it.
The North did not come to beg. It came to collect what had been agreed. There is a profound difference between a supplicant and a creditor.
The NPLF met face to face with the South-South Peoples Assembly, led by Chief Edwin Clark, at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja. The meeting lasted two hours. It ended in deadlock. Clark’s group insisted Jonathan must exercise his constitutional right to contest. The Northern leaders were unmoved. The communique that emerged was a masterpiece of diplomatic evasion. No compact had been restored. Jonathan went on to contest, to win the primary, and to win the 2011 election. The zoning compact was interred without ceremony.
ATIKU: THE NORTH’S CONSENSUS CANDIDATE, THEN AND NOW
There is a detail history must not be permitted to swallow. When the NPLF moved from blocking Jonathan to presenting a Northern alternative, the candidate it screened and announced as the North’s consensus choice for the PDP primaries was Atiku Abubakar. The same Northern political establishment that staked its institutional credibility on the defence of the zoning compact formally identified Atiku as its standard-bearer. That history does not expire. It compounds.
It is worth noting with deliberateness that Dr. Iyorchia Ayu, one of the signatories to the NPLF’s zoning defence document, later served as National Chairman of the PDP during Atiku’s 2023 presidential campaign. The man who signed his name to the North’s zoning claim subsequently chaired the party that carried Atiku’s candidacy. The continuity is not coincidental. It is constitutional memory in action.
THE ARITHMETIC OF THE DEBT
Let the numbers speak, because numbers do not lie and numbers do not negotiate. At the moment Jonathan declared his intention to contest in 2011, the South had accumulated approximately ten years of the presidency. The North had accumulated barely three. Jonathan contested, won, and governed until 2015. By the time he left office, the South stood at approximately fourteen years. The North remained at barely three.
But that is not where Jonathan’s ambition stopped. In 2015 he sought re-election, having already inflicted an approximately eight-year deficit on the North. Had he succeeded, the damage to the zoning compact would have moved beyond repair within any politically viable timeframe. A single man’s ambition, unchecked and twice indulged, would have reduced the North’s constitutional entitlement to a historical footnote. He was stopped by the ballot, by the coalition Buhari assembled, and by the fury of a Northern electorate that had watched its entitlement treated as a negotiable inconvenience twice in four years.
Now here is where the hypocrisy reaches its most breathtaking altitude. Many of the voices loudest today in their attacks on Atiku Abubakar were the very voices that stood at Edwin Clark’s shoulder and defended Jonathan’s breach in 2011 and campaigned for its extension in 2015. They present themselves today as neutral arbiters of democratic principle. That is not a political position. That is a performance. It must be named for what it is: hypocrisy of the highest order, dressed in the borrowed language of constitutionalism.
Buhari’s two terms from 2015 to 2023 narrowed the gap: the North reached approximately eleven years against the South’s fourteen. But with Tinubu completing his first term in 2027, the South will stand at approximately eighteen years and the North at approximately eleven. A deficit of seven years, still carried entirely by the North, traceable in a direct and unbroken line to the breach of 2011.
If zoning is valid when it benefits the South, it is valid when it demands a reckoning from the North. It cannot be both sacred and optional depending on who is counting.
THE 2027 VERDICT
Some say zoning is dead. Some say the Federal Character principle supersedes party convention. Some say the best candidate should win regardless of region. Each of these arguments is available to those who made, benefited from, or refused to repair the breach of 2011. None address the central fact: a compact was made, a compact was broken, and the breaking produced a deficit that has never been acknowledged, let alone corrected.
Atiku Abubakar, the man the Northern political establishment chose as its consensus candidate in 2011, who carries a documented mandate endorsed by the very elders who wrote their names to Nigeria’s most consequential zoning defence document, is the most credible vessel for the North’s 2027 claim. The ADC coalition he anchors, the CPC defectors it has absorbed, the cross-regional alliances forming around his candidacy: these are the convergence of a historical claim, a documented mandate, and a structural opportunity that may not present itself again.
The compact was made in 1998. It was broken in 2011. The bill has been accumulating for fourteen years. In 2027, it falls due.
Zoning is not a favour the South grants to the North. It is a debt the republic owes to its own founding agreement.
Nothing can circumvent it.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
11 May 2026
