For many Nigerians, Atiku Abubakar shouldn’t run for president in 2027. Two reasons come up most: age and zoning. But neither is the real barrier, Olu Fasan argues. Atiku’s problem is Atiku himself.
At 80 by January 2027, Atiku would be old. Yet Fasan points out that health matters more than age. “President Donald Trump will be 80 in June this year, yet one could hardly tell by his energy.” President Biden, by contrast, “at just over 80, was tripping at public events.” And Atiku “appears a lot healthier than President Bola Tinubu, who is supposedly just 74.” So, Fasan concludes, “Atiku could be president at 80, provided he is physically and mentally fit to do the job.
Zoning matters for stability, but Nigeria has no constitutional power rotation. Tinubu ran in 2023 on a Muslim-Muslim ticket and a “Yoruba lokan” platform, ignoring calls for a Christian president or an Igbo turn. He still won, narrowly. “If Atiku gets the votes and becomes president next year, heavens will not fall,” Fasan writes. Southern leaders who opposed Tinubu now visit him; the same would happen with Atiku. “That’s the nature of politics in Nigeria: success has many fathers!”
Atiku, Fasan says, “lacks what it takes to win a national election.” Unlike Tinubu, who spent years building a South-West base and allying with the North-West, Atiku has “been jumping from party to party and burning political bridges
The numbers tell the story. In 2007, Atiku won 2.6mn votes, mostly from the South-West. In 2019, he got 11.26mn nationally but only 5.5mn from the entire North, versus Buhari’s 13mn. In 2023, he won 6.98mn total, with 5.2mn in the North — fewer than Tinubu’s 5.6mn. Peter Obi took just over 2mn in the North.
“So, where is Atiku’s political base? He simply lacks Buhari’s cult personality in the North.” To win, he must dominate the North and pick up sizeable Southern support. In 2019 he did better in the South than the North. By 2023, he “massively haemorrhaged votes in the South” after ignoring calls for power shift and refusing to placate his party’s Southern wing.
“Atiku may be a successful businessman, but he lacks political judgement,” Fasan writes. That showed in his recent Arise TV interview with Charles Aniagolu. Asked why he wants to run at 80, Atiku said governors need his tutelage.
“Take the cases of the state governors… failing woefully simply because at the apex they do not have a capable and experienced president to guide them.” He called Goodluck Jonathan “a decent young man but also inexperienced.”
Fasan finds this arrogant. Atiku ran for president in 1993 at 46, became governor at 52, yet now calls leaders in their late 40s and 50s “young and inexperienced.” He claims he learned under Obasanjo, but “fell out spectacularly with him” and was stripped of duties in 2003.
“Isn’t it a God complex… for Atiku to think that state governors, who have their own mandates, would learn under his tutelage?” If 2027 is his last attempt and he wins, he’d serve one term “showing state governors how to govern.” With a record as “a serial defector and a perennial presidential aspirant,” Fasan argues, Atiku “lacks a track record of sound political judgements… worth embracing.”
Fasan repeats: “The chink in Atiku’s armour is not age or zoning; it’s his perennial failure to win overwhelmingly in the North and sufficiently in the South to clinch the presidency.”
If Atiku gets the ADC ticket, “he has his work cut out to overcome his electability challenge.” His seventh attempt carries high stakes. “Yet, without a miracle, it risks being yet another jinxed attempt