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Rabiu Kwankwaso has offered the most direct explanation yet for why he and other northern politicians in the Nigeria Democratic Congress accepted the party’s decision to zone its 2027 presidential ticket to the South — and the answer reaches back 16 years to the hospital bed where Umaru Musa Yar’adua died and left Nigeria’s power rotation arithmetic permanently tangled.
“We believe the best way to go now is to take it to the south so that we can eliminate the confusion, the confusion that emanated from the death of our brother, our friend, Umar Musa Yar’adua. That actually introduced the confusion into the system,” Kwankwaso said in an interview on Arise TV on Monday.
The argument is structurally simple even if its political implications are anything but. Yar’adua, a northerner, won the presidency in 2007 and died in office in May 2010 having served less than a full term. His deputy, Goodluck Jonathan from the South-South, completed the remainder and then won a full term of his own in 2011 before losing to Muhammadu Buhari in 2015. Buhari served two full terms from 2015 to 2023. Bola Tinubu, a southwesterner, has been president since then.
Read also: Kwankwaso Backs Zoning Of Presidential Ticket To Southern Nigeria
The problem, as Kwankwaso acknowledged, is that none of those facts produce a universally agreed answer to the question of whose turn it is. “One can argue that from 1999 to date, the south has done more years than the north. But it depends on how it suits you,” he said — a remarkably candid admission that the zoning debate is as much about the starting point of the calculation as the calculation itself.
The NDC’s resolution was to pick the starting point that generates the least argument among its own members. “What worked now is counting from Buhari,” Kwankwaso said. Under that framework, Buhari’s eight northern years create an obligation for southern succession — meaning Tinubu is currently serving the South’s first term under this counting methodology, and a second southern term in 2027 would complete the cycle before the North’s turn returns.
It is a clean formula precisely because it ignores everything before 2015, which is also why people who count differently find it convenient rather than principled.
Read also: We Won’t Surrender Party Structure To Kwankwaso – Kano NDC
What makes Kwankwaso’s position politically significant is not the logic he deployed — zoning arguments in Nigeria are rarely about logic — but the concession it represents. A former governor of Kano State, one of the North’s most electorally significant, accepting that the NDC’s presidential ticket goes South is the kind of internal agreement that opposition parties have historically struggled to reach and maintain. He said northern members who joined the NDC did so having already accepted the arrangement. “Almost all of us joining from the north, we accepted. There is no point in fighting,” he said.
Whether that acceptance holds as the 2027 campaign intensifies and the specific southern candidate who will carry the ticket becomes clearer is a different question from whether the agreement exists today. Zoning frameworks in Nigerian politics have a tendency to fracture when the abstract principle collides with the concrete reality of who benefits from it.
Kwankwaso also attempted to lift the conversation above the regional arithmetic entirely, arguing that the noise around zoning was obscuring what actually mattered about the next election. “What is key now is not presidency from the north or from the south. What is key is to have quality leadership, people who are enthusiastic, determined and committed to give the country the leadership it deserves,” he said — a framing that sits somewhat in tension with the rest of the interview, which was entirely about which region gets the ticket.
Kwankwaso and Peter Obi formally joined the NDC on May 3, defecting from the African Democratic Congress amid internal disputes that Obi attributed to government-engineered instability. The party’s national convention in Abuja subsequently formalized the southern zoning decision. The NDC now has two of Nigeria’s most recognizable opposition figures under one roof, a settled position on regional rotation and a registration deadline that passed on May 6. What it does not yet have is a presidential candidate — the southerner around whom all of this arithmetic will eventually have to organize itself into something resembling a campaign.
