Then what happened?
Luckily for President Tinubu, Atiku failed to learn from history — namely, how his breach of the zoning convention damaged our sister opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).Ironically, this is the same man who often romanticises the era of Sir Ahmadu Bello’s dominance, instead of embracing a future built on multilateral accommodation and national inclusion, which the zoning convention epitomises and was designed to promote since 1999.
Many thought that after the 2019 bid for presidency, he could have done what Tinubu did, sit down, introspect and decide patriotically that it is better to support a southern president instead of running against the turbulent wind of zoning convention.
Which today is still his albatross.
What has that got to do with the Constitution, where zoning is not mentioned?
Kindly note that in public affairs, there are laws with legal force and conventions with moral authority.
Human societies since the cradle of civilisation have been governed by both.
Please do ask yourself why do scholars often say that Britain has no single written constitution?
It is because much of its governance rests on conventions that command moral legitimacy and works for their good governance.
Coming home, where in the 1999 Constitution are the six geopolitical zones — North West, North East, North Central, South West, South East, and South South — expressly created?
Yet they remain integral to our political structure because conventions often evolve into stabilising national principles.
We should also remember vividly that the Waziri Adamawa once stormed out of the PDP convention in protest, arguing that then-President Goodluck Jonathan was usurping the North’s turn.
Similarly, during the PDP’s 2018 presidential primary, only northern aspirants contested and Atiku emerged victorious.
As if misadventure bound to happen, in 2023, with his cohorts, they openly breached both the zoning convention and Section 7 of the PDP Constitution.
This was the birth of Nyesom Wike’s Masquerade of five Governors, a raging inferno till date.
Many expected him to rise to the occasion as a statesman who would place national peace, equity, and unity above personal ambition.
That was not to be.
Some had accused Obi of being a nomadic politician who is afraid to face Atiku and others in presidential primary election?
Atiku Abubakar, Bola Tinubu, Osita Okechukwu, PDP, zoning convention, 2023 election, Nigerian politics