Presidential aide Bayo Onanuga has launched a blistering attack on former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, accusing him of trying to upend Nigeria’s informal power rotation arrangement between North and South in pursuit of another presidential run.

Onanuga, Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, was reacting to Atiku’s recent television interview in which the former Vice President argued that he is not bound by zoning or rotation, claiming the South has held power longer than the North since the return to democracy in 1999.

Describing Atiku’s position as “self-serving” and based on “dubious arithmetic,” Onanuga insisted that the shorter cumulative tenure of northern presidents was largely due to the death in office of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, which brought his then deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, to power. That episode, he argued, was an “accidental breach” that did not invalidate the broader North-South understanding.

Onanuga portrayed Atiku as a “perennial candidate” who has refused to learn from what he called the strategic miscalculations of the 2023 election. He recalled that Atiku’s decision to seek the presidency after another northerner, Muhammadu Buhari, had completed eight years in office ran against the Peoples Democratic Party’s zoning principle and deepened internal rifts that contributed to his defeat.

According to Onanuga, the same misreading of Nigeria’s political mood now underpins Atiku’s fresh argument against rotation. He maintained that with Buhari having completed an eight-year tenure for the North, equity demands that Tinubu be allowed to complete his own eight years for the South, making 2027 “still the South’s turn.”

“All Atiku needs to do is to bury the thought of running again,” Onanuga declared, predicting “another spectacular failure” if the former Vice President insists on contesting.

He further suggested that Atiku’s latest comments place him at odds not only with long-standing political practice but also with the expectations of many Nigerians who, he said, see rotation as a stabilising mechanism in a country marked by deep regional and ethnic diversity.

Onanuga’s intervention underscores the intensifying shadow contest over 2027, with the presidency and its allies moving early to frame any northern challenge as an assault on an unwritten but powerful political compact.