By Boma West
Nigeria has 36 states, six geopolitical zones, and one stubborn question that refuses to go away: will an Igbo person ever sit in Aso Rock as president? Since the country returned to democracy in 1999, the presidency has moved between the North and the South, between Olusegun Obasanjo from the Southwest, Umaru Yar’Adua and Muhammadu Buhari from the North, Goodluck Jonathan from the South-South, and now Bola Tinubu from the Southwest again. One zone has been left out of this rotation entirely. The Southeast has watched from the sidelines for 26 years, not for lack of ambition, but for a more complicated set of reasons that go beyond the hostility of other zones. The Igbo have a habit of standing in their own way.
To understand why this matters, you have to look at the numbers with honesty. Since independence in 1960, the North alone has produced leaders who governed Nigeria for roughly 46 out of its 66 years of existence. The Southwest has had eight years of a civilian presidency under Obasanjo plus eight years of Vice Presidency under Professor Yemi Osinbajo. The South-South had Jonathan as Vice President for three years and President for about six. The Southeast, home to one of Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups, has produced exactly one head of state in Nigeria’s entire history, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, who ruled for only six months before he was assassinated in a counter-coup in July 1966. That is the inheritance the Igbo bring to every election cycle: a legitimate grievance with no clean political vehicle to ride it home.
The case for an Igbo president is morally and historically strong. Former Ohanaeze Ndigbo President-General George Obiozor said plainly that the idea of an Igbo president is one whose time has come and is both politically and morally justifiable. Chris Ngige, former Minister of Labour, went further, arguing that handing the presidency to the Southeast would permanently bury the agitations of Biafra separatism and heal wounds from the civil war that have never properly closed. These are not small claims. They speak to something real. The civil war ended in 1970, but its psychological weight still shapes how the Igbo are perceived and how they see themselves in Nigerian politics. Excluding a major ethnic group from the highest office for over five decades is not just a political inconvenience. It is a quiet indictment of Nigeria’s promise of fairness.
The rotational principle, though not written into Nigeria’s constitution, has functioned as an unwritten agreement between the major parties. The PDP formally encoded it in their party constitution. The APC operates it through mutual understanding rather than rule. Political scientists and commentators have long argued that in a multi-ethnic country like Nigeria, power rotation is not a luxury but a necessity. Without it, the fear of domination by one group becomes a permanent fuel for instability. When the Buhari government came in 2015, it secured barely 200,000 votes in the entire Southeast, a number so small it would not fill a mid-sized football stadium. He still won, by sweeping the North and forming an alliance with the Southwest. That formula has worked twice. It shows that a candidate can become Nigeria’s president without meaningful Igbo support, which is precisely why other zones feel no urgency to honour the rotation.
This is where the real problem begins, because the argument shifts from what the Igbo deserve to what they can actually secure. The road to Aso Rock does not run through moral arguments alone. It runs through coalitions, strategy, and the ability to negotiate across regional and religious lines. The Igbo have struggled on every one of these fronts.
The most visible demonstration of this struggle came in 2023 with Peter Obi’s presidential run on the Labour Party ticket. Obi came closer than any Igbo candidate in recent memory. He won Lagos, performed remarkably in the Southwest by working with a faction of Afenifere, and secured the endorsement of former President Obasanjo. His running mate was someone from the North, an obvious acknowledgment that the path to the presidency runs through Northern votes. For a brief, electric moment, it seemed possible. The Obidient movement filled stadiums and flooded timelines. The Southeast voted for him with near unanimity. He still lost. Part of the reason was structural. Atiku Abubakar, who had informally agreed to stand aside in favour of a power shift to the South, went back on that understanding and split the opposition vote. But there was also the harder truth that Obi could not convert grassroots enthusiasm into the kind of elite political network that wins Nigerian presidential elections.
The deeper wound, though, is the one the Igbo inflict on themselves. Every election cycle produces the same pattern. Rather than uniting behind one candidate, multiple Igbo aspirants enter the race, each convinced that he alone is the messiah the zone has been waiting for. In 2023, before the primaries, names like Anyim Pius Anyim, David Umahi, Orji Uzor Kalu, and Kingsley Moghalu all floated their ambitions simultaneously. This scattering of voices is not just political noise. It signals to other zones that the Igbo are not serious contenders. When the zone cannot even agree on who to back, why would another zone agree to deliver their bloc votes in return?
The structural fragmentation runs even deeper than individual ambition. Igbo political elites have consistently aligned with whichever national power centre offers them the best immediate return, even when that alignment undercuts their long-term goal of the presidency. Governor Charles Soludo of Anambra, whose party APGA officially adopted President Tinubu as their preferred candidate for 2027, is perhaps the clearest recent example. This is the same Soludo who opposed Tinubu in 2023. Political analysts have described this as a catch-22 that Igbo leaders have woven for themselves: they want a president of Igbo extraction but they work for the people most likely to prevent that from happening. Ahead of 2027, several Igbo political elites are already gravitating toward Tinubu or other non-Igbo candidates, calculating that proximity to power today is worth more than the presidency tomorrow.
There is also the question of the five states. The Southeast has only five states, the fewest of any geopolitical zone in Nigeria. State creation in Nigeria has historically been used as both reward and punishment, and the Igbo have repeatedly drawn the short straw. With five states, the Southeast contributes fewer federal lawmakers, fewer delegates at party conventions, and less institutional weight in the backroom negotiations that determine who gets tickets. A faction of the Ohanaeze Youth Council has pointed out that the official definition of Igbo land is itself too narrow, arguing that Igbo communities in Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Delta, and other southern states have been cut off from the Southeast geopolitical zone by decades of state creation. Their argument is that the real Igbo voting bloc is far larger than five states suggest, but that potential has never been politically organised.
The 2027 election is already taking shape, and the signs are not encouraging for Igbo presidential ambition in the immediate term. Most analysts believe Tinubu will seek a second term and is likely to win it. If that holds, the presidency returns to the North in 2031 under the informal rotation logic, which pushes the earliest realistic window for a southern president back to 2039. One roadmap circulating in political circles suggests that the Igbo should start now to produce a vice-presidential candidate aligned with the North by 2031, use those eight years to build national visibility, and then contest for the presidency by 2039 as the southern candidate with enough northern goodwill to win. It is a long road. It requires patience that Igbo political culture, with its fierce republican individualism, has not historically demonstrated.
What is clear is this: the question is not whether an Igbo person is qualified to be Nigeria’s president. Qualification has never been the real barrier. The question is whether the Igbo can build the kind of patient, unified, coalition-driven campaign that Nigerian presidential politics demands. Every other major group that has won the presidency understood that you win not just by being right but by being organised. The Yoruba produced Tinubu after decades of building a political structure across party lines. The North maintains its advantage through a combination of population, internal consensus, and strategic alliances with at least one southern zone.
The Igbo have the numbers, the economic reach, the talent, and a moral argument that grows stronger with each passing election. What they have not yet built is the discipline to subordinate individual ambition to a collective strategy. Until that changes, the presidency will remain visible from the Southeast but just out of reach, like a flag planted on the other side of a river that nobody has bothered to build a bridge across.
An Igbo president is not just good for the Igbo. It is good for a country that has spent 65 years pretending that inclusion is happening while one of its largest groups watches the highest office pass over them, generation after generation. The day an Igbo person takes the oath of office in Aso Rock, something in Nigeria’s political psychology will shift. The argument about who belongs and who does not will lose one of its loudest justifications. That day is possible. Whether it comes sooner or later depends far less on other Nigerians than it does on the Igbo themselves.
Leave a comment