The Rotational Covenant: Why Equity Demands Eight Years for Tinubu 

Ikedi Ohakim

From 1999, the Fourth Republic has rested on two pillars: the written Constitution and an unwritten covenant of rotational equity. That covenant — that the presidency should alternate between North and South in uninterrupted eight-year cycles — was not sentiment. It was statecraft, conceived to heal the wounds of June 12, 1993, and to ensure no region sees itself as a permanent spectator in the Nigerian project.

Today, that covenant faces a test of faith. To contemplate a single term for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is to reopen a debate Nigeria thought it had settled. To truncate the South’s cycle a second time, as in 2015, would signal that the formula which underwrote our stability can be discarded when politically convenient.

The precedents are clear and born of trauma. The annulment of June 12 brought Nigeria to the brink. The military’s 1999 exit was conditioned on a national consensus: power must return to the South-West to atone for that injustice and reintegrate an alienated region. The North, in rare political maturity, conceded the presidency to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. That concession was honoured in full: eight years without interruption, despite fierce contests in 2003. The message was unmistakable — the South’s turn was not a token.

In 2007, the covenant dictated a northern swing. President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s emergence was the nation keeping its word. His death in 2010 created the first stress test. The Constitution rightly elevated Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to complete the term. Yet the North’s expectation that its “turn” had been interrupted was palpable. The federation absorbed that tension. By 2015, the corrective asserted itself: power returned North through President Muhammadu Buhari. He was accorded the full dignity of two terms, 2015–2023, without a serious Southern challenge to the principle of his re-election. The North’s eight years were restored, and with it, the symmetry of the covenant.

President Tinubu’s mandate in 2023 was the orderly restoration of the South’s turn. It marked the second half of a national balance sheet. To suggest this cycle should now be abridged after four years implies the South’s tenure is discretionary, whereas the North’s is sacrosanct. That is not federalism. That is revisionism.

The arithmetic of equity is stark:   

1999–2007: Eight years for the South under Obasanjo. 

2015–2023: Eight years for the North under Buhari. 

2023–2031: Equity requires eight years for the South under President Tinubu.

This argument addresses the South as much as the nation. The presidency is not a personal estate; it is held in trust for a region and, by extension, for the federation. The South observed disciplined restraint during President Buhari’s second-term bid, understanding that to break the cycle would be to break the country. For Southern actors to now abet the curtailment of a Southern cycle would be a strategic forfeiture of the region’s long-term standing. It would teach future generations that the South cannot protect its own inheritance.

Constitutional purists will invoke the primacy of the ballot and the right to contest. True in law. But constitutions are sustained not by text alone, but by the political culture that gives them life. For 25 years, Nigeria has subordinated raw electoral arithmetic to the higher imperative of inclusion. That culture steered the nation through the constitutional crisis of 2010. To abandon it now for immediate advantage is to gamble with the stability that has made democratic contestation possible. Laws flourish only in predictable environments. The rotational pact is the environment we built.

Beyond symbolism lies governance. The Tinubu administration is engaged in the most far-reaching reforms since 1999. Subsidy removal, FX unification, banking recapitalisation, the student loan architecture, tax reforms, and the new security doctrine in the North-West and North-East — these are not four-year policies.

The IMF, World Bank, and AfDB note that Nigeria’s structural adjustment requires six to eight years to translate into sustained growth and debt sustainability. Policy consistency is the currency of investor confidence. A one-term presidency guarantees policy whiplash. It tells investors every election is a reset button. It tells civil servants reforms are seasonal. It tells insurgents to wait out the administration.

In 2023, the electorate endorsed not merely a candidate, but the preservation of a stabilising order. To interrupt that order in 2027 is to replace reform with campaign politics at the moment difficult decisions should yield dividends. No nation rebuilds its fiscal foundations, power sector, or security architecture in 48 months.

The rotational pact is the moral infrastructure of our federation. It needs no judicial interpretation — only fidelity to an agreement that has served the republic well. The North was accorded its full cycle, and the republic was the beneficiary. The question before the national conscience is whether the South merits less.

To uphold President Tinubu’s second term is to issue a Manifesto for National Peace: a declaration that transitions of power shall cease to be moments of national anxiety, and that the rules will not shift with every cycle. It is equally a Mandate for Progress, for transformation is not harvested in a single season. Reform must mature into institutional memory and economic fact.

Nigeria must choose between the expedience of the moment and the endurance of the republic. To honour the South’s eight-year cycle is to reaffirm that every region is a stakeholder, that every covenant will be kept, and that the federation is worthy of its citizens’ trust. That is the debt we owe our past, and the foundation we must bequeath to our future.

·         Ohakim, a former Governor of Imo State, is a public policy analyst and statesman. He writes from Owerri.