Former Senate President Pius Anyim has argued that the All Progressives Congress should not be held responsible for the South-East’s failure to produce a Nigerian president since 1999, placing the blame instead on the Peoples Democratic Party’s refusal to zone its ticket to the region.
Anyim made the case on Arise TV’s Prime Time on Monday, 22 September 2026, during a discussion on the zoning question that has shaped Igbo political grievances for more than two decades. He said his own experience in national politics had convinced him that no candidate from the zone could reach the presidency without alliances beyond it.
“The experience I personally gathered is that no person from the South-East would make it in isolation. We must have an alliance with other regions in order to make it,” he said.
He argued that a PDP decision to zone its ticket to the region would have changed its fortunes. “If PDP had been honorable enough to zone to the South-East, it would have stimulated the necessary sentiments that will help us defeat any other candidate,” Anyim said. He added that, to the North, the rotation principle had effectively been satisfied because power remained in the South, “so there is nothing to blame anybody about.”
Anyim, who spent decades in the PDP before crossing over, said his move to the ruling party followed about a year of weighing his options. He tied the decision to what he described as the long-term interest of the South-East rather than short-term positioning. “It took me about a year to join the APC,” he said, explaining that when he and fellow aspirants worked together in the past, their primary interest had been their zone.
His remarks revisit a settled grievance in South-East politics. Since the return to civilian rule in 1999, the presidency has rotated between the North and the South-West, but never to the South-East, one of the country’s major geopolitical zones. In the build-up to the 2023 election, Anyim was among four PDP presidential aspirants, alongside Peter Obi, Sam Ohuabunwa and Nwachukwu Anakwenze, who resolved in April 2022 to push for an Igbo candidate on the party’s platform. The PDP eventually threw its ticket open, and the contest went to Atiku Abubakar.
Anyim formally joined the APC in July 2023, during a rally in Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, where he was received by the party’s then national chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje. His defection had been preceded by a public rift with the PDP over what he called an “arrogant” disregard for equity in the party.
Since then he has taken an active role in the APC. In January 2026, at a South-East stakeholders’ meeting in Enugu, Anyim moved the motion endorsing President Bola Tinubu for a second term, seconded by another former Senate President, Ken Nnamani. He was also named chairman of the committee that oversaw the APC’s presidential primary earlier in 2026.
On the current arrangement, Anyim said Tinubu had secured the presidency for the South-West and was entitled to seek re-election, after which he expected power to move to the North before returning to the South. “After his second term, I believe in rotation. Of course, it will go to the north. Then after the north, it will come down,” he said.
That timeline implies the South-East would wait several more electoral cycles before its turn under a strict rotation reading, a position that sits uneasily with the ambitions of Peter Obi, the region’s most prominent contender for 2027. Obi, who ran on the Labour Party platform in 2023, declared his membership of the African Democratic Congress in January 2026 and remains one of the leading opposition figures heading into the next election.
Anyim’s central argument, that the South-East advances through negotiation rather than solo bids, is his own assessment and remains contested within the zone, where some leaders favour a direct push for the presidency over alliance-building. What is not in dispute is the underlying record: no South-East candidate has occupied the presidency in the current democratic era, and the debate over how the region finally gets there is intensifying as 2027 approaches.