Abdullahi Sule, Governor of Nasarawa State, has spoken out about how the All Progressives Congress (APC) lost the Presidential election in the state on February 28 but swiftly rebounded to win the Governorship election on March 18.
Although the state has a nearly 50-50 Muslim-Christian population, the governor stated that the Christian community, traditional rulers, and a segment of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) all helped to his victory in the governorship race.
“…I didn’t want to come out publicly to keep telling people that they will work for me because this is what people will say, it’s anti-party. So, I kept myself in that bracket because they told me themselves that if they want to challenge you, we will run for governor. But, we are not running for governor; we are running for the position of the Senate because we still believe in you.
“And, since we believe in you we will not run. Having said that, in Keffi, during the national election APC lost Keffi, woefully. But in the governorship election, APC got 16,000 votes ahead of the second.
“So, while APC got 26,000 votes, PDP got about 10,000. Those are the kind of things that you will see in so many other places. We also have problem because of the issue of religion.
“Predominantly we had three Muslims that were running; myself, the one of the SDP, and that of NNPP. Then, we had only one Christian candidate in a state that you almost say it is 50/50 between Muslim and Christian.
“So, if not that we are lucky that we had a lot of Christians that believe in us; if they had done religious lines, we would have lost the election because we will be splitting out votes, including some Reverend Fathers and pastors, who believe in me and actually worked for me.
“Because I remember there was a traditional ruler who entered a church and the pastor got up and took the microphone from him and said ‘don’t bring that to us here. We believe in this governor. He is the one who repaired our technical school, police station. He fixed our roads, he did this and did that…We will get you out of this place if this is the kind of thing you are bringing.’ So, you could see that we had a lot of people who were not Muslims but believed in us.”
The governor added that his opponents misled the people that they had won the election after results from a local government was released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
“For that reason, when the results of some Christian-dominated areas like Karu were coming out, people who didn’t understand the politics of the state were panicking. But, Lafia had not come out and that is predominantly Muslim and predominantly Kanuri. So, for that reason we knew that Lafia is going to produce the highest number of votes in the whole of Nasarawa State. It has been the history. So, since Lafia was not out and I had so many big people in the country calling me and saying we have lost this election. And I said no, Lafia is not yet out. At the time they were leading with about 3,000 or something votes. And some of them were celebrating. And you cannot celebrate when Lafia is not out. So, that is the reason up till now the opposition does not understand what is happening.
“They say ‘they have rigged the election.’ But, that wasn’t true. In the election in 2019. I got 80,000 in Lafia, PDP got 39,000 or something like that. So, this time around because of the amount of registration I got 107,000 votes.
“So, they wondered how I got only 80,000 then and 107, 000 now. We had the highest number of new registrations. That is one. Two, we had introduced allegiance. That time people just did politics. We had a lot of people in PDP this time around in Lafia that actually came and voted for me.
“So, we had 107,000 votes in Lafia. That is the bone of their contention. In fact, they are going to court based on this. They were not worried about the 80,000 votes that I got, but they are worried about the 27,000 in addition. We went to Doma and they said I lost in my local government. Yes, I did because in Akwanga Muslims are minority.
“The majority are Christians. But in my ward, we are the majority. So, we won. In 11 wards we won two wards where we are predominantly Muslims…,” he explained.