Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Works and Housing, has stated that three of his party’s top opponents in the February 25 election surrendered the presidential win to President-Elect Bola Tinubu by splitting from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after the 2019 presidential election.
The former Lagos State governor, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, said the Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), PDP’s Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) all belonged to the same party, the PDP, in 2019 but they separated towards the 2023 presidential poll which gave the All Progressives Congress (APC) a chance to victory.
He said, “Politics is a game of numbers and numbers have arithmetic equations – additions and multiplications. APC was adding and multiplying. Some PDP governors – Cross River, Ebonyi, Zamfara – had come to join APC. PDP was dividing and subtracting.
“So, the major contenders against us in this election – NNPP, PDP, Labour Party, their candidates, were in the same party in 2019. They lost by almost four million votes. So, having now divided that inadequate, insufficient ticket into three, how was it going to add up into an electoral victory?
“So, they handed away the presidential ticket by dividing their powers. Not only did they divide, they now subtracted with the G5 governors. So, it was bad mathematics.”
In March 2022, Kwankwaso, a former governor of Kano State, dumped the PDP, the second term he did so in eight years. He had first left the party in November 2013 and joined the APC. He, however, rejoined the PDP in July 2018.
Similarly, Obi, a former Anambra State Governor under the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), had joined the PDP and ran as Atiku’s running mate in the 2019 presidential poll. Obi, however, left the PDP in 2022 to secure the ticket of the Labour Party.
In the 2019 poll, President Muhammadu Buhari of the APC won his re-election bid as he polled 15,191,847 votes to defeat his closest opponent, Atiku, who scored polled 11,262,978 to lose the election with a margin of 3,928,869 votes.
For the 2023 election, Tinubu won in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states, and secured significant numbers in several other states to claim the highest number of votes — 8,794,726, almost two million votes more than his closest rival — former Vice President Atiku, who got 6,984,520 votes, while Obi polled 6,101,533. Kwankwaso finished fourth with 1,496,687 votes.