Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Works and Housing, says conflicts during the just concluded 2023 general elections should not linger beyond politicking season.
The minister, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, said Nigerians are inseparable beyond religion and ethnicity and should “wear the trousers of adults” and maturity after the polls.
He said, “I think that we are too joined at the hip to allow disagreements over elections fester beyond elections. There are too many places where we are connected.
“I tell people, for example, that if you are talking ethnic issues, my first cousin is Lois Ganiu Okafor and I have another cousin, Fola Okeke, God bless her soul. So, which one of them do I dislike?
“I think that some of the rhetoric went the wrong way and I think everybody should wear the trouser of adults in the room now and I think that is already taking place and tempers are coming down. Sometimes we can be extreme when there is competition. I think as it goes on, maturity will come in.”
The former governor of Lagos State and strong ally of the President-Elect, Bola Tinubu also said his party, the All Progressives Congress conducted pre-election internal polls but never released it, describing polls that predicted victory for Obi and Atiku as “badly conducted”.
Speaking on Tinubu’s strategy against Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Senior Advocate of Nigeria, who headed the Election Planning Directorate of the Tinubu-Shettima campaign, said the party trained 2,000 agents from all the states and sent back to the states to train the agents in their respective states.
Some of the young people came from the United States to campaign for Tinubu, he said, adding that the party knew its results from the situation room before the final declaration by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).