The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has explained how the three major opposition candidates in the February 25 presidential election helped the victory to the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.
Recall that Tinubu had in the recently concluded polls polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who got 6,984,520 votes, while Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) polled 6,101,533 to come third and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) finished fourth with 1,496,687 votes.
Fashola, while speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, noted that Obi, Atiku, and Kwankwaso gave Tinubu the victory when they refused to form an alliance ahead of the election.
According to him, it is the inconsistencies within the PDP that saw Tinubu emerge as winner of the 2023 presidential polls.
The former governor of Lagos state said the three candidates split from the PDP after the 2019 presidential election which made it easier for Tinubu to win the 2023 election.
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.”
Fashola, added that the inconsistencies of the opposition candidates saw Tinubu emerge as winner of the 2023 presidential poll.
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