The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has said that three major opposition candidates in the presidential election gave away the victory to the President-Elect, Bola Tinubu.
OsunDaily News recalls that Tinubu 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.
During an appearance on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Fashola said Obi, Atiku, and Kwankwaso gave Tinubu the victory when they refused to form an alliance ahead of the election.
The former Governor of Lagos State said the three candidates split from the Peoples Democratic Party (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.”
In March 2022, Kwankwaso, a former governor of Kano State, dumped the PDP, the second time 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 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.
