Babatunde Raji Fashola, former governor of Lagos State and current Minister of Works and Housing, in a showman interview on Channels Television, has explained that other contenders in the 2023 presidential election paved way for the well deserved victory of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as president-elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Explaining how the opponents worked for Tinubu’s success, Fashola, during that showmanship interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, noted that Obi, Atiku, and Kwankwaso gave Tinubu the victory when they refused to form a coalition ahead of the election.
He added that, it was the inconsistencies within the PDP that saw Tinubu emerge as winner of the 2023 presidential polls.
Recall that Tinubu scored 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 added that the three candidates split from the PDP after the 2019 presidential election which made it easier for Tinubu to win the 2023 election.
His words: “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.”
