Datti Baba-Ahmed, the vice presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), has stated that none of the presidential candidates in the upcoming election can hope to receive the over 1.9 million votes received by President Muhammadu Buhari in Kano State during the 2015 presidential election.
In 2015, the then-All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Buhari, defeated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) flagbearer, Goodluck Jonathan, who received 215,779 votes in the North’s most populous state.
During an interview on Channels TV’s 2023 Verdict on Tuesday evening, Baba-Ahmed stated that neither of the other two frontrunners in the election would receive votes.
According to him, Buhari dealt Jonathan the death blow by a wide margin in 2015, and no one will receive such votes in Kano.
Other factors working in his party’s favour, according to the LP vice presidential candidate, include the growing youth population in Kaduna, the growing awareness of the importance of uniting Nigeria, and the presence of non-indigenes throughout Northern and Central Kaduna.
He said:
The northern Nigerian votes that were waiting to make up the difference which either of the two other runners-up were hoping to get, [it] turned out that they are not getting it.
The heavy punchers – Kano, for example – is now a watershed of what its votes used to be. In 2015, the 1.9 million votes of Kano, nobody can aspire to have that which of course Buhari punched Jonathan with the final blow. Nobody is going to get that in Kano.
We have pulled a lot of weight beyond the comprehension of the two runners-up.