The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has explained how Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), helped the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, win the March 18th presidential election.
Fashola noted that Obi, Atiku, and Kwankwaso gave Tinubu the victory when they refused to form an alliance ahead of the election.
He added that it is the inconsistencies within the PDP that saw Tinubu emerge as the winner of the 2023 presidential polls.
The former governor of Lagos state stated these while speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.
WITHIN NIGERIA recalls that Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku, who got 6,984,520 votes, while Peter Obi polled 6,101,533 to come third and Kwankwaso finished fourth with 1,496,687 votes.
According to Fashola, said the three candidates split from the PDP after the 2019 presidential election which made it easier for Tinubu to win the 2023 election.
Fashola 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.”
The minister added that the inconsistencies of the opposition candidates saw Tinubu emerge as winner of the 2023 presidential poll.