Akinwande Soji-Ojo
With barely two weeks to the presidential election, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Campaign Council has tipped its candidate, Atiku Abubakar to win the poll, predicting that he will garner majority votes in the entire North and the South South zone of the country.
This Director, Strategic Communication, National Election Management Committee of the PDP Presidential Campaign Council, Dele Momodu, disclosed this in a statement issued in Abuja, on Wednesday.
Momodu described polls and surveys predicting victory for other candidates as fundamentally flawed, due to what he called their “over-reliance on technology in a largely illiterate population.”
Justifying his reason for an Atiku’s victory, the publisher said: “A presidential candidate cannot depend totally on votes from outside his home base to win this election. It is a fact of history that whenever the South produced two strong candidates, the dominant northern candidate won, such as in 1979 and 1983, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe versus Shehu Shagari.”
He noted that the victory of the PDP is based on “established political history of Nigeria and empirical data,” arguing that “Bola Tinubu is far weaker today in the South West and Awolowo was by far more formidable, while Obi is the new Azikiwe (the first Governor General and President of Nigeria) in the South East, and Kwankwaso is the current Aminu Kano.”
“Atiku Abubakar will dominate the North East, North West, North Central and South South. Tinubu may pick a few states in the North and South West but won’t have enough to win. The bridges required to cross to victory has taken Atiku 30 years to build. Tinubu has not been able to lock down the entire South West not to talk of the whole of Nigeria,” he said.
The Ovation magazine publisher warned those bent on rigging their way to victory to perish the thought, stressing that: “Over-reliance on bribing the electorates will fail. Hoping to rig brazenly will also fail spectacularly. I repeat, the entire North and the South South will make Atiku the next President. Atiku will still be competitive in the South East and South West. Wherever Obi is number one in the East, Atiku will be number two. Wherever Tinubu is number one in the South West, Atiku will be number two or vice versa.”
The PDP chieftain explained that the former vice president “will be the first to cross the line of recording 25 per cent in 24 states.”
“He will get 25 per cent automatically in the 19 states of the northern region and will pick six in South South automatically. He will pick more than 25 per cent in all of the five states in the South East, a traditional base of PDP, and same in the South West.
“Wherever Obi is number one, Atiku will be number two or vice versa. I do not know of any state PDP will not record 25 per cent and eventually win the overall popular votes. Nigeria has become so divided that the people are going to vote majorly along ethnic lines as well as primordial sentiments.
“The North will not vote a ‘fake Muslim’ in the name of a pretentious and mischievous Muslim/Muslim ticket. The scam is dead on arrival.
“The North East will never vote for a number two position when they have been chasing the number one since 1966. The North West will not abandon an Atiku for a Tinubu who is well known for his iron grip on Lagos State since 1999. The South West itself knows it has the most controversial and palpably weakest candidate in this race this time and would humbly and readily accept its fate with equanimity.
“It will also dawn on the South East that Obi’s raving popularity alone cannot carry him across the winning line and many of their traditional voters will willingly settle for Atiku Abubakar and Ifeanyichukwu Okowa, the cerebral man and gentle giant of Igbo ancestry,” he added.
