For the second time in less than a week, Dele Momodu, the Director of Strategic Communications of the Peoples Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Council, has said the party’s candidate, Atiku Abubakar, will be elected President of Nigeria in the next month’s election.
Momodu in a statement on Monday, dismissed polls conducted by surveying agencies which predicted victories for either Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress or Labour Party’s Peter Obi in the past few months.
He said, “I have read with bemusement many of the polls about the forthcoming presidential election on February 25, 2023, and have come to the conclusion that the elitist polls have failed monumentally due to the over-reliance on technology in a largely illiterate population.
“I have decided to help situate the forecasts based on the established political history of Nigeria and empirical data.
“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.
“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 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. Over-reliance on bribing the electorates will fail.”
According to him, the reliance on rigging will fail woefully, saying, “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. Atiku 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 northern regions and will pick six in the South-South automatically.
“He will pick up 25 per cent in all of the five states in the South-East, a traditional base of the PDP, and the same in the South-West. Wherever Obi is number one, Atiku will be number two or vice versa.
“I do not know if in any state, the 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 for a “fake Muslim” in the name of a pretentious and mischievous Muslim/Muslim ticket. The scam is dead on arrival,” he declared.
Justifying this position, Momodu argued that “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 and Ifeanyi Okowa, the cerebral man and gentle giant of Igbo ancestry.
“I predict that Atiku will be the next President. He is the most prepared and experienced candidate in the race who is ready to hit the ground running from day one. Nigerians will experience real politicking in the days ahead,” he added.
(Punch)
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