PUNCH
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.”
