GUARDIAN NG
In the 2023 elections Peter Obi pulled off what must count as a major miracle in Nigerian politics. He led an erstwhile politically irrelevant and perennially underperforming Labour party platform that managed to garner only 5,074 votes nationwide in the 2019 presidential election to a 6,101,533 vote tally in the 2023 presidential elections – a staggering 120,000% improvement in performance.
The Obi coalition pulled off three spectacular victories – besting Bola Tinubu in his home base of Lagos State, winning the majority of votes in the capital city of Abuja and thrashing the PDP in its traditional strongholds in the South South and South East geopolitical zones. Not even the most starry-eyed optimists could have imagined that these scenarios were possible.
The results in Lagos are worth considering in greater detail: In the presidential elections, the labour party got 582,454 votes while Tinubu’s APC managed to garner 572,606 votes. The nearly 10,000 votes margin with which Obi beat Tinubu in Lagos might have been a mere 1% of the total votes cast, but the symbolism of that victory is staggering. Lagos after all, was supposed to be Tinubu’s crowning glory. It was Lagos that turned the ex-Mobil Accountant into a powerhouse of Nigerian politics. It was Lagos that was his claim to fame. It was his governance of Lagos that shaped his political resume, filled his coffers, and propped him up as someone capable of leading a complex nation like Nigeria. Lagos was supposed to be his uncontested space. Yet when the dust settled, he had been beaten on his home turf by a party that had only managed to get 110 votes statewide in the 2019 presidential elections, and by a candidate who did not even call the state home.
However, for those who might have imagined that Obi’s spectacular victory in Lagos on February 25 th represented the stirrings of a new political movement, the results in the gubernatorial elections just two weeks later seriously challenged that assertion as the state fell back squarely into the laps of the APC. In the gubernatorial elections, the APC candidate obtained 762,134 votes while the Labour candidate obtained 312,329 votes. 270,125 voters had peeled away from the LP coalition within two weeks – representing about 46% of the coalition that had powered the LP to a narrow victory in Lagos just two weeks earlier.
A coalition that falters within a two-week timeframe is a fragile one. That is not a disparaging remark – it is a statement of fact. If the Obi coalition of 2023 is to realize its full potential, we must be ready to take a hard-nosed, objective look at the set of facts before us.
This discourse will be based on the results of the presidential and gubernatorial elections as presented by INEC. Since none of the top three vote getters in the presidential elections (APC, PDP and Labour) who were able to place agents across almost all of the polling units have come out with alternative polling numbers to contest the official tallies provided by INEC, the reported numbers are the sole basis by which any objective analysis can be done.
