During an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Babatunde Fashola, the Minister of Works and Housing, revealed how the victory of President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was aided by the three major opposition candidates in the March 18th presidential election.
Fashola pointed out that Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar, and Rabiu Kwankwaso gave Tinubu the edge when they chose not to form an alliance ahead of the election.
The inconsistencies within the PDP, according to Fashola, were responsible for Tinubu’s emergence as the winner of the 2023 presidential election.
The former Lagos state governor added that the three candidates’ split from the PDP after the 2019 presidential election made it easier for Tinubu to win the 2023 election.
He 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.”
Fashola stated that Tinubu won the 2023 presidential election as a result of the opposition candidates’ contradictions.