The National Secretary of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, has declared that if President Bola Tinubu could lose in Lagos in the 2023 presidential election, then his party, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is beatable in 2027.
Aregbesola also referenced the Southeast, where none of the governors could win the presidential election for their respective parties in the 2023 presidential poll.
The presidential candidate of the Labour Party in 2023, Mr Peter Obi, had beaten Tinubu and his APC in Lagos, and had also defeated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) and the APC whose governors controlled the five states at the time.
Aregbesola said given the above scenarios, the mass defection of opposition governors to the ruling APC will be of little effect in the 2027 electoral contest.
The former Interior minister, who spoke at a book launch in Abuja on Tuesday, declared that “governors don’t win elections, only the people do.”
The fact that certain governors are defecting to the APC shows that our unity (ADC leaders) is weakened. I laugh because recent statistics in Nigeria, based on the last election, do not support this belief.
“In the past, to quit the government and the federal social, let them commit to a free and fair electoral process. We will then see if it is true.
“The second point is a scenario where I want to use results from two zones—just two zones—to show that when a party controls a state, it may not necessarily translate to votes.
I want to use the results from the Southwest and Southeast. In the Southwest, the APC controlled all the states except one. Despite this, the maximum performance of the party in that election was 55 percent, with the other parties sharing the rest.
“The same applied in Lagos. The APC candidate (Tinubu) lost his ward, local government, and state. So please, for goodness sake, when it is claimed that governors win elections against the people’s will—where? That is the Southwest.
“In the Southeast, the result is even more striking. The APC had only 5.8 percent of the total votes from that zone. I’ll stop at that.
“The results of these two zones clearly showed that governors do not win elections—the people do.
“What we require from the government in charge of the election, is a commitment to a free and fair process.
“So first, commit yourself to a free and fair election, and let us see what the result will be. That’s what we are asking.
