Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the Governor of Lagos State, has listed some lessons learnt from the defeat of the presidential candidate of All Progressive Congress (APC), Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu by the Labour Party Presidential Candidate Mr Peter Obi.
Speaking during an interview on Arise Television, Sanwo-Olu acknowledged that Lagos is one of the APC candidate’s political bases. He added that he also looked at other big states like Kano, Kaduna and Kastina but interestingly all of those states did not go favourably for him.
- “It is an interesting discussion and we have to look at it globally because the candidate is now the president-elect. Looking at the map of Nigeria, Lagos is one of his bases but for him to have won that election he probably looked at Lagos and other big states like Kano, Kaduna and Kastina, interestingly all of those states did not go favourably for him.
- “So it is beyond even Lagos and that is why historians and political discussants need to also further dimensions,” he said.
Muslim-Muslim ticket: Sanwo-Olu noted that the Muslim-Muslim ticket played a role in the outcome of the election as Lagos is the centre of a lot of Nigerian Christians.
- “For us, we have been able to identify and look critically as at to what went wrong and some of them are Muslim-Muslim ticket which played a role because Lagos is also centre of a lot of Christian population, the other reason is that some said that this is the first time they are having their son on the ballot so they are going to go ahead and vote their own, so we cannot force anybody, that’s the beauty of democracy,” he said.
Internal wrangling and youth factor: He also pointed out that the internal wrangling in the party contributed to the presidential candidate’s defeat in Lagos.
- “The third reason is that we have our internal wrangling and we have our internal issues that we were not able to resolve or we haven’t resolved fully before we went into the election.
- “In my view, these are some of the things that have indeed affected the election and also the issue of the youths, it is also not something we can play down but for me, the real conversation is if we claim that Lagos has about 6.7 million voters that have collected PVC, why do we have less than 20% voters turnout.
- “So those are also things we need to critique and find out what we need to do additionally for people to come out and exercise their civic duty, it is a national call, it is not about APC, Labour or PDP, I believe citizens must be able to respond. Less than 20% was not a true reflection of total Lagosians,” he said.
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