After four months of watching the candidates on the hustings, does this presidential election still look like a four-horse race?
t is 48 days, on Sunday, to Nigeria’s seventh presidential election since 1999. The ballot on election day February 25 will have the symbols of 18 parties, down from the 79 that stood in the previous poll of 2019.
A runoff will be conducted for the two leading candidates if the one with the most votes does not also get at least 25 per cent of the votes cast in each of 24 of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. His refusal to honour invitations to town hall meetings organised by Arise Television, amid regular appearance of scathing articles against his person and candidature in Thisday Newspaper, a sister company of Arise Television, brought the APC presidential campaign council into a messy confrontation with Nduka Obaigbena, the owner of the two media organisations.
Mr Tinubu has met directly or through proxies several times with the G5 PDP governors, although he and the governors denied recent reports that they had agreed to work together in the presidential election. But a dispute with his closest rival in the primary, Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, has overshadowed news from his well-attended campaign stops. Mr Wike was not happy with the conduct of the primary but became implacable after Atiku overlooked his recommendation by a committee of the party to pick Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa, as his running mate.Mr Wike then demanded that Iyorchia Ayu, whom he had accused of manipulating the primary for Atiku, step down as national chairman.
The governors on Thursday had a foretaste of the difficult task of working both sides of the aisle that they have set for themselves. At the flag-off of the reelection campaign of one of them in Ibadan, Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde, party members chanted Atiku’s name to mock a suggestion by the G5 that they would be told to work for a different candidate.
Mr Obi’s support base is hewn from PDP traditional strongholds in the South-east, South-south and Northern Christian communities. Mr Okowa and some other perceptive party leaders have warned that Mr Obi could inadvertently be working to smoothen Mr Tinubu’s path to the presidency. The vast reaches of the internet have enabled his campaign to travel far and wide, including in the diaspora where some Nigerian communities have been mobilising support for him in cash and kind.The result is that he has won virtually every online poll conducted on the election and attracted the attention of even the foreign media.
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