The vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Datti Baba-Ahmed, has said the over 1.9 million votes gotten by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), in Kano State during the 2015 elections will not be won by any candidate in the forthcoming elections.
In 2015, Buhari of the All Progressives Congress defeated the Peoples Democratic Party’s Goodluck Jonathan with 1,903,999 votes, while the latter had 215,779 votes in Kano.
“The northern Nigerian votes that were waiting to make up the difference which either of the two other runners-up were hoping to get, [it] turned out that they are not getting it,” Baba-Ahmed said during a live appearance on Channels Television’s special election programme The 2023 Verdict on Tuesday.
“The heavy punchers – Kano, for example – is now a watershed of what its votes used to be. In 2015, the 1.9 million votes of Kano, nobody can aspire to have that which of course Buhari punched Jonathan with the final blow. Nobody is going to get that in Kano.”
Baba-Ahmed said other competitive zones in the North are Kaduna and Katsina.
According to Channels, other factors he believed were working in his party’s favour include the rise of the youth in his home state of Kaduna, the increasing awareness of uniting Nigeria, and the non-indigenes all over Northern and Central Kaduna.
“We have pulled a lot of weight beyond the comprehension of the two runners-up,” he added.
