Babatunde Fashola, SAN, the Minister of Works and Housing and former Lagos State governor, has said that three main opponents of his party in the February 25 poll gave away the presidential victory to the President-Elect, Bola Tinubu by splitting from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after the 2019 presidential election.
Fasola ,who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, said the Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), PDP’s Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) all belonged to the same party, the PDP, in 2019 but they separated towards the 2023 presidential poll which gave the All Progressives Congress (APC) a chance to victory.
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.”