Nigerian Ruling Party Confident of Victory Despite Opinion Polls
(Bloomberg) -- The presidential candidate of Nigeria’s ruling party is on course for a decisive victory despite opinion polls indicating that it will be a tough race, according to a senior member of his campaign.
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The All Progressives Congress doesn’t “expect anything less than a comfortable win” for Bola Tinubu, the former governor of Lagos state who is vying to become the next head of state of Africa’s largest economy, Babatunde Fashola, the party’s head of election planning, said an interview in the capital, Abuja, on Wednesday.
Whoever triumphs in the vote scheduled for Saturday will succeed President Muhammadu Buhari on May 29 after a three-month transition.
The contest for the Nigerian presidency appears to be the most open since the return of democracy in 1999. For the first time, three candidates – Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party – have been able to mount large campaigns throughout the vast nation. Obi has beaten his more established rivals in a series of opinion polls that the APC has dismissed.
The fuller field will work in the APC’s favor, according to Fashola – who points out that Abubakar, Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, who’s also running for the presidency and has a following in the populous northern state of Kano, were all in the PDP during the last election in 2019. With Obi as his running mate, Abubakar lost to Buhari by almost 4 million votes.
“If the sum total of them was not enough to defeat us in 2019, if they are fragmented now, I don’t see a pathway to the presidency for any of them,” said Fashola, who is also the works and housing minister and succeeded Tinubu as governor of Nigeria’s commercial hub.
The PDP is betting its nationwide mobilizing abilities are a match for the APC and can take advantage of discontent with Buhari’s eight years in office. Obi’s campaign is aiming to inspire citizens that didn’t participate last time – turnout was a record low 35% – to cast their ballots against the two-party status quo that’s ruled Nigeria for the past 24 years.
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