The nuance of Professor Yemi Osinbajo’s electrifying whistle-stop
tours of the South-West geo-political zone and pockets of towns in some
of the other zones, since the commencement of electioneering for the
February 16 presidential poll, has raised the stakes in the battle for
massive votes, especially in Yoruba land.
The vice president had
already covered so much ground and was extending his tentacles to the
Yoruba-speaking area of Kogi State last Saturday, when the helicopter
carrying him and his ten-man team crash-landed in Kabba. But gratefully
to God, none of them was hurt in the accident.
Osinbajo’s grassroots
campaigns in the South-West with about 16 million registered voters,
which is next to North-West with the highest registered voter population
of about 18 million, have been very effective. The strategic
electioneering had been designed to lock-in the maximum possible votes
in the zone for the APC presidential ticket.
The calculation is that
once done and the party’s presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, who
is from the North-West, is able to reenact his traditional mojo in the
zone that had, in the past, culminated in vote hauls, the opposition
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, will
have to work hard in the remaining four zones to cancel out the possible
wide margins of lead in the South-West and North-West zones.
It is,
however, instructive that both zones (South-West and North-West) account
for about 34 million of the estimated 82 million registered voter
population, leaving the remaining four geo-political zones with a total
of 48 million registered voters. While Atiku’s North-East has about 11
million registered voter population, there are about 10 million
registered voters in the South-East, the home base of his running mate,
Mr. Peter Obi.
These scenarios leave open for intense battle the
North-Central and South-South geo-political zones with 13 million and 12
million registered voters respectively. The cumulative voter figure of
34 million in both South-West and North-West is quite huge when compared
to 21 million that is cumulatively in the kitties of Atiku’s North-East
and Obi’s South-East.
North-Central and South-South zones
cumulatively custody 26 million registered voters which, to
simplistically put it, can be deployed in making up and doing the
much-needed balancing by the Atiku/Obi presidential ticket, assuming
that the ticket is firmly in control of the zones. But from all
indications, the presidential poll will be down to the wire.
Reports
by different pollsters indicate that Buhari and Atiku will run
neck-and-neck to the finish line by the time all the returns are made.
However, a winner is expected, by the prevailing permutations and
projections, to emerge by a margin that is possibly not significant.
The point is that whoever is going to win the presidential election
cannot afford to lose by very wide margins in both the South-West and
North-West zones.
This is the reason pressure is on the two frontline
candidates to either widen the margin of victory or constrict it.
Buhari and Osinbajo are working round the clock to ensure that the
margin is widened in the South-West and North-West zones while Atiku/Obi
are strategising towards constricting the margin, knowing fully that
the votes in their respective zones cannot mitigate the damage that
South-West and North-West votes for Buhari/Osibanjo ticket would cause
assuming the ticket gets the bloc votes of the two zones.
The
endorsement of the Atiku presidential candidature by leaders of Ohaneze
Ndigbo, the Middle Belt Forum, Pan Niger Delta Forum, a section of
Afenifere and Northern Leaders’ Forum, in Abuja, last Sunday, barely
twenty four hours after the ill-fated crash landing of Osinbajo’s
chopper in Kabba, is thus expected to conduce to swinging more
countrywide votes for the Atiku/Obi ticket. Developments such as this
and others will combine to alter political calculations, permutations
and reasonable expectations ahead of and during the presidential
election.
Although bookmakers favour the Buhari/Osinbajo ticket to
win the majority votes in both zones, if it cannot run away with 75
percent to 25 percent, it could as well kiss victory in the poll goodbye
because Atiku/Obi ticket is poised to lock in the majority of the votes
in southeast and south-south zones by as wide a margin as 80 percent to
20 percent. Both tickets are expected to run neck-and-neck in the
northeast and north central zones.
In 2015, Buhari won in all the
North-West states by very wide margins while in the South-West states,
he won in the five states of Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo and Osun with slim
margins, losing only in Ekiti to Jonathan where he scored about 120,000
votes to about 179,000 votes recorded by Jonathan. By the time votes
from other zones canceled out one another and the dusts finally settled,
Buhari had won by scoring about 15 million votes to about 12 million
votes scored by Jonathan.
So, if anyone did not quite understand
Osinbajo’s strategic grassroots tour of the South-West states, the fluid
shapes, forms and textures of the forthcoming presidential election, to
be sure, provide a context for explication: this is not a battle
between APC’s Buhari and a southern candidate on the PDP platform. It is
different from the 2015 scenario. Both frontline presidential
candidates are northerners, Muslims and Fulani.
The APC cannot
afford to take things for granted, especially in the South-West zone.
But while Buhari is understandably counting on his cult-like following
in the North-West to deliver the zone emphatically to the APC, the vice
president is doing everything possible not only to deliver South-West
zone to the APC presidential ticket but also to garner massive votes
that will make its win emphatic.
Osinbajo’s exertions in the final
homestretch to the presidential election must be appreciated for what
they are: occasions to touch base with the people who voted for the APC
presidential ticket in 2015; opportunities to deepen the conversations
and engagements with the people, many of whose lives have been somewhat
positively impacted with tradermoni, marketmoni programmes, which
Osinbajo drives on behalf of the administration; the N-Power and the
rice farmers’ anchor borrower scheme of the administration, et al; and,
chances to appeal to their sensibilities in the quest of the
administration for mandate renewal.
Just like the superintending APC
Presidential Campaign Organisation that has been electrifying in its
campaigns – which have, of course, been laced with and contoured by
dramatic incidents – the Osinbajo campaigns that are reinforcing the
main presidential campaigns have been smooth and luminous until the
crash land on Saturday, February 2, in Kabba by the chopper in which he
arrived the North-Central Yoruba-speaking town in continuation of his
‘Next Level’ engagements with and mobilisation of the people.
It is
remarkable that Osinbajo is putting in everything into the campaigns for
the re-election of the APC presidential ticket. He must necessarily
commit himself to the power-retention process to justify a sense of
entitlement to the vice presidential position on his personal merit,
performance, reputation and delivery and not on the back or
recommendations of some godfathers who position themselves in
self-acclaimed superintendence over the vortex of presidential power
calculus.
This time round, Osinbajo is working in concert with, over,
within and around the power caucus or caucuses to determine and justify
his continuing choice as vice presidential candidate in his own right.
If he plays his cards well, it may just be that he is actually working
for his unanimous endorsement by the North as a natural successor to
Buhari in 2023, if the ticket wins in 2019.
The other nuance of
chopper accident in the overall picture of the electioneering, though a
blight on otherwise smooth whistle stops, may count for something in his
consideration as the “Khalifa” to President Buhari in 2023.
•Ojeifo sent this piece via ojwonderngr@yahoo.com