By Wole Adedeji, Ilorin
Rages in some quarters over the choice of Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential candidate to fly a Muslim-Muslim ticket will not stop him from winning in 2023.
A Kwara State politician, Alhaji Khaleel Bolaji, though a member of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, but at the same time an ardent admirer of Tinubu, made this assertion while speaking with this reporter in Ilorin, Kwara State.
Alhaji Bolaji also insisted that many other factors would also work in Tinubu’s favour, come 2023.
He averred that while same-faith ticket will freely fly in the Northern part of the country, it will not all the same hinder the success of Tinubu and his running mate from emerging victorious at the poll.
Alhaji Bolaji said in the South-West
for instance, religious differences do not count, pointing out that an average family home in this region can have brothers and sisters of the same parents, who are either Muslims or Christians without any bad blood against one another, on the strength of religions.
With this permissive attitude of Nigeria’s South-Westerners and coupled with the fact he is their own son, the APC presidential flagbearer would sweep the votes of his people, the Kwara politician said.
Besides, he said that it was strategic that Tinubu picked his running mate from the North East, because it remains a known fact that President Muhammadu Buhari got millions of votea from both Yobe and Borno states in 2015 and 2019, which is an assurance of the same volume of votes from the region.
Similarly, Bolaji was of the strong opinion too, that the same victory would be recorded as it was in Kano during the elections of 2015 and 2019 in Kano State come 2023 for the APC.
Asked to speak on the prospects of his new party, the SDP, as a former member of the APC in Kwara State, Alhaji Bolaji said both the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and APC had separately held sway in the state for over two decades with virtually no commensuration with the volume of billions collected all along as regular federal allocations in terms of physical developments on ground.
Because of this, he said that the SDP remains the only notable neutral party in the state that could bridge the developmental gaps created over the years, by the two earlier parties.
Not only that, he said that the SDP is waiting to reap from the faulty political calculations with the outcomes of the primaries held by the PDP and the APC when the time comes for voting.
