By Rasaq AdebayoOn March 18, 2023, the next governor of Lagos State will be elected by about 6 million registered voters in the State. The 40 members to represent each political constituency in the state at the State House of Assembly will also emerge.
No fewer than 16 candidates were registered by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to contest for the covetous seat of the Lagos State governor but only four of them are prominent. Those are the incumbent governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Olajide Adediran (Jandor) of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Hakeem Olaogun-Dickson of Accord Party (AP) and Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour of Labour Party (LP).
The four candidates will be jostling for highest vite counts expectedly to be cast by over six million voters.
According to the INEC, Lagos has the highest registered voters with 7,060,195, surpassing Kano (5,921,370) and Kaduna (4,335,208).
The Commission also revealed that Lagos State has the highest number of collected Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVC), a total of 6,214,970.
However, out of about six million voters with their PVCs, less than two million participated in the last Presidential/National Assembly in the state. The election results indicated that many eligible voters especially the APC supporters refused to go out and cast their votes.
The turnout was very low, only 18.92 per cent of the total eligible voters participated in the presidential poll. LP got the highest vote counts – 582,454 (45.81%), APC – 572,606 (45.04%), PDP- 75,750 (5.96%) while other political parties got 38,431 votes (3.05%).
Though Lagos is said to be home to APC, it came as a shock to many observers why and how the party lost to a less known LP party in the presidential poll.
Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, won the state by nearly 10,000 votes, a 0.77% margin, in a massive upset over former state Governor Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress. The other two major contenders, Atiku Abubakar (Peoples Democratic Party) and Rabiu Kwankwaso (New Nigeria Peoples Party), trailed with just 5.96% and 0.66%, respectively.
Although Lagos State is the home state of Tinubu, both Abubakar and Obi pushed to make the state competitive by targeting certain demographics and using the downballot candidates of their respective parties to lead the grassroots campaign. As a state in the ethnic Yoruba homeland of Yorubaland, most of Lagos State’s indigenous population are ethnic Yoruba but over a century of internal migration led to a significant minority of non-Yoruba non-indigenes. These differing ethnic dynamics greatly affected the presidential election for the APC.
The result of the presidential poll in the state has since given the governorship candidate of LP, Rhodes-Vivour more confident to ride on Obi’s triumph in Lagos. First, he made an attempt to go into alliance with the PDP to oust the ruling APC.
Rhodes-Vivour, in a chat with EHONEWS, was so confident that he said the PDP will have to collapse its structure for his own party.
He said forming alliance with the PDP became necessary and that he has been discussing with the leadership of party to forge a common front against the APC in the governorship election to be held this week.
He said: “Yes, we are in talk with the stakeholders and owners of PDP to work together to take APC out of this government.
“We are determined to emerge victorious during the coming Saturday gubernatorial election. We have made plans to ensure everybody comes out to vote. We will not be cheated twice, INEC has promised us that there would electronic transmission of the results; they deceived us because that was not what happened during the last election, but we will not be deceived again. So, we are encouraging all our members to come out massively and we have made sufficient security plan to ensure everybody is safe.”
Though he did not disclosed whether the PDP has agreed with his alliance motive, when asked whether his own party will collapse its structure into that of the PDP to form the said alliance, Rhodes-Vivour quickly said his own party cannot collapse its structure, explaining that his LP party has more followers than PDP, adding that his party has become stronger than the PDP.
“How is that possible, Labour Party is strong, we got 900+ thousand votes and have higher votes than both APC and PDP, so it is not possible for us to collapse our structure for the PDP. We’re working with the party and they are collapsing their structure for us so that we can deliver Lagos State.”
Rhodes-Vivour has also planned to leverage on what played out during the presidential election, believing that the Ndigbo in Lagos will also vote for his party and that their votes would give him victory.
He reportedly quickly added an Igbo name to his name to show the Ndigbo that he is their kinsman, hence, his name was re-written as Gbadebo Chinedu Rhodes-Vivour as shown on Wikipedia.
Rhodes-Vivour was said to be trying to remind the Ndigbo that though he is a Yoruba man, his maternal lineage is in the Igbo origin as his mother, Mrs. Nkechi Rhodes-Vivour was from the Southeast while he also married from the same region.
He also believed that the youths, who are the majority, would vote en mass for him, appealing to them to vote for his party as they did during the last election.
Though the PDP seems to have been weakened by the emergence of LP at the Presidential poll, the PDP governorship candidate said his party is not ready to go into alliance with LP based majorly on the court case surrounding the LP candidate.
Since the result of the last presidential election came as a shock to the ruling APC, the party has retraced its mistake and has started to put everything in order ahead of the Saturday gubernatorial election.
Political observers traced the downfall of APC to many factors which they said must be corrected within the few days to the governorship election.
They were surprised that the party was unable to record more than two million votes during the last election despite the fact the it has over two million registered members in Lagos State. It was said that the members of were angry with the leadership of the party for nit funding them.
ECHONEWS gathered that the party set up about 1,500 canvassers in each ward and were promised N5,000 each weekly as incentive, but they were only given the money once. The political observers said the canvassers and members were not motivated and encouraged even to do the door-to-door campaign. They further noted that be local council chairmen compounded the issue by not funding the campaign in their various localities.
They suggested that each local council chairman should be charged to mobilise voters in their domains to deliver a number of vote counts in their various localities.
With this and other strategies being deviced by the party, it is believed that the ruling APC will coast home with landslide victory at the forthcoming governorship and state assembly elections.
Meanwhile, the extension of the gubernatorial election by one week gives political parties opportunity to mobilise more voters and convince them to troop out to exercise their civic right. It is expected that million of voters in Lagos State will participate in the Saturday election.
