TheCable

Datti Baba-Ahmed, the vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), says no candidate will replicate the votes polled by President Muhammadu Buhari during the 2015 elections in Kano state.

Speaking in an interview on Channels Television on Tuesday, the LP vice-presidential candidate said his party is gaining support in the northern part of the country.

In the 2015 presidential election, Buhari, then candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), scored 1,903,999 votes in Kano while former president Goodluck Jonathan polled 215,779 votes.

Buhari was declared the winner of the elections after he scored a total of 15,424,921 votes to defeat incumbent Jonathan who polled 12,853,162 votes.

The huge number of votes garnered by Buhari in Kano was instrumental to his victory.

Making reference to previous polls, Baba-Ahmed said the hopes of APC and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to get large votes from the north in the coming elections have been dashed.

He said the LP would win the polls while the PDP and APC would be the runners-up.

Baba-Ahmed said the presidential campaign of LP has moved beyond social media and currently gaining momentum in the northern region.

“We have women rising to the challenge now more than we thought. We have the youths uniting particularly in the north,” he said.

“I’m talking about Sokoto, Kano, Bauchi, and Niger. The women in Niger were just too good for us. All over the north.

“Gombe was phenomenal. Adamawa was far beyond our expectations. We went to southern Adamawa, southern Gombe, and southern Borno. The energy in the youths in southern Borno is very unbelievable.

“The northern Nigerian votes that were waiting to make up the difference which either of the two other runners-up (referring to APC and PDP) were hoping to get, turned out that they are not getting it.

“The heavy punchers – Kano, for example – is now a watershed of what its votes used to be. In 2015, with the 1.9 million votes of Kano, nobody can aspire to have that which of course Buhari punched Jonathan with the final blow.

“Nobody is going to get that in Kano. We have pulled a lot of weight beyond the comprehension of the two runners-up.”