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Defectors inconsequential, won’t affect Buhari in 2019 —Keyamo

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Defectors inconsequential, won’t affect Buhari in 2019 —Keyamo

President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman for 2019 reelection campaign, Festus Keyamo, has boasted that the defections the All Progressives Congress (APC) has suffered will not affect Buhari.

He said despite the latest defections by some National Assembly members and the governor of Benue State, that Buhari will win 2019 presidential election and possibly with landslide victory.

He also said that should the much-rumoured two more governors (of Kwara and Sokoto states) also defect from the APC, that Buhari will still win the election.

He stated this in a statement on Sunday, adding that President Buhari won with large margins in the past in some states without the support of majority of the politicians from those states who moved recently to join the opposition party.

“From the demographics we have now, the historic figures and the present realities that we know, these defections will have little or no impact on the chances of Mr. President’s re-election,” he said.

Keyamo said that no amount of defections will have an effect on Buhari’s chances in 12 states of Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Yobe and Niger, where he said that the president had consistently won with considerable large margins in past elections, especially in 2011 and 2015.

“This was achieved despite the fact that most of those states were being controlled by political parties other than his own. In 2011, when the President was in CPC, despite being states with sitting opposition governors, National Assembly Members, state assembly members and local government chairmen, the President posted close to eleven million votes against all odds, defeating all his rivals in these twelve states mentioned above.

“In 2015 despite the majority of these states being in opposition after the merger that formed the APC, the President posted close to eleven million votes again in these states with PDP not scoring up to twenty per cent of the votes in most of these states,” he said.

He also said that defections from APC will have no effect on Buhari’s chances in 2019 in Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Kwara, Kogi, Adamawa and Benue, which he said was the nine states Buhari lost election in 2011 but won in 2015

According to Keyamo, five south-western states in the list are being controlled by the APC. “Ekiti will join before the 2019 election after Governor Kayode Fayemi is sworn in for a second term in office. All the political gladiators in those south-western states that helped to tilt the election in favour of the President in 2015 are still solidly with him and more have joined.”

READ ALSO : DEFECTIONS: ‘God has removed stones from our rice and sand from our garri’—Lai

On Adamawa, Kwara, Kogi and Benue states, he said that “with APC in charge of three out of the four states, especially with Senator Gbemi Saraki and Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information, leading the efforts in Kwara State and the APC structure in Benue State still firmly in the hands of Senator George Akume (the same structure on which Governor Ortom rode to victory) the defection of the senators from these states will have little or no effect on the difference gained.”

On what effect the defections will have on the 15 states comprising 11 states of the South East and South South and Plateau, Taraba, Nassarawa and Ekiti States, were Buhari lost elections in 2015, Keyamo said:

“Apart from having governors in Edo and Imo states, the exemplary work of the President in the South East and South South, especially in terms of infrastructural developments, like the Second Niger bridge and a whole lot of road constructions, APC is on the rise in these states and this momentum will surely rub off on the electoral fortunes of the President.

“In the final analyses, despite all the noise from our ‘noisy neighbours’, we may be in for a landslide victory for the President in 2019,” he said.

 

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