by Ranti Joseph

Sule Lamido of Jigawa State on Tuesday predicted that the South-west would not vote for the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Muhammadu Buhari because that would place the APC national leader, Bola Tinubu, as the leader of the Yoruba race.

Lamido said this while speaking exclusively with ThisDay Newspapers. “If the Yorubas vote for Buhari because their son is the national leader of the South-west, then it will prove that Bola Tinubu is the undisputed leader of the Yorubas. This is because his people have spoken and therefore hearkened to Tinubu’s directives,” he said.

Lamido, who is the North-west Coordinator of the Peoples Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Organization (PDPPCO) further noted that religion and ethnicity would play a major role in the March 28 presidential election, owing to the fact that President Goodluck Jonathan is from the south and a Christian while Buhari is a Muslim northerner.

He went on to challenge the presidential candidate of the APC to state how he intends to confront corruption, which is the major plank of his presidential manifesto, when some former governors of the PDP who are now members of the APC are facing corruption charges in the courts. “How would Buhari, if he became president, tackle the corruption cases pending against the former Governor of Gombe, Danjuma Goje, and the former Governor of Kwara State, Bukola Saraki. What will he do to them? Will he send them to jail or convict them as he did when he was the military head of state. Buhari should come clean and tell Nigerians his blueprint on how to tackle corruption. It is not just shouting about corruption. Let Nigerians know how this would be done,” he said.

He further noted that religious sentiments and campaigns on the basis of ethnicity have boosted Buhari’s standing in the north. “People of the north are said to be supporting him because they say that he is one of our own and he is Muslim. This is also what is happening in the south. Some of President Jonathan’s supporters in the south are doing so because he is a Christian and from the south. But above all, to the elite, we see him from the prism of what he has done. That is why I said that he is the preferred candidate.” Some elite in the north have made religion the campaign issue. They are supporting Buhari, not because they love him, but simply because he is Muslim from the north and are against President Jonathan because he is from the south and is a Christian. This is the mode of the presidential campaigns in the north. But Thank God we are breaking and debunking this myth because the Nigeria of today has gone past that stage. The works of the PDP governors in bringing home the dividends of democracy is gradually presenting President Jonathan as the preferred presidential candidate. Even among the elite and northern establishment, Jonathan is seen as the preferred candidate despite the campaign style of the APC in using religion and ethnicity to entice the talakawas (local parlance for the masses),” he added.

Janeth J