The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola has stated that the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi’s victory in Lagos State, in the just concluded 2023 presidential election, was a surprise to the All Progressives Congress.
The minister made this revelation during an interview on Channels Television during the Sunday Politics program.
The former Lagos governor explained that the LP turned its voters on in the state, and rubbed out the chances of the Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar.
Fashola, who revealed that the ruling party conducted pre-election internal polls but never released them, described polls that predicted Obi and Atiku’s victory as “badly conducted.”
Fashola, who was the head of the Election Planning Directorate of the Tinubu-Shettima campaign, said APC figured out states where it had high chances of winning and had concentrated its energy in those states.
“In some cases, you get blindsided. We were blindsided in Lagos State because the opposition turned out their voters there. And you also saw that the umbrella party that has been competitive for 24 years suddenly disappeared. It showed that their support base has shifted, ” he said.
When asked how APC received Obi’s victory in Lagos during the presidential poll, he said, “Yeah, blindsided us, without a doubt. They turned out their voters, and in the subsequent governorship poll, we turned out our voters.”