Leaked documents have indicated that the newly formed opposition political party, the All Progressives’ Congress (APC) is approaching the 2015 elections with all seriousness having mapped out a formidable strategy to dislodge the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) from power.
Despite that the opposition party has, for some time, blocked avenues of information leakage as a result of the embarrassing experience it had over the issue of its registration, some members of the party who are uncomfortable by possible flocking of PDP members into the APC unwittingly revealed the grand plan to this paper.
According to the plan, the opposition has created a geopolitical map of Nigeria with marking of areas of its strength and weaknesses. The first approach, which is already in operation, is the targeting of the major electoral and population centres of the federation with a view to securing plurality advantage over the ruling party’s candidate in 2015 such as Kano and Lagos states, as the two most populous in the country with a likely combined strength of between 12 and 14 million votes.
As the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) already controls Lagos, the opposition is reported to be investing heavily in snatching Kano from the ruling party, a reason said to be behind the on-going push to get the Kano State governor to defect to the APC
Insight into the plan also revealed that the pressure on Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso to defect has grown so much that the governor is alleged to be in communication with General Muhammadu Buahri. A defection by Kwankwaso, it was gathered, would leave the opposition with the control of three dominant political caucuses in Kano State, namely the Buhari group, the Ibrahim Shekarau group and the Kwankwasiya group of Governor Kwankwaso.
With such control,the opposition, with could then claim close to 80 per cent of the votes in the state. While the governor is yet to embrace the signals, reports indicated that collaboration may have gone far ahead as recent interactions among the trio of the state governor, Buhari and Senator Bola Tinubu indicated.
The map, aside focusing on the population centres, also reportedly identifies the core North, spreading from upper North-East to North-West and the South-West, including parts of Edo and Delta axis as zones of influence. The listed states include Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Jigawa, Borno, Yobe, Niger, Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi and Gombe, including parts of Adamawa. The document indicates that the opposition is banking on the cult, like support of General Buhari and planned defection by some PDP chieftains to its fold.
For the South, the political map is said to include the six states of the South-West, namely Osun, Oyo, Ogun, Lagos, Ekiti and Ondo, in addition to Edo and a substantial part of Delta State where the document believes opposition support is growing on a daily basis. The expectation is that the alleged marginalisation of the Yoruba in the Goodluck Jonathan-led government will dissuade any Yoruba voter from supporting him come 2015, just as the strategists also hold that the core North will politically work against the president as a group.
It was also learnt that the optimism of the opposition on the South-West has been strengthened by the rift between the president and former President Olusegun Obasanjo. The opposition is said to believe that the anger within Obasanjo group in the South-West will work to its (opposition’s) advantage.
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