Ahead of the 2023 general election, the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) continues to come up with strategies to outwit the other political parties to come tops in the election. Various fora, such as debates, town hall meetings, have particularly offered the party’s presidential candidate, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and other party members the opportunity to convince Nigerians on the need to vote the NNPP, across board, in the next election. Suffice it to state that Kwankwaso’s candidate may have made the 2023 presidential race a four-horse race. Kwankwaso, who is a former governor of Kano State, is a cult figure in Kano and has continued to make inroads into other parts of the North as well as the South. Even going by polls conducted by various organisations, the four leading candidates for the presidential election are Senator Bola Tinubu (All Progressives Congress), AlhajiAtikuAbubakar (Peoples Democratic Party), Mr Peter Obi (Labour party) and Kwankwaso (NNPP). While past elections have largely been a two horse race, there might be a change this time with the growing popularity of the NNPP and the LP. Evidence of the tide-changing relevance of the likes of the NNPP in the forthcoming electoral contest is seen in the fact that political analysts, till now, find it difficult to predict a clear winner of the next presidential election. They note that with the NNPP and the LP, the 2023 election will be so keenly contested such that a winner will only emerge by a slim margin. Sure of his acceptability, Kwankwaso has consistently declared that he has no plan to enter into an alliance with the APC or PDP for the elections.
Some analysts, particularly, predict that a winner will not emerge at the first ballot, except after a second ballot or a runoff. Giving a hint to a likely keen contest, National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr Festus Okoye, during its meeting with bureau chiefs and editors of media organisations in Abuja, said the commission was already preparing to print double of the total number of the ballot papers required for the first ballot should there be a rerun where no candidate meets the conditional requirement for declaring a winner on February 25, 2023. Quoting relevant sections of the 1999 constitution, Okoye stressed that a candidate could only be declared winner for a presidential election only if he or she has the highest number of votes cast and secures a quarter of the votes cast in two-thirds of the states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja.
