X-raying Tinubu’s rally in Kano

There is no gainsaying the fact that the unmatched pace at which Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has been prosecuting his campaign ahead of the crucial February 25, 2023, presidential election has placed him and his running mate, Senator Kashim Shettima, way ahead of any of their rivals.

The North-West flag-off rally of the APC was held about a week ago but it remains a mind-numbing phenomenon of the undisputed ascendancy of the Tinubu candidature.

Whatever might have been the reason for choosing Kano, an ancient centre of culture and commerce, historical hub of West African Sahel, and vibrant modern metropolis, which also doubles as the capital of Nigeria’s second most populous state as well as a veritable electoral powerhouse, as the venue for the rally, the people of this remarkably politically intelligent constituency did not disappoint at all.

On the contrary, not only did they impress to the fullest, they ended up making the Kano rally a most intimidating testament to overwhelming northern support for Tinubu.

Despite the cold harmattan weather on January 4, 2023, an endless stream of the most enthused throngs of patriotic citizens from the north-west geopolitical zone of our country, kept trooping out in the most intimidating numbers to register their adoption of the Tinubu/Shettima ticket.

This is not merely a verdict upon the crowd size at the Sani Abacha Stadium, Kofar Mata, Kano, which alone would have made for a rally truly unprecedented.

The crowd outside the stadium, stretching out across entire districts adjoining it was so great that it took the presidential campaign convoy more than three hours to access the venue for the actual rally to even begin!

While it is easy to assume that the organisers would have intended for the Kano rally to unfold as a rally to remember, their palpable surprise, awe and ecstatic reaction at the sheer size of enthusiastic supporters who had come to welcome Bola Tinubu in this particular politically savvy state clearly show that the turnout beat all their projections and expectations.

Not only did the rally solidly establish the fact that Tinubu is both truly and widely accepted in the core north, but it also served to correct the utterly baseless notion that President Muhammadu Buhari is not fully supporting the Tinubu/Shettima ticket of his own party!

The presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who, as of today, has abandoned his campaign for his native home in Dubai, had all along predicated his inordinate ambition to be president of a country that has always rejected him and is set to do so once again, come February 25, on inheriting the northern support base and vote bank of President Buhari.

To imagine that this is the same man who has always despised Buhari and had the effrontery of running against him in 2019, hoping then that the south that he is presently trying to cheat out of its turn to produce the next president of Nigeria, would give him the required edge to upstage his fellow northerner!

That Kano rally must have understandably really discomfited him, perhaps explaining his puzzling reluctance to reemerge from the hideout of his Dubai country home and return to what a senior colleague of mine has described as “Atiku’s campaign to absolutely nowhere”!

If the massive turnouts in the Niger and Kaduna rallies had not already fully put a lie to the complete fiction that the PDP and its Peter Obi-led Labour Party offshoot have been peddling as to the supposed lack of grassroots support for Tinubu in the north, the Kano rally definitively delivered a technical knockout to all of their groundless posturing and shameful confabulations.

Indeed, through these and other rallies in the north, our northern brothers and sisters stoutly exemplified the unassailable credentials of their pan-Nigerian orientation, contrary to the baseless impression of Atiku and PDP that the north is merely nothing but a backward bastion of ethnicism, regionalism and base sectionalist sentiments that they can simple bulldoze through while reaping unearned electoral windfalls along the way!

Against the unfounded speculations that the north will betray Tinubu, the Asiwaju and his running mate, Senator Shettima, have kept proving them wrong, time and again, even as our fellow patriotic northern citizens continue to robustly keep faith with the Tinubu/Shettima “Renewed Hope” ticket for the Nigeria of all our dreams from the north to south.

Simply put, the Kano mother of all political rallies is a most unequivocal affirmation of northern support for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, having already more than firmly established the fact that he is deeply loved by Northern Nigeria and that he is the one they will be voting for on election day.

Ogunleye-Bello, an award-winning Nigerian journalist, is a member of the Media and Publicity Directorate, as well as the Contact and Mobilization Directorate (South-West) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council