Femi Adesina, Special Adviser on Media to President Muhammadu Buhari, has shared the discussion he had with Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, ahead of the Nigeria’s presidential election.
He made the revelation in an article titled ‘PMB at 77: ‘Please tell Baba we are with him all the way’, in commemoration of the president’s birthday on December 17.
Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) defeated Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
He wrote: “Some months before the 2019 general elections, I ran into Governor Nasir El-Rufai in the Presidential Villa, as he was going in to see the President. We greeted warmly, and I asked if he could please stop by in my office on the way out. He promised to do so.
“What was my worry? The trend on social media, as to how the elections would go. I had a broader view of the reality, but I needed some reassurance. And I knew El-Rufai was analytical, and constantly had statistics at his fingertips. He’s not a first-class quantity surveyor for nothing.
“The governor turned up. I unfolded my worries, and asked for his opinion. He merely opened his laptop computer, and shared the result of a scientific research with me.
“What did the research say? With large sample size from across the country, and painstaking state by state analysis, it stated that President Buhari was going to beat his closest opponent by millions of votes.
“And wait for this: the social media would account for just between nine and 11 percent of the votes. And wait again: that percentage would not go to one party alone. It would be shared between the two leading political parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). It turned quite prophetic.”