The Lagos State governorship election holds on Saturday March 18, with the incumbent Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), AbdulAzeez Adediran of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour of the Labour Party (LP) the leading contenders for the seat. The ICIR’s Temitayo Odunlami examines the tension-soaked build-up to the election and the chances of the three front-seat candidates.

THE stakes have gone higher in the electoral race to the Lagos State governor’s office at Alausa, Ikeja. The governorship election holds on Saturday March 18 and it is a no-brainer that it will be contested among Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Abdul-Azeez Olajide Adediran of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour of the Labour Party (LP). Other candidates do not stand even a scintilla of a fighting chance.

The APC is a bigger version of the ‘progressives’ camp that has held the state in its grip since 1999. Since the president-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, governed the state from 1999 to 2007, he has not only ensured that the party he leads controls the state, he has been directly involved in picking who would be governor.

Until now, Tinubu had had it relatively easy to control the governorship election, even when former president Olusegun Obasanjo vowed his “do-or-die” politicking in the 2003 and 2007 elections. The Alliance for Democracy (AD), and later the Action Congress (AC) and Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), with Tinubu as a leader, had always conveniently dumped the PDP in the governorship elections in what were purely two-way races. Other parties were inconspicuous. But the sudden emergence of the LP seems to be altering the configuration for Saturday’s election.

How the AD (AC, ACN, APC) dominated PDP in previous elections in Lagos
In the 1999 governorship election, Tinubu, contesting on the AD platform, defeated Dapo Sarumi of the PDP, polling 841,732 votes to Sarumi’s 184,900.

The PDP, with Obasanjo pushing for the party to completely take over the South-West, put up a stronger showing in the 2003 governorship election in Lagos State. The party’s Funso Williams garnered 740,506 votes, but could not do enough to unseat Tinubu, who polled 911,613 votes to return. Lagos State was the only one the PDP was unable to snatch from the AD in the South-West, a development that would begin to unravel Tinubu as an emerging political strategist to watch.

Before the 2007 governorship election in the state, Tinubu had departed the AD to form the AC. It was on this new platform that he picked his Chief of Staff, Babatunde Fashola, to run for governorship to succeed him. Fashola won the election with 599,300, edging PDP’s Musiliu Obanikoro, who got 383,956 votes.

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By 2011, the AC had metamorphosed into the ACN, on which platform Fashola ran for a return to office. He won convincingly, polling 1,509,113 votes against PDP’s Ade Dosunmu’s 300,450 votes.

Again, the ACN would assume another political identity after merging with the Congress for Political Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to form the APC.

It was on the APC ticket that Akinwunmi Ambode, another Tinubu nominee, contested the 2015 governorship election. Ambode won the election with 811,994 votes to succeed Fashola, beating Jimi Agbaje of the PDP, who had 659,788 votes.

APC leaders in Lagos State would not give Ambode a second term opportunity for the 2019 governorship election, and in his stead, they picked Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who emerged winner with 739,445 votes, defeating Agbaje, who contested for the second consecutive time on the PDP name and got 206,141 votes.

2023 Lagos governorship election and the LP factor
The tables may have turned. The governorship election in Lagos State on March 18 is expected to be fundamentally different from the two-horse race it had been since 1999. From the blues, Rhodes-Vivour has jumped into the mix, thanks to the frontline showing of the LP in Lagos State in the presidential election of February 25.

READ MORE HERE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/tension-as-sanwo-olu-rhodes-vivour-adediran-battle-for-lagos-governorship-seat/

What's Blud Jandor doing there?

I am for the msn of the moment.
GVR for governor
Lagos must accelerate
Lagos must attain its true potential.
I am sick and tired of the status quo
I am sick and tired of agberoism.

Jandor is not even in the race as far as I know