Okpebholo’s Phantom 2.5m Bola Tinubu Votes

My friend, Ehitare, was the brightest elementary school kid you could ever meet. When it concerned education or the classroom, he was the gold standard. He brimmed with confidence and motivation.

I am talking about my village, Igueben, where there was no library and almost no books in the late 1960s. But Ehitare, who was just 12, taught me that there should be no obstacles. He read anything and forgot nothing. We had to read anything we could find.

Then came time for us to take the common entrance examination into secondary school. On his own, Ehitare would have passed the test on the spot. But the nearest test centre was in Ugbegun, which was six miles away, as I would confirm later.

Shockingly, when the test began that morning, my friend was not there. I was distressed. He arrived when we were halfway through but still finished ahead of many.

I was seething with anger when I joined him. Why had he been late, I growled.

I will never forget what he said. He had left home just before dawn, in those days when we told time only by the crowing of a cock, and walked the distance. Nobody in his family was able to come up with transport money for him.

Think about that: a 12-year-old walking six miles through unfamiliar terrain at dawn to get to the test venue.

When I hear Edo State Governor Monday Okpebholo speak, I remember Ehitare’s power and purpose. At 12.

Because Governor Okpebholo, about whom I first publicly marvelled here nearly two years ago, thinks less coherently, and with far less focus, than my heroic 12-year-old friend from five decades ago.

I write this only for the record, because I lack the capacity to stop the governor from pursuing his crash-and-burn dream of bagging 2.5 million Edo State votes for President Bola Tinubu in January’s election.

Okpebholo calls his 2.5 million votes figure a “fixed deposit,” describing it as “achievable and already settled.” But that reveals ignorance of voting and votes, and insults the electorate.

He has made this pledge so repeatedly that some of the people around him forget that it is arbitrary and fictional.

Edo State APC Chairman Jarret Tenebe has declared that he would mutilate himself or commit suicide to achieve it. For his part, the governor has vowed to resign should Tinubu fail to win Edo. This immediately means that, if Okpebholo truly knows the spelling of honour, Edo will have a new governor four months from now.

Achieving 2.5 million votes would require almost every registered voter in Edo to turn out and vote for Tinubu: a state which recorded roughly 600,000 votes cast in the 2023 presidential election. It is impossible.

Suicide is not an Esan thing, but this one is a suicide mission, requiring Mr Tinubu to get 2.5 million votes from the same electorate where he was not only defeated four years ago but scored only 144,471 votes.

Furthermore, APC has not won the presidential vote in Edo in any of the last three cycles under review. In 2019, it lost to the PDP, and then in 2023, heavily to the Labour Party (by nearly 187,000 votes).

Consider also that Edo’s presidential turnout has been consistently modest. The INEC archives place it in the mid-to-high twenties as a percentage of registered voters. What this means is that turnout—unless turnout is not a factor in Okpebholo’s kitchen—has never approached a level that would make 2.5 million votes for a candidate with fewer than two heads arithmetically possible.

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And then consider that between 2019 and 2023 in Edo, the trend has been of APC decline rather than growth. Buhari’s 267,842 fell to Tinubu’s 144,471: a nearly 46 per cent drop, and that occurred even as the total pool of registered voters grew.

The governorship record in the state confirms the same pattern. Turnout for Edo’s own gubernatorial elections fell from 32 per cent in 2016 to 24.5 per cent in 2020 to roughly 21 per cent in 2024. Again, that is despite the pool of registered voters growing from 1.9 million to 2.63 million.

Okpebholo’s own governorship winning total in the controversial election that made him governor was 291,667 votes: a little over one-ninth of what he is pledging to deliver, just two years later, and to another candidate for a less locally engaging election.

Let me put it another way. Okpebholo has recently claimed that he can cast out demons. For him to get those 2.5 million ballots, he would have to work in the other direction: cast in and count those demons as votes.

It would require the APC presidential vote in Edo to grow more than ninefold from its best-ever showing, and, worse still, more than 17 times from Tinubu’s 2023 result of 144,471.

That’s not the only mathematical mountain. The best result any party has recorded in an Edo presidential election, Peter Obi’s 331,163 votes in 2023, an unusually energised, youth-driven surge, falls far short. For Tinubu to reach 2.5 million, Okpebholo would have to manufacture those demons quickly to produce a margin of consolidation that the state has never approached, for any party.

And then there is the obvious: Edo’s registered voter roll stood at 2,629,025 for the 2024 governorship election, of which 2,249,780 had collected their PVCs.

Okpebholo would need a registered electorate close to or above that size. Furthermore, PVC collection would have to be near-universal, along with turnout and essentially unanimous consolidation behind Tinubu. That is an unprecedented combination anywhere in Nigeria.

The problem is that Okpebholo does not understand the state he governs. Everyone knows he did not really win Edo State, which may explain why, instead of governing it, he has stuck it in a perpetual campaign mode for Tinubu.

This may be because his infamous track record as a D-student did not prepare him for leadership. He came into political prominence with scandals over age-falsification: a man whose birthday changes on different days or with different public documents.

In 2024, he was further exposed as a man who was not even registered to vote, and when he won the election, as a man who could barely read.

What this means is that in a state with the profile of Edo, Okpebholo was an awful governorship candidate who somehow won over a much more qualified opponent. Gratitude to his sponsors appears to have thrown the governor into a mission where he has substituted a perpetual campaign mode for Tinubu for governance.

Which is why he has made the most egregious mistake of all: counting votes before they are cast, forgetting that a guaranteed outcome and a free election are mutually exclusive.

Okpebholo’s Tinubu guarantee can only be delivered through such extra-legal means as coercion and blackmail.

Even that, for a hungry, angry, and disaffected electorate, underestimates the humongous scale of the challenge. Translation: There is no scenario in which 2.5 million votes are remotely feasible in Edo on January 16.