A former Nigerian sports minister, Bolaji Abdullahi, has said that the defeat the former Senator Bukola Saraki-led group suffered in the 2019 elections was inevitable, adding that even a chicken would have defeated their candidates in the elections.
Abdullahi, who defected with the former senate president and contested the Peoples Democratic Party governorship primary, made this statement in an interview with Premium Times on Saturday.
Abdullahi blamed the failure of the Saraki-led political group in the 2019 elections on their failure to listen to what people were saying.
“I belong to a political group that is led by the former Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki, and the counter mobilisation that happened in 2019 was to send away all of us that belong to that political group.
“It was many years in the making but for some reasons, we were not paying enough attention to what people were expressing and what they were not saying.
“I think in 2019, if a chicken had been fielded against us, that chicken would have won. It was that bad. People somehow felt at that point that they had had enough of us, which is quite unfortunate, the situation we found ourselves in” Abdullahi said.
He said the Saraki-led group was roundly defeated in both the senatorial and governorship elections because people were fed up.
“Some people even won elections against us without leaving their sick bed. It was a case that people were fed up with us. People saw sufficient reasons to say ‘enough is enough’ (OTOGE). That was what happened.
“For someone like me who wanted to become a governor in the last election but never got beyond the primaries, there are different interpretations to what happened but I don’t think that story is ripe to be told yet. But the truth was that, what happened in 2019 was inevitable”, Abdullahi said.
