By Femi Ige
Borno state governor, Kashim Shettima has promised to deliver the highest percentage win possible for Professor Umara Zullum in this week’s gubernatorial election. In an exclusive chat with The State Online ,Shettima said his administration intends to better the percentage win in the last presidential election’’by delivering a bigger win this Saturday’’
According to the Borno helmsman ,the state is a Buhari territory from time immemorial which may be linked to the president’s sterling performance when he was a military governor of the defunct North Eastern State, to which Borno belonged. Shettima drew attention to the 2007 presidential election result where Buhari defeated Atiku in Borno state with a high percentage win to show that the relationship between the state and the president is a long standing one
’’Also in 2011, he contested as a candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change(CPC),Buhari got over 90% of the votes in Borno. Even in 2015, Buhari got the highest percentage win not in Kano,not in Kaduna,not in Katsina but in Borno where we gave him 97.3%.Candidate Jonathan, the then President got a paltry 2.7% in Borno. So it’s not a surprise when you check the vote differentials, we were number three nationwide in 2019,but we will be number one this week which is our normal position. This is strictly down to our ability to mobilize the mass of humanity to come and exercise their franchise. The bottom line is that ability to mobilize the people and that was what we did for the president and that is what we are doing now in order to deliver the highest percentage win possible in Nigeria for our governorship candidate’’ he said
The Borno governor explained that the need to mobilize the people also played a large role in the choice of the APC governorship candidate from a pool of 21 outstanding aspirants that jostled for the ticket.’’They were all eminently qualified, but we were looking for someone with a magnetic connection to the Borno people, that led us to Professor Umara Zullum’’ he said.
According to him, Professor Umara Zullum’s outstanding understanding of the peace-development nexus in a post conflict Borno and his experience as Commissioner for Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and Resettlement has enabled him to establish enormous amount of contact in the post conflict development sector and this has earned him unequalled confidence of local and international stakeholders’’ This confidence is necessary for the next phase of our development and also vital for our mobilization for Saturday victory’’ he said.
*Photo L-R: Gov Shettima, Prof Zulum
