A political activist and member of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, Aisha Yesufu, has said supporters of the party’s presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, will not rely on electoral institutions to protect their votes in the 2027 presidential election, and will instead place people at every polling unit and follow result sheets through every stage of collation to Abuja.
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She spoke in an interview on Channels Television, discussing Obi’s prospects and the lessons drawn from 2023.
Yesufu, who supported Obi in 2023 without joining any party, confirmed that she is now a member of the NDC.
“I’m in a political party. I’m doing politics. I’m a politician now,” she said, describing herself as a cadre member.
Asked about her earlier disagreement over the conduct of the party’s primaries, she said she had moved on. “That was at that time. Right now the main focus is the 2027 election, and that’s where I am.”
She said she is not seeking elective office and did not cling to any ticket.
Yesufu said her work would be at polling units rather than at rallies.
“My role is ensuring that at every polling unit we have a council. We have at least nothing less than 20, 50, 100, depending on the polling unit, already mapping that out,” she said.
“Where I come in, it’s not going to be at the rallies only. My own is to be at the streets, at every polling unit, that we must take over every polling unit and ensure that every vote is protected. Men will mount, women will mount. We’ll be everywhere.”
She said the campaign already holds the cities and is moving into the hinterland to organise before election day.
Asked what would be different from 2023, Yesufu said the lesson was that the institutions cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
“At every polling unit we are going to stay there. Vote protection people that will stand there. We have our own alternative means of ensuring that we are protected, and then people will stand and follow the vote all the way from the polling unit to the ward collation centre, from the ward collation centre to the local government, and from there to state, and all the way to Abuja,” she said.
“There is no time that any ballot paper, any ballot box, result sheet, or the individual will be out of our sight. We will follow them using bikes. We will follow them using boat. We will follow them by air. If they are coming on private jet, we’ll use alternative private jet to go with them until we get to every place that every result is entered, and it must be the result that the people voted.”
She added: “We are not going to give them any chance to assume that they’re going to do the right thing. We will ensure that no vote is changed from where it is voted and entered, to the place when the INEC chairman declares the final result.”
Yesufu described the approach as a return to older methods. “The playbook is us going back to 2003, where everything, whether technology or whatever, we just stay on.”
Pressed on whether the plan amounted to an admission of organisational lapses in 2023, Yesufu rejected the framing.
“There were no lapses in the organisation. You have an institution that can’t be trusted,” she said. “We’ve come to a place where we are so fixated about this agent issue, but meanwhile INEC is given billions of naira, probably running into trillions, to conduct this election, and we are not asking them why it is that they don’t do free, fair, credible elections.”
She said the burden falls on the wrong party. “You can’t come and say that you have an institution that should do the right thing, you have security that should protect, and then put the onus on anybody to say, ‘Oh, because you did this or you did not do that.’ We’ve gotten to a place where we accept this anomaly in our society.”
On the absence of agents at some polling units, she said citizens filled the gap. “There might be agents that were not at this or that place, but guess what? Citizens played agents. Citizens were there. Citizens had their results. Citizens put out their results. People saw what was counted.”
She then stated her position plainly: “In this place, I do not have any trust of INEC, of security agencies, of the judiciary. That’s the difference we are doing.”
Recalling 2023, she said the campaign had believed the then chairman. “On the same day, the House of Representatives results were going through, the Senate results were going through, it came to presidential results, and there is a glitch. And nobody up till now has asked INEC, ‘What happened? Where is the glitch? What happened to the monies that we spent all this while?’”
She said the approach now is different. “Zero trust. There’s nothing like believing that INEC will do the right thing or not do the right thing. We are going to watch them like hawks. Since they don’t have the sense to do the right thing, we force them to do that right thing and ensure that the result that the people voted is the result that ends up coming out.”
Yesufu said supporters would not submit to violence.
“If you come to take away our vote, it’s like you are killing us, and if you come to do violence, there is something called self-defence. We will defend ourselves, and we will ensure that anybody that comes in there must do the things that they are supposed to do the right way,” she said.
She framed the election in stark terms. “When I talk about the fact that we are fighting for our lives, it is war. People think it’s a joke.”
She added: “We have been cowards for too long in this country, where some people think that they have a monopoly of anyhowness. This country belongs to all of us, and no Nigerian is more Nigerian than any Nigerian.”
Echoing Obi, she said: “Anybody that does not want our vote to be counted, that person will be counted.”
Asked about the obstruction of Obi’s convoy in Benue State, and about criticism from Isaac Fayose that he should not have backed down, Yesufu defended the decision to move on.
“There is no politician in Nigeria that is as courageous as Mr Peter Gregory Obi,” she said, noting that Obi had been to Benue before and was returning to Yelwata.
“There is a place where someone has to be strategic. You have a lot of things to do. If you’re fighting people who don’t have work, it doesn’t make any sense at that moment,” she said, adding that Obi had been scheduled to go from Benue to Plateau and then to Europe the same day.
“One of the things that Mr Peter Obi never allows is to allow them to dictate the way things will go,” she said.
She directed criticism at the Benue State Government. Told that the governor has denied any hand in the obstruction, she questioned the response to the killings in the state and said the campaign would return. “That Benue, we will land there. Wherever, however they want it, we’re going to do it, stay in that Benue, and they will see that nobody has a monopoly of madness.”
On the arrests made afterwards, she welcomed the police action but said it did not go far enough.
“Well done to the Nigerian police. But what about the faces, the prominent faces we saw there? The same prominent faces that go around with the governor of Benue State and the government, and some of the spokespersons that were there. Why are those people not also arrested?” she asked. “If people have the guts to come out and say that somebody should not come in, they should also have the guts to say to the police, ‘Yeah, we stopped that person.’ I don’t go to protest and go and hide my face.”
Asked whether she believes Obi can win, having maintained that he won in 2023, Yesufu said the second attempt is less difficult.
“2027 is even easier than 2023. In 2023 you had to put in all that work,” she said, crediting a former Governor of Edo State with inadvertently helping the campaign by denying it the use of halls, which she said prompted Edo residents to turn out and created the shift at which people saw that a new Nigeria was possible.
She pointed to the alliance between the Obidient movement and the Kwankwasiyya, and to Obi’s running mate, Engineer Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso.
On religion, she said the calculation has changed. “The hunger has entered everyone, that you now realise that even if you go to the market and you don’t have money, saying Muslim-Muslim ticket is not going to buy you that thing. It’s no longer about religion but about competence, character, capacity.”
Presented with the 2023 map, that Obi swept the five South-East states, won Edo, Delta and Cross River in the South-South while losing Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa, took Plateau, Nasarawa and the FCT in the North-Central, won only Lagos in the South-West and won nothing in the North-West and North-East, Yesufu disputed the record rather than the analysis.
“In 2023 you saw a situation whereby the results that we had, a lot of them were reduced. We won Lagos, but the numbers were drastically reduced. Same thing with Plateau, and quite a number of places that we won,” she said.
On Rivers, she said: “Even though they have said we did not win, a lot of his cronies have come out to say it. They have accepted the fact that we won Rivers. There are also so many other states that we won, but our votes were not allowed to count.”
She said Benue also belonged in that category. “Even in Benue, presidential election, they know what happened there.”
Her conclusion was blunt. “If in 2023 they rigged us out, shame on them. In 2027, if we sit down and allow them to rig us out, it will be shame on us, and that shame is not something that we’re ready to take.”
Responding to the FCT Minister’s declaration that the territory is a no-go area for the opposition, she said: “There’s a difference between being an appointee and being a governor in charge of a state.”
Yesufu questioned the Commission’s name.
“The only independence in INEC is the I,” she said. “Every other thing, there’s no independence there. We’re not going to sit back and be trusting of them. Yes, they are the umpire that will have to conduct the process. We are watching them, but we’re watching them like hawks.”
Asked whether Obi is a match for President Bola Tinubu, Yesufu was dismissive.
“Mr Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not who he thinks he is, and he knows it,” she said. “Wherever, all around the system, nobody wants him, and he knows, and he’s afraid. That is why you see the recent threats coming from all of them, because they know they have lost it in every way.”
She conceded the spending gap. “They will outspend us. For every ₦1,000 that we bring, they will bring $1,000 or foreign money that has been kept. No wahala. But they can’t out-passion, because the people have already said no.”
She said the pattern of threats runs down the chain. “From governors to senators to local government chairmen, it seems as if the circular that has been given to them is to threaten the people. If you have it in you, you won’t threaten anybody.”
Put to her that the administration points to improved macroeconomic indicators, credit ratings, tax reform, judicial reforms, local government autonomy and larger allocations to states, Yesufu rejected the measure.
“There is a macro that goes with a micro, and that micro is where the people are, because that is what affects the people. People can’t even travel. People can’t eat. People don’t have the money,” she said.
She said she has always supported subsidy removal and was not part of Occupy Nigeria for that reason, but faulted the execution. “You don’t remove subsidy and not put anything in place to take care of the people, and then use that money to waste on colossal projects. What has been set aside for those projects, they’re almost like conduit pipes.”
On the larger allocations to states, she said the figures mislead. “They’re quick to tell us that they’re giving more monies to governors than they gave before. But they’ve forgotten that things are three times, four times more expensive than they were before. Even though the figures have increased, the value of that money has not increased.”
She pointed to student protests over fee increases and to questions over the student loan scheme, and said ministries now publicly complain of receiving little or no funding.
On the human effect, she said: “There are people that are carrying their children to go and feed on grasses because they’ve been driven away from their farms, and nothing is being done about it. Those are the people that we care about, because at the end of the day everybody has a thumbprint, and that’s the only time that the poor man in Nigeria can put their vote. In Nigeria, when you’re poor, you’re nameless, faceless and voiceless.”
She said empathy is the deciding factor. “Mr Peter Obi has shown that he has empathy, and that is the deciding factor.”
On the incumbent seeking a second term, she said: “You cannot be running for a second term, and instead of showing workings, you are saying what you will do or what you will not do. People should be speaking for you. You should have made the lives of the people better.”
Asked whether the campaign will retain Lagos, Yesufu answered without hesitation.
“Absolutely. That’s the easiest,” she said, recalling that few believed the state could be won in 2023.
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