El-Rufai: Tinubu will not win 2027 presidential election

Nasir El-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna state, has made a bold claim about the outcome of the 2027 presidential election with President Tinubu coming a distant third.

El-Rufai made this assertion on Sunday on Channels TV program; Politics Today, ahead of the election that he claimed would be a two-way horse.

The former APC chieftain who recently joined the ADC coalition party, affirmed that the next presidential election will be decided by a run-off with Tinubu missing out on third position.

According to El-Rufai, Tinubu’s greatest undoing will be his performance as incumbent president which will be the voters’ major determinant in electing their next leader.

“I was governor of Kaduna state; I was one of Bola Tinubu’s biggest campaigners, but I couldn’t deliver the state to him.

“Bola Tinubu himself couldn’t win his state with his own governor in place. So, these things are not as theoretical as people want them to be,” El-Rufai said.

“If you want to engage in self-delusion, you are free to do so. I will not tell you how we are going to win, but I tell you very clearly — the worst-case scenario in the 2027 elections is that no winner will emerge in the first round.

“We may have to go for a runoff, and Bola Tinubu will not be on the ballot for the runoff, because he will, at best, be third in the election,” he added.

El-Rufai, who is believed to be a member of the APC despite ADC move  have sounded a note of warning to Tinubu and the APC to take lessons from Jonathan’s 2015 defeat.

He alleged that even if Tinubu does all it takes to retain power, it’ll end up futile because Nigerians are fed up with his administration.

“He has no pathway to win. I have done the maths, I have done the analysis; he cannot — he will, at best, be third.

“But he can deceive himself; he may think, oh, you know, I have money, because they have taken all the money in the country, I have INEC, I have the police, I have the army.

“You know what, President Tinubu, invite ex-President Goodluck Jonathan for a chat, and ask him if he didn’t have all this in 2015, and we got him out. Is the case still the same? Similar to 2015? It’s worse.

“It’s like those who say Tinubu has never lost an election. That can be contested, but it’s okay. He’s a political strategist, he’s this, he’s that. Wait.

“I naturally have said, if you want to learn some lessons, invite ex-President Goodluck Jonathan for a chat over coffee, and ask him what happened in 2015. That’s all,” he concluded.

Although many people still believed that El-Rufai’s recent criticism of Tinubu’s administration is because he wasn’t made a minister, he clarified that he would have resigned if he had been appointed as one.