The South West Independent Campaign Movement (SWICAM) has promised to deliver 1.5 million votes to the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 20 June Ekiti State governorship election.
The group based its calculation on the population of the state, which is estimated at four million.
Incumbent Governor Biodun Oyebanji is running for a second term under the banner of the APC. He won the last election four years ago with 187,057 votes against 82,211 votes recorded by the next candidate, Chief Olusegun Oni of the Social Democratic Party. Oni was governor of the state from 29 May 2007 to 17 February 2009 when his victory was truncated through a judicial process. He then returned to the same position and served between 6 May 2009 and 15 October 2010. He was a Deputy National Chairman of the APC.
The Independent National Electoral Commission is expected to publish the register of voters for the state on 11 May, but only 987,647 registered voters were recorded for the 2023 general elections.
At the end of its congress in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, on Thursday, SWICAM also said that it would collaborate with other groups in the southwest to secure between 15 and 20 million votes for the APC in the region.
SWICAM said that the southwest has the second largest number of voters in Nigeria and is in a position to secure 15 to 20 million votes, if the people are effectively mobilised. It, however, regretted that voters’ apathy in the region is the highest in the country.
The group said: ‘We are set to change the voting culture in the southwest. We are using non-party volunteers, speaking to teachers, meeting peasants on their farms, meeting students in high and higher institutions, market women and men, while professional organisations and the young and the aged are not left out’.
SWICAM said it would use Ekiti State as the starting point towards a ‘new, conscious voter’s culture in the southwest.
The group said that the volunteers recruited to campaign in the state are young people who ‘will move from one community to the other, not just talking to the people but acting like evangelists with information, educational and communication materials’.
‘We have embarked on a revolutionary campaign. The difference is that the campaign is not led by the APC but by non-party members who are concerned about the need to preserve democracy against military intervention, sustain power shift to the south and to support the ongoing efforts at restructuring the country, which the APC had started’, it said.
It listed such efforts which were never achieved in the 16 years of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) federal administration, which its APC counterpart has been able to achieve. These include railway and electricity, which are now in the concurrent list, initiation of state police, the establishment of the South West Development Commission, and the ongoing process towards the establishment of state police.
The group described the efforts as ‘fundamental intervention to secure the most important pillar of democracy, which is self-determination’. It warned that a return to PDP or the emergence of the African Democratic Congress in power would spell doom for Nigeria.
SWICAM said it would write personal letters to all the 151 traditional rulers in the state, while communication tools had been developed specifically for all teachers, traders, civil servants, peasants, farmers, primary, secondary and university principals and students, professionals, traders, hunters and even rural goldsmiths. It added that information materials had also been produced for Igbo, Northerners and people from the Niger Delta living in Ekiti State.
