Oshiomhole said since they failed together in 2019, it is sure that they will fail individually in 2023.
Former Edo State governor and a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, Adams Oshiomole has said what the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party and Labour Party, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi failed to get together, cannot be attained by either one of them.
Atiku and Obi were respectively the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the PDP in the 2019 election, which was won by incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari.
Oshiomhole said since they failed together in 2019, it is sure that they will fail individually in 2023 now that they are presidential candidates of separate parties.
The former governor during an interview on Channels TV on Wednesday said Atiku is more favoured in the South-South and the Southeast than in the northern part of the country.
"Just four years ago, his excellency Atiku Abubakar and my very dear friend Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra, they had a combined ticket, and that combined force challenged the APC and Buhari. And unlike in 2015, Buhari scored more votes against the combined ticket of Atiku and Peter Obi.
"Together they failed, how can they possibly win divided and their constituency is the same? If you check Atiku's votes, you will find that he got more votes in the South-South and Southeast than he got in the entire North, so he was more favoured in the South than in the North," he said.
He added that Buhari lost in the South-South and Southeast in the 2015 and 2019 elections.
He said if the electorate retains the 2015 and 2019 voting patterns, it means APC will lose again in the two regions.
"If the voting pattern remains the same, it means that they will not vote for APC.
"I'm confident that in terms of a unifying figure, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu (APC presidential candidate) is ahead of the two of them.
“What they couldn't together, they can't get it as individuals,” he said.
He said although President Buhari will not contest in 2023, the APC and Tinubu will benefit from his support base.
"President Buhari is not eligible to recontest, I believe APC will still benefit from his support base because those who believe in him still believe in him.
"With President Muhammadu’s voice on the side of Asiwaju, that's a huge electoral asset,” he said.
Speaking about the result of the opinion poll released by Bloomberg on Wednesday, Oshiomole said it lacks credibility as it was conducted by the supporters of Peter Obi to sway public opinion.
He added that a poll conducted by Economic Intelligence Unit believed Tinubu will win the election but was not out on social media because some people did not find the result satisfactory.
He said, “In this environment, all sorts of things happen. You consistently ignore the findings of the Economic Intelligence Unit that says from their evaluation, they believe Asiwaju will win.”
"There will be a lot of fake opinion polls but they are not more than opinion polls even if they were published by fairly well-known credible people who are seasoned organisations that are known to be seasoned in the business of opinion polling,” he added.
He said the APC campaign council which was meant to be inaugurated on Wednesday could not be inaugurated because the Director-General of the campaign was away in New York, US.
He said the campaign council will be inaugurated as soon as the Director-General of the campaign council returns from New York by this weekend.
Meanwhile, SaharaReporters earlier reported that the inauguration of the council had to be shifted indefinitely because Tinubu left Nigeria to seek medical treatment abroad.
Sources told SaharaReporters that the ailing APC presidential candidate went sought medical tourism in London, UK.