On January 2, 2023, Nasir El-Rufai, the Governor of Kaduna State, appeared on the TVC news show, Journalist hangout. This interview came barely 24 hours after he claimed that there are saboteurs in the presidency working against Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
While fielding questions on the chances of Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate, El-Rufai said Obi cannot win the elections.
He added that Obi was polling well in the south and poorly in the north, emphasising that all states are not equal.
“The number of votes in Anambra is the size of one local government in Kaduna state. So all states are not equal,” he said.
Claim: The number of votes in Anambra is the size of one local government area (LGA) in Kaduna state.
Verification
As of January 11, 2023, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) revealed that Kaduna ranks as the third state with the highest number of registered voters.
The northwestern state has 4,335,208 eligible voters. Two million of these voters are female while the remaining 2.3 million are male spread across 23 local government areas (LGA) in the state.
Anambra state, on the other hand, has 2,656,437 eligible voters. INEC says the total number of registered voters for the 2023 general election stands at 93.4 million.
Does one LGA in Kaduna have more votes than Anambra?
The evidence does not support El-Rufai’s position. As of February 6, 2023, INEC had not released the breakdown of registered voters per local government area.
However, the total number of registered voters in Anambra state is more than the total number of registered voters in the most populous local governments in Kaduna.
By Kaduna’s own data, published by the Kaduna State Independent Electoral Commissioner (KADSIEC) in 2019, the local government with the highest number of registered voters is Kaduna South, which had 361,357 registered voters.
The number of registered voters in Anambra state is more than the entire population of the most populous LGAs in Kaduna. According to the National Population Commission (NPC), the most populous LGAs in Kaduna are Igabi, Kaduna South, and Zaria.
All of these highly-populated LGAs in Kaduna have less than 700,000 people each, which is a lot less than the 2,656,437 eligible voters in Anambra.
None of the LGAs in Kaduna has as many people as the number of registered voters in Anambra state.
Verdict
El-Rufai’s claim is false. Anambra state has more registered voters than the entire population of the most populous local government area in Kaduna state.
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