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Ekiti State governor, Biodun Oyebanji, has set a target of securing 90 per cent of the state’s registered voters for President Bola Tinubu in the January 16, 2027 presidential election.
He has also directed members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) to track and mobilise more than 600,000 registered voters, who did not participate in the last governorship election.
Oyebanji, who gave the directive yesterday, while inaugurating the Ekiti State APC Presidential Campaign Council at the Conference Hall of the Governor’s Office, Ado-Ekiti, said the party must move beyond organising rallies and political campaigns to identifying eligible voters and ensuring their participation in the election.
He described voter tracking and grassroots mobilisation as the most critical assignments before the council. He also insisted that the party could not afford to repeat the low turnout recorded during the last governorship election.
The governor recalled that although the state had about one million registered voters, fewer than 400,000 participated in the governorship election, leaving more than 600,000 registered voters who stayed away from the polling units.
Oyebanji, who recalled that the APC secured 85.7 per cent of the total votes cast in the governorship election, said anything short of 90 per cent of the registered voters supporting Tinubu would amount to a collective failure on the part of the campaign council.
“The real work is to get the voters registered in a unit and identify those who don’t want to vote. Our focus should be on voter tracking,” he said.
He urged members to develop a comprehensive strategy for tracking voters across the state’s 16 local government areas, electoral wards and polling units.
The governor stressed that the party must abandon the conventional approach of measuring campaign success by the number of rallies organised and vehicles deployed.
“We don’t like to do the heavy lifting. We want to do campaigns, arrange cars and drive round towns. We are not going to do that this time around. Our real work is to get the voters registered in each unit and identify those who have not come out to vote.
“After this inauguration, everybody should go out and agree on how we are going to do voter tracking. That is our job.
“We can’t have a quality collection of leaders like this, and still be sitting on 400,000 votes. That is something we should never contemplate. The most important assignment we have now is to track those voters, to track the 600,000 people, who did not come out to vote and find out why they did not come out,” the governor said.
Oyebanji also acknowledged possible operational challenges associated with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and electronic transmission of election results.
He urged party leaders to develop appropriate strategies to address such concerns through sustained voter education and mobilisation.
In his acceptance speech on behalf of the council, Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, assured Tinubu and Oyebanji of the members’ commitment to delivering an improved electoral performance for the APC in the state.
He commended the governor for ensuring that the composition of the council was comprehensive and inclusive of relevant political stakeholders, describing the inauguration as the beginning of a serious assignment that must not be treated with levity.
He pledged that the council would work towards surpassing the party’s previous electoral performance and securing a significantly higher number of votes for Tinubu.
Earlier, the Ekiti State APC Chairman, Sola Elesin, described the assignment before the campaign council as a serious national responsibility. He enjoined members to work assiduously towards securing unprecedented votes for Tinub
