Nicolas Felix, the Pastor who almost 'accidentally' became Nigeria's president, will be back in 2023
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Shortly after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) started the collation of results for the 2019 presidential election, Nigerians started to pay attention to a surprising trend.
Dr Nicolas Felix, the candidate of the Peoples Coalition Party (PCP), was polling votes in the thousands that started to raise eye brows, especially as he was performing better than more well-known candidates also on the ballot that had a total of 73 candidates.
Prior to the election, many of the candidates that didn't belong to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) or main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had campaigned prominently as alternative candidates popularly called the Third Force.
The Third Force narrative was driven by the idea that a new crop of politicians should be given the chance to steer the affairs of the country because it has been repeatedly failed by the old political class embodied by the APC and PDP.
In the months leading up to the election, the most popular faces of the Third Force happened to be Omoyele Sowore of the African Action Congress (AAC), a renown activist and journalist; Kingsley Moghalu of the Young Progressive Party (YPP), a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and Fela Durotoye of the Alliance for New Nigeria (ANN), a well-known leadership expert and business coach.
L-R: Fela Durotoye, Kingsley Moghalu, and Omoyele Sowore Alongside the two main candidates, they were the ones that were invited to the big interviews, they were the ones that got invited to the big presidential debates and town hall meetings, and they were the ones that thumped their chests and were confident of victory with millions of votes.
However, when it came time to be counted by INEC, it was Dr Felix who was polling thousands of votes while Moghalu, Durotoye and Sowore were rolling in the tens and low hundreds.
As Dr Felix, the founding pastor of the Miracle Centre International in New York, continued to poll in the thousands and break away from the pack of also-rans, a theory about his surprising performance started to gather steam on social media.
His PCP, a party only just registered in August 2018, was placed just above the main opposition PDP whose candidate, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president, was poised to be the major challenger to APC's President Muhammadu Buhari's second term bid.
Dr Felix joined the PCP in October 2018 after he was muscled out of the All Blending Party (ABP), the party on whose platform he originally intended to contest in the election.
In an election that had a total of 1,289,607 votes cancelled as void ones, many believe that Dr Felix was accidentally getting the votes of unaware voters who intended to vote for Atiku who ended the election with 11,262,978 votes.
The theory gained even more life when it was discovered that the colours of the PCP and the PDP were identical on the ballot, a curious development especially because the PCP's official colours were supposed to be many shades lighter.
In Dr Felix's official campaign posters, the PCP's colours are light green, white and orange/yellow/mustard/brown (depending on who you ask), with a hammer in the centre to signify the party's commitment to building the nation.
Dr Nicolas Felix's presidential election campaign poster However, on the ballot paper that Nigerians voted on February 23, 2019, the PCP's colours were the same deep green, white and deep red that the PDP has used for two decades, the only difference being the umbrella logo on which the colours were printed.
The colours of the Peoples Coalition Party (PCP) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were too obviously similar on the ballot paper that many believe it's the only reason the new party, registered in August 2018, finished third in the presidential election That interesting development soon led to theories about an attempt by the PCP to ambush unaware voters and intentionally sabotage the PDP's votes, a theory that fails to fly in the face of the fact that Dr Felix had endorsed Atiku just days before the election.
"Our resolve to follow the PDP presidential candidate was necessary because, we had gone through the policies paper and we are so very sure that with such a personality with magnanimous achievement and experience in the past, he is a very good candidate for the new job of making Nigeria work again," he said in a February 12 statement.
Dr Nicolas Felix endorsed the main opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) before the February 23 presidential election where he eventually finished third behind him His party, the PCP, is also part of the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP), an alliance of at least 40 parties that endorsed Atiku as consensus candidate against Buhari who eventually won with 15,191,847 votes.
When asked if the colour change on the ballot was a printing error, Rotimi Oyekanmi, the spokesman to INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, said, "What we have on the ballot is the logo recognised officially."
However, PCP chairman, Don Anthony Chukwuma, told Pulse that the party didn't change its colours to that of the PDP for the sake of the election.
"Our colour is green, white, and brown, not red. We didn't change anything, that was what we gave to INEC. I don't know and don't believe INEC changed anything.
"Although it may be reflecting differently, our colour is brown there. Our colour has nothing to do with PDP, completely nothing," he said.
Even though this curious last-minute colour mix-up has overshadowed Dr Felix's high return at the polls, the 37-year-old businessman believes there's no truth to it.
Dr Nicolas Felix When he spoke to Pulse on Saturday, March 2, he said the theory was sponsored by an unnamed young presidential candidate that simply wanted to discredit his 'victory' as the true face of the Third Force in the country.
"Some young presidential candidate who can't handle the fact that we came 3rd has decided to create another party logo to discredit our victory. Please note INEC will never allow two political parties to have identical logos, so that is false," he said.
He noted that he was simply rewarded for doing a lot of grassroots work during the campaign period and not just limiting himself to television and social media, like some Third Force candidates have been accused of doing.
He insisted that the votes that propelled him to third place were not accidental votes but endorsement from his supporters who subscribe to his vision of a better Nigeria.
Dr Nicolas Felix surrounded by supporters during the campaign for the 2019 presidential election Despite Dr Felix's insistence that he didn't benefit from his party's strategic placement on the ballot paper, questions will remain over how he was able to poll his high return, especially when all eyes were on a different set of candidates to set that pace.
A similar scenario had played out in the 2015 presidential election, with less attention, when a widely-unknown Adebayo Ayeni of the African Peoples Alliance (APA) placed third with 53,537 votes due to what some believed to be his party's strategic placement near the APC that won that election. The party was similarly launched in August 2014, just months to the election.
Despite the speculations that his emergence has generated, Dr Felix has chosen to see it as a manifestation of his popularity with the Nigerian people and has already announced plans to run for the presidency again in 2023.
"I am surely coming to run for the office of the President in 2023 and we have kick-started plans already and few days from now I will officially make my declaration. Without any doubt we are going to win the election," the New York-based businessman told Pulse.
Dr Nicolas Felix says he'll contest for presidency again in 2023 Even though he still polled 11.1 million less votes than second-placed Atiku, Dr Felix believes God has chosen him to lead Nigeria and he plans to have the likes of Durotoye, Moghalu and Sowore in his cabinet when he wins in 2023 because he believes they each have great ideas.
However, he could not fully commit to running again on the PCP's platform as he said he'd consider running on the platform of the PDP if the party "wants to welcome young candidates".
Source:
Nicolas Felix, the Pastor who almost 'accidentally' became Nigeria's president, will be back in 2023- gist culled from
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