In Photos: Tinubu ends presidential campaign in Lagos where he first won election as Senator in 1992

The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential candidate Bola Tinubu, on Tuesday, February 21, 2023, ended his presidential campaign tour in Lagos, the country’s commercial capital where he cut his political teeth in democratic politics and went on to build a political empire in three decades.

The county’s 93.4 million registered voters will be going to the polls on Saturday, February 25, 2023, to elect a new president and federal lawmakers in a country with 63% (133 million) multidimensionally poor people according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Tinubu, who first became a Senator in Lagos in 1992, returned seven years later in 1999 to become Lagos state governor and served for two terms. Since leaving office in 2007, he has not run for any political office, but has been instrumental in installing his preferred candidates in office as governors, federal and state lawmakers and local government chairman across Southwest Nigeria, including his wife Oluremi Tinubu, who is serving her third term as a Senator from Lagos and his son-in-law, Oyetunde Ojo, a federal lawmaker from Ekiti State.

After playing a crucial role in the APC and Muhammadu Buhari‘s emergence as President in 2015, the famed godfather of modern politics declared that it is his turn to rule the country bedeviled by rising unemployment, insecurity and a staggering economy which his party could not fix in its eight years in power.

With a promise of renewed hope, his handlers in their campaign tried but failed to detach him from the failures of his party and Buhari.

As he ends his campaign on Tuesday, he heads into the election as one of the top three contenders. Others are Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party.

Tinubu arrived at the Lagos Airport around 12 pm in the company of his running mate Kashim Shettima, who was governor of Boko Haram ravaged Borno state when the terrorists kidnapped schoolgirls at Chibok in 2014.

From the Lagos Airport, the APC candidate and other chieftains of his party had a swell time navigating through the crowd from Oshodi through the Agege motor road to the Teslim Balogun Stadium in Surulere, about 11km from Oshodi. He arrived the venue of the rally at 3 pm.

Here are photos from the rally which some observers described as a carnival of a sort with live music from Naira Marley and K1 De Ultimate: