By: Shafihi Abdulrasheed
Ten million votes from where? How will they be found? Who will deliver them? Is the number realistic, or is it another ambitious political declaration waiting for election season to test it? Since the City Boy Movement announced its ambition to mobilise ten million youth votes for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s re-election, the same question has followed the Movement everywhere it goes, changing its clothes but never its face.
Numbers do not lie, but they can certainly be lazy. A politician can stand before a crowd and declare a million supporters the way a fisherman exaggerates the size of the one that got away. CBM has refused that temptation. It has chosen, instead, the harder path — the path of structure. In all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, in all 774 local government areas, down into 8,809 political wards, CBM has planted its flag not as decoration but as architecture. This is not a tent pitched for the rainy season of an election and folded away at the first harmattan wind of victory or defeat. This is a house built on foundation, and a house built on foundation does not fear the storm.
It is worth remembering the wisdom of the elders: you do not send a hunter into the forest without first showing him the paths. CBM’s structure is that path. It is the chain that runs from the National Secretariat down to the ward and back again — a chain along which instruction travels downward and truth travels upward. This is what separates a movement from a mob. A mob gathers for noise; a movement gathers for purpose. And purpose, when properly organised, has a way of arriving at its destination.
But structure alone, like a skeleton without flesh, cannot walk into the future. This is where the grassroots come in — the true marketplace of Nigerian politics, where the real bargaining for hearts happens, far from the glass towers and television studios of the cities. CBM’s membership platform, cbmnigeria.org, is not only a website; it is a census of conviction. Every name registered is a torch lit in a ward, a light that tells the Movement exactly where its people stand, from state to local government, from ward to the very polling unit where the ballot will ultimately be cast. This is not guesswork dressed in ‘agbada’. This is a Movement that knows the difference between a PVC in a drawer and a PVC that walks itself to a polling booth on election morning.
And then there are the support groups — those small, determined bands of loyalty that spring up like mushrooms after rain, each one a cell of conviction, each one multiplying the reach of the centre without waiting to be told. A movement that inspires a thousand small groups to organise themselves in its name has already won a battle that money alone cannot buy: the battle for genuine belief. CBM has that. Its support groups are not conscripted; they are converted. And the converted fight harder than the conscripted, always.
No war of persuasion, however, is won by structure and grassroots alone, without a voice to carry the message beyond the village square. This is where media advocacy enters the arithmetic. CBM has understood, correctly, that silence is a vote for the opponent’s narrative. In an age where information travels faster than the wind that once carried town criers’ voices across the village, CBM has positioned itself as both drum and drummer — telling its own story before others tell it wrongly, reminding Nigerians daily of the roads built, the projects commissioned, the agricultural interventions, the quiet, steady architecture of the Renewed Hope Agenda. A people who are constantly reminded of what has been done for them do not easily forget it in the secrecy of the voting booth.
This is perhaps the most underestimated weapon in CBM’s arsenal: the patient, persistent work of grassroots awareness — the fact sheets, the scorecards, the door-to-door conversations that translate policy into language the market woman and the okada rider can understand. It is one thing to build a road; it is another thing to make sure the man who will vote knows who built it, and why it matters to his own daily bread. CBM has chosen to do both — to help build the achievements, and then to carry the lantern that illuminates them for the ordinary voter who may never read a communiqué but will always remember a road that shortened his journey home.
Now put together — structure, grassroots presence, support groups, media advocacy, and the steady drumbeat of achievement awareness — and you do not have ambition dressed as arithmetic. You have arithmetic dressed as certainty. Ten million is not a number CBM hopes to stumble upon by accident. It is a number being built, just the way a patient builder does not rush the foundation because he intends the house to outlive the builder himself.
Doubters will always doubt; that is their trade, and Nigeria has never lacked those who prophesy failure before the race is even run. But structure does not read newspapers, and grassroots networks do not attend to Twitter storms. They simply work, quietly, the way roots work beneath soil that gives no hint, from above, of what is growing beneath it. When the harvest season comes, it is not the noise-makers who fill the barn; it is those who planted early and tended patiently.
So let the question be answered, finally, and without ambiguity: City Boy Movement will deliver the ten million votes. Not because it has only said so, but because it has done the unglamorous work that precedes every genuine political harvest — building structure where others built slogans, organising grassroots where others organised photo opportunities, telling the truth of achievement where others left a vacuum for rumour to fill. The ballot box, as it always does, will have the final word. But when that word comes, do not say you were not shown the arithmetic long before the counting began.
One last few words; Tinubu till 2031!
Abdulrasheed is a PR practitioner and perception manager. He writes from the City Boy Movement National Headquarters and can be reached via sharvee2@gmail.com | +2348109941929
