By
Hon. Rahman Owokoniran
The 32,414 margin between the leading People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the loser the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Adamawa State exceeds the number of collected 20,642 PVCs of undeclared results from the remaining 10 local government areas. Therefore, nothing now prevents the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from declaring Governor Fintiri the winner of this election right now and right away.
This can be likened to penalty shootouts after the full-time of a football match. If one side missed two goals out of the possible five shots by each side, and the other side scored four goals –it is game over!
Thus in Adamawa, it is game over! INEC should immediately declare Governor Fintiri as the winner.
It took INEC four days to declare the presidential election with 176,600 polling units, in an exercise that was highly contentious and manually collated. What is INEC’s excuse for not declaring 69 polling units’ rerun elections? Clearly, this umpire is neither free nor fair in performing its roles. This same institution, which conducted the Ogun State election with about the same number of collected PVCs, but a closer margin of about 10,000 votes, declared APC’s Governor Dapo Abiodun as the winner.
Conversely, in Adamawa, a rerun was declared with a margin of 31,000 votes’ gap between the potential winner PDP and APC the runner-up. Now that the rerun election is conducted, the INEC REC attempted to declare their preferred candidate winner, without reference to the votes from the units.
Adamawa people prevented the REC from usurping the role of the Returning Officer. Don’t forget that the same INEC REC suspended counting at about 1am, with the understanding of continuing later in the day. Instead of going back to the collation table to conclude the job, the REC sneaked to another room to grant a press briefing where he made his false declaration of victory going to APC. Simultaneously, the benefactor of the false declaration was delivering her acceptance speech. What more do we need to convince the people that the Adamawa INEC’s role was preconceived, as in the case of all elections conducted by INEC on 25th February and 18th March?
The tragedy of our democracy is INEC’s conspiracy with the ruling party APC, and other agencies of government (especially the security agencies), in their orchestrated design of subverting the processes of our general elections. They have demonstrated total disregard for the rule of law. Even the rules and regulations INEC wrote as guidelines were completely disregarded. So who is fooling whom?
What a shame!
The leading light of Black and African nations has refused to learn from history.
What a shame!
HON. RAHMAN OWOKONIRAN IS THE PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY (PDP) SOUTH-WEST ZONAL SECRETARY