April 22, (THEWILL) – The Senatorial candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for Plateau Central in the recently concluded elections, Ambassador Golkuna Yohanna Gotom, has faulted the declaration of Diket Plang, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the winner of the senatorial election.
Describing INEC’s declaration of the APC candidate winner on April 15, about 33 days after the election was held, as a sham and travesty of justice and democracy, Gotom noted that there was no way for Plang to emerge winner because he had won the election decisively after the first ballot.
According to Gotom, there was no need to withhold the announcement of the result for such a long period because of cancellation and mutilated votes from Gagdi ward in Kanam LGA. He said he wanted the INEC not to add any votes to what he had secured in the entire exercise.
He said the result from Kanam was delayed unduly for three days, and in the end, the votes were inflated to forty-three thousand plus just to neutralise the over thirty thousand votes with which he was leading.
INEC, he said, skewed the entire process leading to April 15, when they purportedly concluded collation and announced the results. For one, he noted, the INEC changed the Returning Officer on the eve of April 15, without duly informing all the stakeholders.
Secondly, he said, on April 15, the INEC officials arrived at Pankshin, the headquarters of the senatorial district, with an overwhelming number of security men, and deployed six armed security men to mark each party agent, and barred them from talking or making any observations.
According to Ambassador Gotom, no further collation of results was done before the rescheduled Returning Officer simply announced an already prepared result claiming that the APC candidate, Diket Plang, had won “having scored the highest number of votes.”
Gotom, who said he was already putting evidence together to contest the declaration at the Tribunal, noted that the independence of the INEC as the regulatory body in general elections is in doubt as he said official interference and manipulation processes and procedures during elections are rampant.
Comparing his case in Plateau Central with the failed ‘coup’ in the Adamawa State gubernatorial election, Gotom said of the eighteen party agents in the hall, only the APC agent signed the result that was declared, meaning the remaining seventeen disagreed with what took place in the name of collation and announcement of results.
Having won majority of votes cast in Bokkos, Pankshin, and Kanke Local Government Areas by a clear margin of over three hundred thousand votes, Gotom said verifiable indices show that his main opponent in the APC had lost and had no chances of survival.
As a peace-loving Nigerian interested in good governance for the masses, he expressed confidence in the Nigerian judiciary, irrespective of the trending wry joke that holders of false electoral mandates are fond of advising the ‘loser’ to “go to court”.
