April 15, (THEWILL) – The stakes are high, the stage is set, especially in Adamawa and Kebbi, as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), conducts supplementary election in 24 States across the country.
On March 27, 2023, the INEC’s National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education, Festus Okoye, in a statement, said this was necessary to conclude the outstanding Governorship, National and State Assembly elections, which was disrupted in some states.
This includes Governorship election in Adamawa and Kebbi States, three states will participate in the Senatorial election, 15 states for federal constituency election and 17 for State Assembly election.
Ahead of today’s event, the Commission said it published a comprehensive list of the polling units by State, Local Government, Registration Area, registered voters and PVCs collected on its website.
On March 18, the electoral umpire conducted the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly election which was initially postponed from March 11, to enable INEC to reconfigure the BVAS ahead of the polls.
28 states participated in the governorship election except Anambra, Bayelsa, Edo, Ekiti, Imo, Kogi, Ondo and Osun, which only took part in the State Assembly election.
However, in Adamawa and Kebbi, gubernatorial election was declared inconclusive in the two States.
In Adamawa, it is a two-horse race between incumbent governor, Ahmadu Fintiri of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the only woman-governorship candidate in the 2023 guber polls, Aishatu ‘Binani’ Dahiru of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as 37,016 potential voters determine their fate.
In the result declared on March 11, Fintiri polled 421,524 votes, while Binani Dahiru scored 390,275. Fintiri defeated Binani with a margin of over 30,000 votes. The governor also won the election in 13 of Adamawa’s 21 local government areas while Binani won in the remaining eight.
But the state’s Collation Officer, Prof. Mohammed Mele, announced the cancellation of elections in 69 polling units in Fufore Local Government Area, which affected no fewer than 37,016 potential voters with PVCs in those units.
Although final results showed that Fintiri scored the highest votes, INEC said the cancelled votes were more than the margin of victory between him and the runner-up, Binani. It, therefore, declared the governorship election in Adamawa State inconclusive.
For Kebbi State, results announced after the March 11 polls showed that the candidate of the ruling APC, Dr Nasir Idris, scored 388,358, while Mohammed Bande of the PDP scored 342,980.
There was cancellation of results in a number of local government areas of Kebbi State, cutting across a number of Registration Areas in different polling units.The cancelled votes were more than the margin of victory between Idris and Bande.
As a result, the Collation and Returning Officer of the election, Prof. Yusuf Sa’idu of the Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto, declared the Kebbi governorship election inconclusive.
“We aggregated the total number of collected PVCs in polling units where elections were cancelled and it came to a total of 91,829. And when we checked the results, the two leading political parties in this contest, APC and PDP polled 388,258 and 342,980 votes respectively. When we look at the difference, it stands at 45,278”, Yusuf Sa’idu said.
Also, supplementary elections for House of Representatives is ongoing in 31 constituencies in 15 states, including Akwa Ibom (2), Anambra (1), Bayelsa (1), Edo (1), Imo (1), Kano (2), Kebbi (2), Kogi (1), Oyo (2), Rivers (2), Sokoto (11), Taraba (1), Zamfara (2), Jigawa (1) and Ebonyi State (1).
For the State House of Assembly, elections are also ongoing in 58 constituencies across 17 states.
