By Jennifer Omiloli
The battle for the soul of at last seven states, where the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared the gubernatorial elections conducted on March 9 inconclusive may have prompted some All Progressive Congress governors to storm the Presidential villa, where they met with President Muhammadu Buhari, secretly.
Among the governors that thronged the State House, Abuja, shortly after the President returned from Daura, Kastina state, where he had gone to exercise his franchise, the previous week, were Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, Kaduna, Abdulaziz Yari, Zamfara, Yahaya Bello, Kogi, Kayode Fayemi, Ekiti, Atiku Bagudu, Kebbi, Muhammad Badaru, Jigawa and Ibrahim Shettima of Borno state.
The governors met the President at his official residence at about 2pm, but our correspondent at the State House, observed that they were all wearing long faces while going for the meeting.
Recall that INEC, had based on feed backs gotten from its Returning Officers on the field, declared elections inconclusive in at least seven states, namely Plateau, Adamawa, Bauchi, Benue, Sokoto, Kano and Rivers states.
Although the development has not gone down well with the two leading political parties, the PDP and APC, it prompted them to trade blames, since the announcement were made by the electoral umpire.
Owing to the uncertainties in the affected states, both parties have however been united in criticising INEC over what they termed poor handling of the polls.
In another twist, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) tasked its members in states where elections were declared inconclusive to immediately commence a march to INEC offices and use all legitimate means to protect their mandate.
The charge was handed down by the national publicity secretary of the party, Kola Ologbondiyan, who had accused INEC of surrendering its independence to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) by declaring states where PDP was leading as inconclusive.
PDP had also lamented the violence that trailed the polls in some of the affected states, alleging that information at its disposal revealed that 58 persons were killed in the course of the elections.
According to the opposition, the electoral umpire ought to release the results of the governorship polls in Sokoto, Adamawa, Plateau and Bauchi where its candidates were reported to be leading before the INEC declared the exercises inconclusive.
It warned the commission against manipulating the figures, while lamenting that it was playing the APC’s script to rob it of victory.
In the case of Kano where the INEC Chief Returning Officer Professor BB Shehu declared as inconclusive, results collated from all the 44 local governments showed that PDP was leading the polls with 1,020,465 votes while APC had 987,459 votes.
The contest was mainly between Abba Kabiru Yusuf of PDP and the incumbent governor, Abdullahi Ganduje.
Similar scenario also played out in Benue state were the Chief Returning Officer based its decision on statistics it gave that 121,011 electorates were either not able to vote or election did not hold in their areas.
Prior to the declaration, the returning officer, Sebastian Maimako, had announced that Samuel Ortom of the PDP scored the highest number of votes of 410,576, closely followed by Emmanuel Jime of the APC who polled a total number of 329,022 votes.
It would be recalled that the opposition candidates in the PDP were leading in five states, which includes Kano, Sokoto, Bauchi, Adamawa and Benue states respectively
