Dino Melaye, a former chairman of the Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory, made a scene on Monday at the National Collation Centre when he challenged the Ekiti State presidential election results, claiming there had been an excessive number of votes cast.
The drama began before the collation process began when Melaye, who is also a PDP agent, pointed out that the results figures provided by the Independent National Election Commission for Ekiti State do not match.
Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress’ presidential candidate, won the election for Ekiti State with 201,494 votes, defeating Alhaji Abubakar Atiku of the People’s Democratic Party, who received 89,554.
Peter Obi of the Labour Party received 11,397 votes, while Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party received 264 votes. However, 1703 votes were invalidated because of overvoting and circumventing the bimodal voter accreditation systems.
Melaye said, however, that the PDP’s calculations revealed a disparity of an increase of 887 in the overall number of figures from Ekiti State.
Kenneth Udeze and Umar Farouk, representatives of the Action Alliance and Labour Party, concurred with Melaye’s statement.
But, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, the chairman of INEC, emphasized that the commission stood by the outcome announced by Prof. Akeem Olawale Lasisi, the collation officer for the state of Ekiti and vice chancellor of the Federal University of Health Sciences in Ila Orangun, Osun.
“I still insist that the figure presented by the state collection officer for the presidential election for Ekiti state of the total number of accredited voters is 315,058. This is what is on the spreadsheet that we screened yesterday. And this is also what is on the actual result manual recorded by the scope and signed by the PDP agent and agents of other political parties back in Ekiti state.
“But having said that, I’ve taken note of your observations, let us make progress on that one. But what we have here is exactly what I’ve said. And any other figure that is at variance with this one cannot supersede the official result presented. Let’s make progress.”
Melaye persisted nonetheless, nearly putting a stop to the Kwara state results tabulation.
