On Saturday, Bende women and youth in Abia State’s Bende Local Government Area demanded that the elections, particularly for the Bende federal constituency National Assembly seat, be completely canceled.
carrying signs saying that Chief Frank Chinasa, a candidate for the Labour Party, had won the election.
They blocked the Uzuakoli-Akara Road while singing anti-INEC songs and asserted that Bende voters overwhelmingly supported Peter Obi, the presidential candidate for the Labour Party, but expressed surprise at the amount of votes that the Independent National Election Commission, INEC, gave him.
Ben Kalu of the All Progressive Congress, APC, received 10,020 votes, Chinasa received 6,818 votes, and Nnenna Ukaeje of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, received 3,930 votes. Ben Kalu was declared the winner of the Bende federal constituency poll by INEC.
However, the demonstrators claimed that the INEC-announced results were manipulated and did not accurately represent the will of the populace.
In contrast to the commission’s earlier pledge, their spokesperson, Mrs. Chinechetam Mbah, said that INEC’s failure to transfer the results of the election from the various polling units was a premeditated plot to alter the outcomes of the polls.
She claimed that INEC purposefully delayed the delivery of voting materials to the majority of polling places in the Labour Party’s stronghold in order to deny voting rights to those who support it.
“The whole electoral process was faulty; Materials couldn’t get to all the polling units on time; and some of the BVAS machines were faulty and could not provide optimal performances,” she lamented.
“Results were not uploaded immediately after the votes were counted. They claimed there were network issues and they left with both the results and duplicates and uploaded results we suspect to be fake after 24 hours.
“INEC did not provide logistics and Transportation for all the polling units and so some polling units in different wards were disenfranchised,” she added.
