The All Progressives Congress (APC) Sokoto state chapter has vowed to retrieve its stolen mandate in the just concluded supplementary governorship election in the state.
Incumbent Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal won the re-run election but the Director General of Gubernatorial Campaign Organisation, Alhaji Yusuf Suleiman, said the party would do anything within the law to get back the stolen mandate.
Suleiman, who spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in an interview, claimed they were rigged out of the mandate by the ruling the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
“We will not say we didn’t get the ticket of the Governor. We will rather say that somehow, through some inexplicable reasons, the returning officer declared Gov Aminu Tambuwal as Governor elect.
“The declaration was totally against the spirit of the law. Once the difference between the two leading parties is less than the total number of votes cancelled, you cannot declare a winner and that was what happened. Gov Tambuwal knows it. Everyone in Sokoto knows it.
“We had 1500 plus people that were not able to cast their vote during the supplementary election. The difference is just about 342 votes. I don’t know what law the returning officer used to return Governor Tambuwal as Governor-elect.
“The law says once you cannot determine a winner. You have to declare the election inconclusive. It doesn’t matter how many times you have to do that, a winner has to emerge.
“The reason for this is that, if the number of voters who have not cast their vote is more than the difference between the two leading parties, it suggests that if all the voters decide to vote the other way, the leading person will lose.
“In this case, we have 342 vote lead, so-called lead, because it contains results of the election that was conducted twice in many places, both on March 9 and March 23. Both were recorded.
“I can’t understand what happened to INEC other than, for many of us, we believed they were compromised. There is just no way any reasonable, sensible person could declare that election conclusive and declare Gov Tambuwal returned as elected.”
While claiming that every reasonable, responsible person knew that Alhaji Ahmed Aliyu ought to have been declared the Governor-elect, the APC chieftain asked INEC to come clean on what went wrong in Sokoto.
“During the Presidential election, President Muhammadu Buhari and our APC candidates in both senatorial and House of Representatives elections got an average of 490000 votes. PDP on the other hand got 340,000 votes. The difference between the two parties is about 150,000 votes.
“During the governorship election, APC got 486,000 votes which is about 4000 people less than we got, which is normal in an election like this. But PDP on the other hand, jumped from 340000 to 490000 votes without a corresponding reduction in our votes.
“Where did the votes come? That is why we believe the election was absolutely rigged in their favour.
“INEC in Sokoto has to account for the difference between the total number of people who voted during the presidential election and those who voted during the governorship election, Suleiman said.
He vowed that his party will seek redress at the tribunal, adding that “we believe we are going to get Justice in this regard and we will do whatever it takes to retrieve the mandate openly stolen by Sokoto INEC and PDP.”
