Dino Melaye, spokesman of the polling agent of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on Monday, led 10 other of his colleagues, including those of the Labour Party (LP) and Action Alliance (AA), to storm our to the National Collation Centre, for the 2023 presidential election in Abuja, after making no headway in the attempt to stop the National Chairman of the Independent National Commission (INEC) from continuing with the collation of Saturday’s election.
Specifically, the parties were protesting the insistence of the INEC Chairman, Mahmoud Yakubu, who is also the National Collation Officer (NCO) for the February 25 election to proceed with the process despite the commission’s inability to transmit the results to the INEC server as provided by the Electoral Act.
Melaye, a former chairman of the Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and spokesman of the PDP Presidential Campaign Council (PDP-PCC), was the first to raise the issue of results not being displayed, adding that the results being announced at the collation centre in Abuja were different from what were recorded at the states during the Saturday Presidential election.
Before the platform took a break in the afternoon, Dino, had raised the challenge over the figures posted by INEC for Ekiti State, where the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, was declared winner with 201,494 defeating to that of Abubakar Atiku of PDP, who scored 89, 554, Peter Obi of the LP polled 11,397 and Rabiu Kwankwaso of New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), who polled 264 votes.
The views of the lawmaker from Kogi State, that there was a discrepancy of an increase of 887 in the total number of figures from Ekiti State, were echoed by the agents of the Action Alliance (AA), Kenneth Udeze and Labour Party, Umar Farouk agreed.
But the INEC boss, had insisted: “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.”
