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. Nevertheless, 1703 ballots 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.
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 state.
“I continue to insist that the total number of accredited voters for the presidential election in the state of Ekiti is 315,058 as stated by the state collection officer. This is what the spreadsheet contained when we reviewed it yesterday. Additionally, this is what is written in the real results manual that was compiled by the scope and signed by PDP agents as well as representatives from other political parties in Ekiti state.
“Having said that, let’s move forward with that one. I have noted your observations. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with is exactly what I said. And any additional figure that differs from this one cannot surpass the declared outcome. Let’s move forward.
Yet Melaye persisted and nearly put an end to the collation.