THOUGH results of the presidential and National Assembly have been declared, Bauchi State chapter of the New Nigeria People Party, (NNPP) has rejected the results of the election conducted last Saturday in the state, describing it as “a sham which has denied the people of the state from exercising their franchise.”
While addressing a Press conference at the NUJ Secretariat in Bauchi on Tuesday, the governorship candidate of the party, Ambassador Shuaibu Ahmed Adamu called for the cancellation of the results of the election, alleging that it was marred by several electoral irregularities.
He said that “As far as the NNPP is concerned, there was no election that took place in the conduct of the National Assembly election that was conducted last Saturday in the state. The government in the state connived with security agents and INEC to rig the election.”
“In Katagum local government, for instance, voting materials were diverted to the houses of government officials and thumb-printed, card readers were never used in many of the polling centres, instead people were given ballot papers which were collected by the agents of APC. In a lot of polling centres, voting materials never got to their destinations until Midway into the voting time,” he further alleged.
Shuaibu Ahmed further said that “There were rampant cases of vote buying where agents of the APC were buying votes from the electorates as low as N200. The government took advantage of the poverty of the people which they inflicted on them.”
“The APC government intimidated district and village heads in the state by summoning them to the government house where they were threatened to deliver their wards to the APC or lose their seats. Top civil servants in the state were summoned by the government and paid to deliver their wards to APC,” he also said.
The Governorship candidate then called on INEC to rectify all the electoral irregularities or conduct a fresh election in the state, stressing that President Muhammadu Buhari had assured Nigerians that the elections will be free and fair, but unfortunately, the government of Bauchi has flaunted the order of the President.
In his own words, the Senatorial candidate of the party for Bauchi North, Farouk Mustapha declared that the conduct of the election was marred with a lot of electoral malpractices vowing to do everything within the armpit of the law to reclaim his mandate.
It was the same story by the candidates of the party for Alkaleri/Kirfi and Gamawa Federal Constituencies, Yusuf Musa Gumli and Ibrahim Wabu respectively who all alleged that the conduct of the election was fraught with electoral malpractices.
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