Governorship Candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Kogi State, Senator Dino Melaye, has described the just concluded election in the state on Saturday as a sham.
Melaye, who lampooned the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, for declaring the All Progressive Congress, APC, governorship candidate, Usman Ododo, as the winner, insisted that he would not accept the olive branch extended to him.
He said, “Darkness and light don’t concur. There’s no relationship. In other words, we are on parallel lines; our paths don’t cross. APC, Usman Ododo, I don’t work in darkness.”
Asked why he didn’t vote, he said, “Either I voted or not has no meaning; people win elections from prisons. So whether I voted or not is immaterial.
“To start with, there was no election; there was only the allocation of votes by INEC. The election was shameful, and I sympathize with this country. I sympathize with the citizens of Koggi State, and it is a big shame that the INEC boss, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, and his co-travellers would manifest the kind of Satanism that took place in Koggi State on Saturday. I am sorry that INEC had the opportunity to correct their mistakes in the last presidential election, but instead they decided to compound the worries of Nigerians about our democratic process. What we saw on Saturday was not democracy. Mahmood Yakubu is the bane of our democracy in this country. He (Mahmood) has proven again that he’s not a repentant soul.
“This is not the first time I have lost an election, and I have never come out to complain like this. If I lose in a free, fair, and credible election, I will congratulate the winner. The election is not close to credible.
“The election is not about Dino being a good sportsman; it is about integrity; it is about the credibility of INEC.
“In 2019, Yahaya Bello wrote a result in Okehi local government of up to 112,000 for the APC and less than 1000 for the PDP. When BVAS appeared in the February election, the total vote cast was less than 40,000, and in the election on Saturday, Okehi alone voted about 150,000, and the governor was awarded 144,538 votes. So you can imagine the same local government that produced less than 30,000 votes in February. INEC is shameless; they showed the correct accredited voters, and we downloaded that already yesterday; by today, they started tempering with it.
I challenge INEC with this document that I have. Registered voters in Okene LGA are 142,243, with the APC alone scoring 146,538. We had over 90 percent of registered voters. Even in the United States, which has the best democracy in the world, this cannot happen. And that is what happened to almost every local government in Koggi State. The result was completely inflated.
“There was over-voting in 17 local governments, including my local government. It’s so clear and open, so shamelessly done. It is institutionalized and scientific rigging, and INEC said in their press conference that they were investigating it but went ahead to declare a fictitious written result.
“I have shown you more than 15 documents, and they can’t lie. Yahayan Bello’s candidate was declared to be based on lies. In a just society, silence is a crime. We will not allow it. How can we call an illegitimate mandate and be comfortable? They said Dino Melaye must not come second; the formula used in Lagos was what was used in Koggi”.
Vanguard
