A new twist into the Kogi election emerged on Thursday as Hon. James Faleke, the running mate to late Abubakar Audu, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress in Saturday’s governorship election in Kogi State,wrote to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, asking the commission to declare him the governor-elect of the state.
Faleke, made this known in a letter to INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu.
The lawmaker representing Ikeja Federal Constituency of Lagos State in the House of Representatives, who expressed sadness over the death of Audu, opined that under Section 187 of the 1999 Constitution, he was duly elected as deputy governor of Kogi State.
“In law and logic, no new candidate can inherit or be a beneficiary of the votes already cast, counted and declared by INEC before that candidate was nominated and purportedly sponsored,” Mr. Faleke wrote through his counsel, Wole Olanipekun.
“Assuming without conceding that INEC is even right to order a supplementary election, the votes already cast, counted and declared on Saturday, 25th November 2015, were votes for the joint constitutional ticket of Prince Abubakar Audu and our client.
“Therefore, no new or ‘supplementary’ candidate can hijack, aggregate, appropriate or inherit the said votes.”
…Faleke writes APC too
In the letter to the APC national chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, Olanipekun, again writing on behalf of Faleke rehearsed the same arguments as put forward to INEC, even as he added that the party should not allow itself to be distracted.
Concluding, he said:
“Arising from the foregoing, our client enjoins the APC not only to support him at actualising the mandate already given to the party under the joint ticket of himself and the late Prince Abubakar Audu, but to also distance itself from the ‘Greek gift’ offer being made by INEC, to wit, that it is allowing the APC to conduct a fresh primary election to nominate a candidate for a supplementary election in 91 polling units, where only about 25,000 PVCs are available; whereas the APC is already leading, by the announced results, with over 40,000 votes.”
APC out with Audu’s death — PDP
Meanwhile, the PDP in a statement confirming the deliberations of its national caucus insisted that the death of Audu, the APC’s running mate has inevitably put the party out of the governorship contest.
The party insists:
That with the death of its candidate, Prince Abubakar Audu, the APC has legally crashed out of the governorship race as no known law or constitutional provision allows the substituting of candidates, once the ballot process has commenced.
That with the unfortunate death of Prince Abubakar Audu, the APC has no valid candidate in the election, leaving INEC with no other lawful option than to declare the PDP candidate, Capt. Idris Wada as the winner of the election.
The party also:
l. Notes that the combined reading of the provisions of the constitution and Electoral Act does not in any war whatsoever support the substitution of candidates for election in the middle of the ballot process.
2. Notes that if APC is allowed to substitute its original candidate, then the party would have fielded two separate candidates in the same election, a scenario that is completely alien to our electoral laws and to any known democratic norms and practice world-over.
43. Observes that the APC, fully aware that it has no case before the law is now orchestrating confusion in the polity with a view to diverting attention from its glaring incompetence and failure of governance.
The party also demanded the immediate resignation of the chairman and all national commissioners of INEC and the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Mallam Abubakar Malami for purportedly deliberately misleading INEC into arriving at the unconstitutional decision of allowing APC to substitute its candidate in the inconclusive election.
The PDP warned that the AGF, INEC and APC were creating a scenario where a loser in a primary will patiently wait for the winning candidate to finish election and then have him either poisoned or assassinated before the final collation of results.
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