ADAMAWA GUBER POLL: OBSERVERS CALL FOR CANCELLATION

By NBF News

One month after the gubernatorial election was conducted in Adamawa State, a group of election observers, Coalition of Accredited Civil Society for the State Election has called for its cancelation.

Addressing the press yesterday in Kaduna, the Secretary of the 15-member coalition, Mallam Garba Yakubu said the call became necessary because the election was flawed.

Yakubu said there was massive ballot box stuffing, falsification of figures as well as intimidation of voters, adding that votes counted and declared at the polling units did not tally with the votes declared at the collation centres.

The group noted that sensitive electoral materials did not arrive at some polling units and in some cases the materials were not seen in most of the polling units.

'The above points and many more are solid grounds why we, the election observers consider the governorship election of Adamawa State conducted on February 4, 2012 as the worst in the history of Nigeria.

'We want a free and transparent election. If we keep silent, we will endanger democracy, we want a credible election in Adamawa State. In this respect, we totally reject the result of the election as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which returned Rear Admiral Murtala Nyako (retd) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the winner and returned elected.

'Since the election was rigged even before it was conducted and it did not only reflect what the voters expressed at the ballot box, the election did not meet basic electoral and democratic standard.

'We regret that the election in question did not meet the political, electoral and democratic rules of engagement. It was a mere farce and we therefore consider it an exercise in futility.

'We also call on the security agencies to fish out and punish the perpetrators of the rigging of the Adamawa governorship election. If not, rigging of this scale has the capacity to truncate our democracy,' the group said.