The December 12 local government Council election in Kogi state will forever stand out as the most fraudulent and shambolic election ever held anywhere in Nigeria since the beginning of the current democratic dispensation, a member of the House of Representatives, Honourable Teejay Yusuf has said.
According to Honourable Yusuf who represents Kabba-Bunu/Ijumu federal constituency, the state government conducted the purported election with wanton disregard for the basic principles of transparency that govern elections in a democracy.
In a statement, he recalled that long before the council polls, many citizens in the state had expressed anxieties about the capacity of the state’s electoral authorities to conduct credible elections.
“Recent patterns of barefaced manipulations in the conduct of local council elections have aroused much concern; nowhere is such concern as grave as what unfolded in zkogo state.
“on December 12, 2020 when the Kogo state local government election was scheduled to hold, many citizens inmost council wards waited all day without seeing either election materials or election officials.
“Curiously, purported results reflecting random allocation of votes made to favour chairmanship and councillorship candidates of the ruling APC later started flying around as the state electoral authorities’ pureported results!
“If anything happened at all across the state on that day, it was a barefaced robbery of Kogi citizens’’ votes but I urge all our teeming supporters not to lose heart because we shall soon have genuine chance to vote out APC and their shenanigans entirely”, he said.