On Monday, Dino Melaye, a former chairman of the Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory and the agent for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), created a significant disruption at the National Collation Centre by rejecting the presidential election results for Ekiti State. He alleged that there had been over-voting. The incident unfolded before the collation process began, as Melaye raised concerns regarding the discrepancies in the figures announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for Ekiti State.
INEC had declared Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, as the winner in Ekiti State, with a total of 201,494 votes. His closest rival, Alhaji Abubakar Atiku of the PDP, received 89,554 votes. Peter Obi of the Labour Party garnered 11,397 votes, while Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party received only 264 votes. Additionally, 1,703 votes were canceled due to bypassing the Bimodal Voter Accreditation Systems and instances of over-voting. In his observations, Melaye noted that, according to calculations conducted by the PDP, there was a discrepancy of 887 in the total number of figures reported from Ekiti State.
Melaye’s concerns were supported by the agents of the Action Alliance, Kenneth Udeze, and the Labour Party, Umar Farouk. However, INEC Chairman Prof. Mahmood Yakubu firmly maintained that the commission stood by the results declared by the collation officer for Ekiti State, Prof. Akeem Olawale Lasisi, who is also the Vice Chancellor of the Federal University of Health Sciences in Ila Orangun, Osun State. Yakubu stated, “I still insist that the figure presented by the state collection officer for the presidential election for Ekiti State, which indicates a total number of accredited voters as 315,058, is what is on the spreadsheet that we screened yesterday. This is also reflected in the actual result manual recorded and signed by the PDP agent and agents of other political parties back in Ekiti State.”
Despite Yakubu’s insistence on the official results, Melaye continued to challenge the figures, nearly halting the collation of results in Kwara State.
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