[News] Osun Decides 2018: PDP Rejects INEC’s Inconclusive Declaration Of Osun Election

The Peoples Democratic Party has rejected the Independent National Electoral Commission’s declaration of Saturday’s governorship election in Osun state as inconclusive.

Declaring the outcome of the election at the INEC headquarters in Osogbo on Sunday, the commission’s Chief Returning Officer, Professor Joseph Fuwape, announced that the PDP candidate scored 254,698 votes while his APC counterpart scored 254,345 votes.

Fuwape, however, said that the number of votes in places where election was cancelled prevented him from declaring Ademola Adeleke of the PDP as the winner.

“Unfortunately as the returning officer, it’s not possible to declare anybody as the clear winner of the election on the first ballot,” Fuwape said.

But the PDP strongly disagrees with INEC.

The party insists that the process was conclusive and that its candidate, Senator Adeleke was in clear lead and should be immediately declared winner by INEC, having met the requirements of the 1999 Constitution (as amended).

Spokesman for the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan, said that Section 179 (2) (a)(b) of the 1999 Constitution, (as amended), was clear and very unambiguous in spelling out the conditions for returning a candidate to the office of governor of a state.

He said, “A candidate for an election to the office of Governor of a State shall be deemed to have been duly elected where, there being two or more candidates – (a) he has the highest number of votes cast at the election; and (b) he has not less than one-quarter of all the votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of all the local government areas in the State.”

The main opposition party said that the declaration by INEC of the election as inconclusive, was a “sordid robbery” of the franchise of the people of Osun, who participated in the election.