Why we suspended collation in kano Inec

There is uncertainty surrounding yesterday’s Kano State supplementary governorship election after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) suspended the collation of results following a disruption of the process by hoodlums.

Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Riskuwa Shehu, announced the suspension  of collation early this morning citing the invasion of Nasarawa  Local government collation centre by thugs.

Briefing journalists, observers and party representatives at the State INEC office, Shehu  said: “As we were waiting to reconvene with the intention to continue with the collation, we heard a disturbing report that just as they were about to conclude, results collation in Nasarawa local government were disrupted and the result sheet torn away and there was a lot of commotion and the police had to rescue some people.

“As it is now, we don’t have the result and even the E. O. (Electoral Officer) had to be rescued. Luckily, nothing happened to him. He was saved from the crisis

“But the intention of the commission is that we are going to refer to our primary and secondary data of results that were collated from the polling units as well as the ward level.

“When we get the results in the presence of all the representatives of political parties, we will regenerate the results and we will confirm those that are acceptable within our laws and guidelines and those that have to be cancelled because the card readers will have to be referred to as well.

“Based on that, we will have genuine results and we will complete the collation for the state governorship election,” he said.

Early results from the areas in which the re-run election was held in Kano State showed that Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of the APC and Abba Kabir-Yusuf of the PDP were running each other close.

Yesterday’s election held in 208 polling units in 29 local governments with 128,831 voters.

The PDP candidate had polled 1,014,474 votes during the first election, while the APC scored 987,819 votes, leaving a difference of 26,655 votes.