Just few weeks after the Governorship and State House of Assembly elections in Nigeria, some Bishops have rejected Enugu Governorship Results, says it’s Coup d’état against Enugu residents.
The Network Evangelical Bishops of Nigeria (NEBN) have rejected the governorship results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Enugu State Nigeria.
The clerics argued that the result was full of manipulation and rigging in favour of the Governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Mbah.
Recall that INEC had earlier announced Peter Mbah the winner of the poll after critically looking into the manipulation and rigging alarms raised by the parties involved.
The Bishops in a statement issued on Sunday after a two-day meeting in Umuahia, Abia State, signed by Bishop Samuel Ani, the NEBN president, and Bishop Emeka Nwafor, its publicity secretary, hinted that the Labour Party (LP) candidate, Chijioke Edeoga, “won the election fair and square”.
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They said that INEC was trying to play a smart game on the people of Enugu State, thinking that the public would consider it evenhanded if it “awarded Abia to the Labour Party and Enugu to the PDP when it looked into different reports by different by all parties involved, accusing the ruling PDP in Abia and Enugu States of inflating votes in some LGAs on an industrial scale”.
“INEC’s declaration that Mbah won the election is nothing other than a coup d’état against the people who trooped to the polls to vote for change, after 24 years of being under PDP’s imperial rule”, the Bishops said.
“This is why the whole state has been like a graveyard, in contrast to the neighbouring Abia State where the rightful winner, Dr Alex Otti of the Labour Party, was declared victorious, a development which saw hundreds of thousands of people in towns, cities and villages of the state wildly celebrating the dawn of a new era,” the statement said.
The clerics said that the PDP could not have possibly polled 16,000 votes in Nkanu East Local Government Area as announced by INEC when only 6,179 voters were accredited using the BVAS machine.
“We are convinced that the 16,000 votes were conjured up so that the compromised INEC would pronounce the PDP candidate the winner,” they said.
The Bishops argued that the presidential election which recorded a higher turn-up in the country Nkanu East couldn’t boast of up to 9,000 persons who voted.
They remarked that the Labour Party’s success in the governorship election is consistent with the pattern of voting in the 2023 general election in the State which saw the LP win seven out of the eight House of Representatives seats, two of the three Senate seats, 14 out of the 24 House of Assembly seats and %87.7 of the votes cast in the presidential election.
“The Enugu governorship election petition should be one of the easiest that the Election Petitions Tribunal will deal with because it is a straight case of outright falsification and fraud”, the statement added.
