The Chief Returning Officer of the November 16 governorship election in Anambra State, Prof. James Epoke, has explained that the election was declared inconclusive because it did not meet certain requirements of the Electoral Act.

Epoke said the Electoral Act required that for a winner to be declared in an election, the difference in the total voting population of the areas, where election was cancelled, should be less than the difference between the votes scored by the candidate with the highest votes and the votes of the candidate with the second highest votes.

In the Anambra case, the returning officer said the total voting population of the areas in which election was cancelled was 113,113, which is higher than the 79,754 difference between the leading candidate’s votes and the second highest candidate’s votes, the commission had no choice but to declare the election inconclusive.

“The rule guiding this election is that for a winner to emerge, he must have majority of votes cast and the required spread of 25 percent of votes in two thirds of the local government areas.

“We observed that due to many reasons there were a lot of canceled votes that make it difficult for a winner to emerge,” Epoke said.

He said the winner of the election would only be declared after election had been conducted in areas where the election was cancelled.

Epoke explained that election was cancelled in the respective polling units where they were cancelled for a number of reasons ranging from snatching of ballot materials; delivering of coded ballot materials to wrong collation centres; the non-arrival of election materials at polling units.
Source: www.punchng.com

Nigerian politics is filled with unnecessary sentiments drawn along ethnicity. In the case of Anambra,the people believes so much that APGA is an Igbo party and for that reason, APGA should return to the seat of power. They also believe that APC is a yoruba party and being in alliance with their greatest foe (Hausas) automatically ruled them out of contention. PDP came from the back door despite all the challenges facing the party came 2nd in the election though inconclusive for now. The points raised above are peculiar to all states of the Federation and not Anambra alone. What this portray is that for us to achieve that meaningful democracy that we have been clamouring for over the years where leaders are chosen based on what they can deliver, we must, first of all, rule out sentiments in our Politics. Like what happened in 2011 Presidential election where Nigerians troop out in large number to vote for Uncle Jona of PDP, he was voted for not because he is from South-south or a christian,but that Nigerians believed the Shoeless-President would deliver dividends of democracy to the common man. Has he been able to achieve that is a topic for another day. I think we should emulate the Presidential elections of 1993 and 2011 where people removed sentiments and other affiliations to vote for a candidate of their choice. Now is the time to start and imbibe this great attitude so that we can move forward.