Fact check: Ishaku Abbo lied about Fufore result being declared under duress, as no evidence of a BVAS bypass or an act of violence was recorded during the governorship polls in Adamawa.
Claim
Ishaku Abbo, the All Progressives Congress (APC) senatorial candidate for the 2023 election in Adamawa North, waded into the review of the Fufore local government to expose the shanagigan of the opposition party in Adamawa that it won Fufore with 37,000 votes against the PDP’s 7,000 votes with lies and false claims.
According to Ishaku Abbo:
“The election in the entire Fufore local government should be cancelled because the result was declared under duress, the same way the results of the elections in Tudun Wada and Doguwa in Kano state were nullified due to overvoting.
“Similarly, in some polling units in Madagali, Michika, Hong, Song, Numan, Fufore… about 16 local governments where BVAS were bypassed, it’s an outright ballot stuffing. We’re calling on the INEC to invoke section 65 of electoral act 2022, to see that they review the results before supplementary elections are conducted.
“If you look at the downloaded iREF portal for the Fufore results for instance, it revealed that the election results of about 17 units for a member of the state house of assembly was uploaded on the iREF portal of the Governor and that same result was erroneously download by INEC adding to the Governor’s results, this is unacceptable
“Adamawa election, due to the similarities, should also follow through the Anambra experience; INEC must review the Adamawa governorship election; should outrightly cancel the election in the entire Fufore local government area and cancelled the results of polling units in the 16 local governments where BVAS was bypassed,” Sen Abbo said.
Abbo, since three years ago has vowed that Fintiri led government would not go beyond 2023, he has been working tirelessly, according to him, to salvage Adamawa state from executive tyranny and ethno-religious deception. He said he would support his colleague at the Senate, Aishatu Dahiru Ahmed, a.k.a. Binani to be elected Adamawa state governor, who would take over from Fintiri. It is the support he remains assiduous to this day.
First fact
Mr Abbo, who was seeking a second term in the Nigerian Senate, was the PDP candidate for the 2019 senatorial election in the Adamawa North. He first contested the district election and won it in 2019 as a PDP candidate before he defected to the APC in 2020.
In 2019, Senator Binta Masi, who was running for the APC, was very upset that Abbo’s major votes were counted even though most of the votes were cast without using the recount machine. She went to court, but she couldn’t show enough evidence to overturn Abbo’s win.
Abbo’s claim, as enumerated above, is far from the truth, as the Fufore local government collation officer has never alleged he is not under duress. it was confirmed that he was filling out the result sheet when a House of Representatives member elected evaded the collation centre and tore the collation sheet, which prompted him to request another.
“I was not under duress as allege by APC; it was an APC member, elect from Fufore, that came in with thugs and tore the result sheet, and I requested for another, and since the caollation centre is not safe because I refused to do the APC’s bidding, we moved to the nearest police station for me to complete my job, which I did.
“If I were forced to collate the fufore result sheets, like in Kano, I would have written to INEC after the whole thing and the entire result will be cancelled, but nothing like that has happened.”
As for the BVAS, it showed that most of the results from Muchalla on the IREV were messed up in the APC box. This explains why the APC got a lot of votes in Muchalla while the PDP only got a few.
An INEC official that spoke in confidence told this medium that Abbo and Binani are telling lies, though they are not intelligent enough to seek BVAS accreditation data before the lies they are spewing in public.
“They lied; they won in furfare, but when we review that result from fufore on the IREV, we discover that the figure they claim to have from fufore is concocted.
The result sheet for the governorship and House of Assembly has different colour codes, and since they claim our ad hoc staff used the assembly result sheet for the governorship, we challenge them to give us an instance. The truth of the matter is that the rigging they planned has failed, so they result in tarnishing INEC’s name, which will do them no good.
Conclusion
Mr. Abbo lied when he said that INEC rigged the 2023 governorship election in Adamawa’s sixteen local governments for the PDP candidate. Evidence showed that the APC candidate asked the commission to rig the election for Mrs. Binani, and the police can confirm that there was no violence in Adamawa during the governorship elections.
Abbo’s braggadocio about Fintiri not running again shows that he knows more than the average person.Why will Abbo and Binani call for a review of sixteen local governments where they lost but forget the four councils they won?
The section 65 of the electoral act quoted by Ishaku Abbo is not applicable in this case as the furfore returning officer is alive and has debunked APC claims of announcing the result under duress. Finally, even in the senatorial election, Abbo was declared the winner despite the PDP calling for a review of the results of Abbo’s Muchalla.