Adamawa Governorship Polls: One election, three results

The much-awaited 2023 governorship election is over, and a winner has been announced. Its resonance in every neighbourhood and public place across the country is exemplified in the cascade of the age-long condemnation of a rogue INEC REC, Hudu Yunusa, who threw caution to the wind to announce a fabricated result on the morning of Sunday, when collation was still under way.

Indeed, those who are lucky to have witnessed the new dawn in INEC’s immediate decision to reverse the illegal victory allocated to the APC, which almost caused civil war in the state, can imagine that a single election can produce three different results, with one authentic among the three.

The rogue REC, Yunusa Ari, sneaked into the collation centre on April 16th, 2023, and announced the APC winner with a piece of paper written: APC 428,173 and PDP 422,303. How Hudu arrived at these figures, the chief dreamer of the APC mandate, Ahmad Sajoh, has yet to tell the people.

Secondly, another result surfaced on the internet by APC supporters, in which they claimed APC got 339,060 and PDP got 319,400. If I may ask, which of the two results is authentic among the two results brandished on social media by APC supporters? First, they claim Hudu’s result was correct, and after the case proceeded to the tribunal, they came forward with another result they claimed they got from INEC.

How can people continue to deceive one another to satisfy their ego, yet within them they know the truth, and the truth is that the original result is what was used to declare Fintiri the winner of the polls, yet they fend ignorance? I could remember when bandit figures claimed it was Furfore local government results, and later they believed the lies until Hudu bought into their hallucination and did the unthinkable.

What will be the argument of the APC before the tribunal? That the tribunal should stand by Hudu’s imaginary result or the recent result they brandish on social media, claiming it from INEC, which is another lie from the pit of hell.

At the tribunal, will the APC bring Hudu results on the recent result they claim is from INEC or the authentic results that produce the winner? I remember the excitement of a former commissioner under the Bindow administration when he claimed that the Supreme Court would sack Senator Umaru Jibrilla Bindow and that he had started packing his belongings in preparation for the Supreme Court verdict, yet the Apex Court refused to sack Bindow.

Now the same people who procrastinated about the court’s sacking of a governor in 2015 are yet to learn their lesson. Since the advent of the governorship polls in Adamawa, not a single promoter of the APC candidate has yet to tell the people the names of the local government wards where overvoting took place. They have their agents in all the over 4000 polling units in Adamawa, yet they refuse to accept the duplicate sheets of the results from the PUs.

We are not new to the slogan, “This person is coming; our mandate will be restored.” If they believe the wujja tactics used in the just concluded polls in Adamawa will work, it is a joke taken too far. Finally, there is nothing bad in hoping, but hoping for something to come out of nothing is the baldest dream of the century.

The Joseph De Maistre dictum that “In a democracy, the people end up with the government and leaders they deserve” should be an alarm bell for those that think that wujja powers can be used on the judges of the tribunals.