Senator Hope Uzodinma has been re-elected governor of Imo State; and this is official.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on Sunday, declared the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate as winner of Saturday, November 11, 2023, gubernatorial poll, with a landslide.
According to INEC, Uzodinma polled 540,308 votes to defeat his closest rivals, and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Samuel Anyanwu who scored 71,503 votes and Labour Party’s Nneji Achonu who got 64,081. Jack Ogunewe of the Action Alliance (AA) and 14 other opponents of the incumbent were unimpressive in their performances at the poll.
The State Returning Officer and Vice Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Prof Abayomi Fashina, declared Uzodimma re-elected at 10 a.m. on Sunday, after over eight hours of collation of local government results.
“That you Hope Uzodimma of APC having satisfied the law is hereby returned elected,” Fashina declared.
However, the collations exercise did not go without incidents as opposition party agents protested and rejected the results, alleging that the results brought to the state collation centre did not tally with the ones uploaded on INEC’s Result Viewing Portal.
Indeed, agents of Labour Party and others vehemently demanded the suspension of the collation exercise but the returning officer insisted that it shall be concluded.
According to INEC, the number of registered voters in the state for the poll was 2, 419,922 with 2,318,919 Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) collected but a total number of 701,338 votes were validly recorded at the end of the poll.
The protesting party officials may not be crying wolf after all as election monitors said Saturday’s governorship poll in the South-East state was marred by vote buying, voter intimidation, violence and other electoral malpractices, even as anti-graft agencies arresting some party agents with large cache of cash.
Like Imo, governorship elections were held in Kogi and Bayelsa on Saturday, November 11, 2023,but collation of results in the two states was adjourned till Sunday morning.
