Osun Election Declared By INEC As Successful

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said on Sunday that facts available showed that the Osun Governorship election was better than the Ekiti poll, held on June 21.

The Chief Press Secretary to INEC Chairman, Mr Kayode Idowu, made the statement in a telephone interview in Abuja.

“From all indications, the election has been successful even from the comments from virtually all the stakeholders – politicians, observers and others.

“Our own figures also prove that it has been successful. On our arrival time by 8 a.m. yesterday (Saturday), 96.25 per cent of the polling units were opened. That is better than that of Ekiti State, which was 95.6 per cent.

“Don’t forget that Osun has 30 local government areas, while Ekiti State has 20 local governments, yet we still surpassed the performance in Ekiti,“ Idowu said.

He said other indices showed that there were no challenges with voter accreditation and voting.

“Even the announcement of the election result is another indication, which shows the functionality of our process.

“As at 7. 30 a.m. today (Sunday), the result from all the 30 local government areas were announced, while that of Ekiti was announced at about 9 a.m. the day after the election. So, from all indications, the election was a success,“ he said.

Idowu said because no human endeavour was perfect, the commission would continue to fine-tune its operations to improve on the organisation of elections.

“INEC is not saying that the Osun election is the highest we can attain; we are still going higher and we believe God that we will do better by 2015.

“We had our deployment plan and contingency plan, but every election has its complication. What INEC normally does is to deploy based on its plan and we also had contingency plan because you cannot predict the turnout of the people.

“You will notice that immediately we observed that there were challenges in some areas, the contingency plan was deployed to make up for those places.

“That is part of our operational plan and at the end of the day I don’t think there was any place people were unable to vote due to inadequate ad-hoc staff,” he said.

Asked if Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had rejected the election result, Idowu said the commission was not aware of such development and added: “We are more concerned about the election procedures.“

He commended all the stakeholders in the election, especially the members of the National Youth Service Corps, security agencies, observers and political parties.

“They have all done extremely well and we hope to build on that,“ Idowu said. [NAN]