25% FCT votes not needed to win presidential poll, says INEC
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Professor Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chairman
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has said a candidate does not need to secure 25% of votes in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, to win a presidential election in the country.
This is even as it said the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar did not meet the constitutional requirements to be declared winner of the February 25 election.
It also described the petition of Labour Party’s Peter Obi as incompetent.
The commission, however, said the President-Elect, Bola Tinubu validly won the February 25 election.
Recall that Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku who scored 6,984,520 and Peter Obi of the Labour Party who got 6,101,533. Atiku and Tinubu won 12 states each while Obi won 11 states and the FCT.
Both Atiku and Obi are in court to challenge the declaration of Tinubu as winner by INEC but the electoral umpire told the court that the FCT is not accorded any special status in the constitution as being erroneously portrayed by some political parties and candidates who lost the election.
The commission said the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate met all the legal requirements to be so announced as the winner.
It argued that a candidate must not secure 25 per cent of votes in the FCT to be declared the winner.
INEC said the APC candidate scored 25 per cent of the valid votes cast in 29 states of the Federation.
It added that by the margin of the lead, it did not act hastily, as claimed by Atiku and the PDP in declaring Tinubu the winner.
The Commission noted that Tinubu scored 25 per cent of the valid votes cast in 29 states, namely: Ekiti, Kwara, Osun, Ondo, Ogun, Oyo, Yobe, Lagos, Gombe, Adamawa, Katsina, Jigawa, Nasarawa, Niger, Benue, Akwa Ibom, Edo, Kogi, Bauchi, Plateau, Bayelsa, Kaduna, Kebbi, Kano, Zamfara, Sokoto, Taraba, Borno and Rivers.
It added that the FCT, beyond being the country’s capital “has no special constitutional status over and above the other 36 states of the Federation” to require a candidate in the presidential election to obtain at least 25 per cent of the votes cast in the FCT before being declared winner of the presidential election.
The commission subsequently urged the Tribunal to dismiss Atiku’s petition.
