The Labour Party governorship candidate in the Imo state governorship election Athan Achonu led scores of his supporters to the national headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission in Abuja to demand the true certified copy of the just concluded poll in the state.
Achonu, who was accompanied by the National Youth Leader, Kennedy Ahanotu, also accused the electoral umpire of playing a double standard in the November 11 off-cycle election.
The protest came two weeks after INEC declared Governor Hope Uzodimma of the All Progressives Congress winner of the election.
The APC candidate polled 540,308 votes to beat Samuel Anyanwu of the People’s Democratic Party who scored 71,503 votes and Achonu who could only secure 64,081 votes.
However, the two opposition candidates rejected the result and declared that the election was marred by electoral irregularities.
The long procession, which saw the demonstrators chanting solidarity songs and displaying various banners that read “INEC Give Us Our CTC” “Respect Our Law” and “INEC Has Become Headache to Nigerian People” caused a mild gridlock.
Addressing newsmen in front of the INEC building, Achonu accused the commission of deliberately refusing to give him a copy of the Imo poll CTC because they had something to hide.
The LP candidate stated that unlike what transpired in Bayelsa where it took three days to round up the election process, INEC collated Imo ballots and hurriedly announced the result in two hours.
He said, “When collation started after the voting, our state election agent duly asked INEC not to announce any result that collation started very early that day even when voting was going on. They were even uploading results on iREV when voting was taking place. So how did that happen? They were told to go to their backend server and confirm the result they were about to announce but INEC refused to do that.
INEC national commissioners, Mohammed Haruna and Prof Abdullahi Abdu Zuru, who came out to address the group urged them to exercise patience, and promised that their grievance would be addressed by the commission in earnest.
