4th December, 2011
Former Governor of Kogi State, Abubakar Audu has been trounced by his rival in the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Captain Idris Wada, for the state governor’s crown.
In the election held yesterday in the Nigerian central state, Wada was declared the winner, by a very wide margin.The returning officer, Prof. Shamsudeen Amali, who announced the results in Lokoja, the state capital today, said Wada polled 300,372 votes out of 484,168 valid votes cast. Prince Abubakar Audu of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, came a distant second with 159,913 votes.
Audu yesterday complained about vote rigging by the PDP and it is expected that his party may challenge the result of the poll.
But the result declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission today, has effectively ended Audu’s comeback bid for the third time as Governor of the state. He was governor in the early 1990s, during the aborted Third Republic transition programme under the Babangida administration. He returned to the seat in 1999, but was shut out by the PDP candidate, the incumbent in 2003. Audu dumped his All Nigeria People’s Party and ran under the platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria for a third term bid.