The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) does not have the full results of the highly controversial 2007 presidential election, The Cable reports.
As reported on its website Wednesday, the news medium said it had sent a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to the electoral umpire for a state-by-state breakdown of the 2007 presidential results, ahead of the 2019 general election in order to map voting trends in the fourth republic, but the commission in its response signed by its Acting Secretary, Okechukwu Ndeche, said it is not in custody of the information requested for.
“You can however obtain the information from INEC State Offices in all the 36 states and FCT,” the reponse read.
The news medium also reported that “poll analysts and journalists have, for years, searched for a breakdown of the results but have never been lucky.”
Going by this development, the 2007 presidential election held on April 21 of that year with 18 political parties participating, appears to be the first and only in Nigeria’s history in which there is no state-by-state breakdown of the candidates’ scores, as against the usual practice where the electoral commission always announces results state-by-state before declaring an overall winner.
According to the results announced in by the Maurice Iwu-led INEC at the time, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) who was declared winner of the election garnered a total of 24,638,063 votes, the highest vote ever amassed by an individual in a single election in Nigeria, but there were no detail given by the commission on how the total was arrived at.
Olusegun Obasanjo scored 18,738,154 to win in 1999 and 24,109,157 to be re-elected in 2003, while Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari scored 22,495,187 and 15,424,921 in 2011 and 2015 respectively.
Temidayo Taiwo-Sidiq is a Journalist, Political Analyst and Satirist with major interest in Nigerian Politics, Governance and Sports.
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