GOVERNOR Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, on Monday, said something must have gone wrong in the last three weeks of the Edo State governorship election campaigns for the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Osagie Ize-Iyamu, not to have won the election on Saturday.
The governor said results of opinion polls had, three weeks to the poll, revealed that Ize-Iyamu would win, adding that this made him optimistic that APC would coast to victory in the election.
Speaking during a programme on Channels TV, he also pointed out that the President Muhammadu Buhari administration was committed to conducting free and fair elections and that had been demonstrated in Edo.
The Point had reported that Governor Godwin Obaseki won Saturday’s poll with a wide margin of 84,336 votes, polling 307,955 votes to defeat APC’s Ize-Iyamu, who had 223,619 votes.
The Independent National Electoral Commission’s Returning Officer, Akpofure Rim-Rukeh, announced the final results while declaring Obaseki winner of the governorship election on Saturday.
“We would have loved to win. Quite frankly, I was optimistic up to three weeks ago. The polls indicated that we would win. I don’t know what happened in the last three weeks of the campaign,” El-Rufai said.
“Three weeks ago, the polls clearly showed that APC was going to win but the result came out differently from what we expected. Many voters make up their minds in the last two weeks of election campaign. Obaseki has won, that is it. You can’t go into an election without the possibility of losing,” he added.
