The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, who was contesting for Yobe North senatorial seat has reportedly lost the return ticket to the upper chamber ahead of the 2023 general elections because of controversies over primaries.
Also missing out is Lawan’s fellow All Progressives Congress member and former Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio, who is contesting for the Akwa Ibom North-West senatorial seat.
According to The Punch, the controversies surrounding the APC primaries had made Lawan and Akpabio lose their senatorial seat, an Independent National Electoral Commission official confirmed.
The source further states that the APC does not have any candidate contesting the Yobe North senatorial seat in its published list.
“Both Yobe North and Akwa Ibom North are blank. What we have is Mohammed Bomoi for Yobe South and Ibrahim Geidam for Yobe East. There is no name for the Yobe North for the APC”, the source said.
He further confirmed that the electoral body did not publish any candidate for APC in the Akwa Ibom North-West in the next year’s election.
‘’In Akwa Ibom State, apart from North West that is blank even though that man (DIG Udom Ekpoudom) won, in the North East and South Senatorial Districts, and the House of Assembly, they brought names of people who didn’t go through primaries monitored by INEC,” the source said.
However, a Certified True Copy of INEC’s report from May 28, 2022, primary election trending online on Friday revealed that Machina polled 289 votes out of 300 delegates to emerge a winner for the Yobe North Senatorial District, even though the APC submitted the name of Lawan as the candidate of the party for the Senatorial District.
The document was reportedly certified by the Commission on June 23, 2022.
Several calls, SMS and WhatsApp messages were sent to INEC National Electoral Commissioner and Chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, and Chief Press Secretary to the commission’s chairman, Rotimi Oyekanmi, on the matter were not answered.
The National Chairman of the APC, Abdullahi Adamu, had warned of severe sanctions if Machina refused to relinquish his ticket to the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan.
He had claimed that the party was supreme and that it reserved the right to decide who would get its ticket in any election.
But Machina, a Third Republic member of the House of Representatives, rejected the substitution of his name in the list sent to INEC.
