Just three weeks after the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Senatorial District’s 2023 Presidential and National Assembly elections, which resulted in Ireti Kingibe being elected as the district’s senator-elect, Kingibe’s closest rival, incumbent Senator Philip Tanimu Aduda, has vowed to challenge the results of the election at the Election Petitions Tribunal.
This comes at the back of the fact that the result of the FCT senatorial election was announced while collations at the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC) were still pending, as well as with complete disregard to results cancelled in other polling units across the 62 wards of the six Area Councils, Senator Aduda, who is the Minority Leader of the 9th Senate, said to journalists at the National Assembly Complex on Thursday.
“The election, as guided by the extant laws used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is supposed to have been declared inconclusive.
“Pointedly in substantial numbers of the polling units, there were over-voting which led to cancellation of results that supposed to have been revisited by INEC through rescheduled election but from nowhere, we heard that results were declared.
“We are going to challenge it,” Aduda said.
Senator Aduda commented on his capacity and service delivery to FCT residents over the years as a lawmaker. “Within my 12 years in the Senate and eight years in the House of Representatives, a lot of development-driven projects have been facilitated by me across the 62 Wards and six Area Councils, many of which are still ongoing,” he said.
“If the winner of the election had the potential, Google would have shown her what I had done, so I think she is the one who lacks it.
You’ll be able to see that I brought a protest to this location. I had to discuss the redesign of the Naira and other measures pertaining to vital national concerns on the Senate floor.
“We have roads worth over N1 billion we are building in Kubwa, another worth over N1 billion in Nyanya, and we have the ones we are doing in Bwari. If I don’t have the capacity and can’t represent the people, I don’t think I can bring those projects to the various communities or Area Councils,” he said. I’m not referring to Gwagwalada, Kwali, or Kuje; all I’m referring to is this area’s metropolitan core and its surroundings.
“Apart from the very significant Laws I sponsored and the National Assembly like the Federal College of Education Zuba bill that has been there for over 17 years without graduation until we passed that Bill.”
He continued by saying that he implemented infrastructure in a number of areas, including the provision of classrooms, Primary Healthcare Centers, portable water, rural electrification, the construction of roads throughout the Area Councils in the FCT, Small & Medium Scale Empowerment Programs, and the provision of student bursaries to more than 3,000 beneficiaries drawn from the sixty-62 electoral wards of the six Area Councils.
