PDP’s Ahmadu Fintiri defeats Adamawa governor

Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has declared Ahmadu Fintiri winner of the Adamawa state governorship election, TOPNAIJA.NG reports.

Andrew Haruna, returning officer for the election, made the declaration at the INEC office in Yola, the state capital, on Friday morning.

Haruna said the PDP candidate scored 376,552 votes to beat Jibrila Bindow, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the election and the incumbent governor, who scored 336,386 votes, leaving a margin of 40,166 between the two candidates.

The March 9 election in the state had been declared inconclusive because the number of cancelled votes was higher than the margin between Fintiri and Bindow.

But for a suit filed by one of the governorship candidates, the Adamawa supplementary election would have held on Saturday.

Mustafa Shaba, governorship candidate of the Movement For Restoration and Defense for Democracy (MRDD), had sued the commission over the absence of his party’s logo on the electoral materials for the March 9 election that was declared inconclusive.

A federal high court in Abuja which had stopped the elections initially later asked INEC to procceed with it.

Bindow is the second sitting governor to have lost his reelection bid in 2019. Bala Mohammed of the PDP, unseated Mohammed Abubakar of APC on Saturday.

The Adamawa governor-elect was speaker of the state assembly. He served as acting governor when Murtala Nyako was impeached in 2014.