Biokpomabo Awara

Okafor Ifiebor/Port Harcourt

Biokpomabo Awara, the governorship candidate of  African Action Congress , AAC has described ongoing collation of results of March 9 Rivers governorship election as a charade scripted by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC to favour the incumbent governor,  Nyesom Wike.

Awara who is in distant second to the governor at the end of collation of results from the 17 local governments spoke today on a live radio interactive programme in Port Harcourt on Wednesday.

The results from the 17 local governments indicated that  Wike is leading Awara by 601,423 votes.

But the AAC candidate dismissed the collation exercise: “The whole exercise is a drama like the World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE. They present the game as if it is serious, but it’s all drama to entertain fans and viewers. Rivers people should remain calm. I was leading Governor Wike with Unit to Unit results, but when they saw the shocking results, INEC did their bidding and suspended the announcement. ”

He accused INEC national Chairman,  Yakubu Mahmoud of working to please Governor Wike who was his boss as the Supervising Minister for Education when Mahmoud was the boss of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund(TETFUND)  under the Federal Ministry of Education.

Awara has also accused the State Secretary of AAC who is also the State Collating Agent for the governorship results for the party, Mr. Nenye Kocha, as acting like a double agent who is working for the interest of Wike and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

“Nenye Kocha is not working for my interest and that of AAC. How can I attest to someone’s integrity when this morning he drove into the INEC Collation centre in Hon. Austin Opara’s car ? Opara is the State PDP Agent for Collation of PDP result.

“When we noticed that he was working for the PDP during the Presidential election. We substituted him with Dr Lawrence Chukwu. I also told him that during the Governorship Collation, he will not be the State Collating Agent. And that we were replacing him with Dr Lawrence Chukwu.

“But Mrs Agbamuche-_Mbu, who is supervising Rivers, Bayelsa and Akwa-Ibom for INEC, refused insisting that she will only accept the old name. This morning for instance, Mocha drove into the INEC Collation Centre with Austin Opara, tell me is this person representing me?”

He also dismissed the speculation that Dr Lawrence Chukwu lacks the right to represent him because he is not a member of AAC.

According to him, Chukwu had joined the AAC.

Asked at what point Lawrence Chukwu joined the AAC, Awara said, ” I am not a data manager of AAC. The AAC is structured, it is just a matter of accessing the website of AAC and then you get your number. The party is so digitalized that you don’t need to be carrying you party card around. ”

Awara vowed that he will legally challenge INEC because the results released did not tally with the with the unit results.

Nenye Mocha continued to represent AAC as the resumed Collation today.

Reacting to the collation exercise,  Nenye Kocha, he said: “Things are now unveiling. We have been in the dark over what has been happening even when we had thought that we were leading.

“In terms of transparency, the exercise is transparent. But the figures are not what we were expecting.

“As a party, we are going to review the gamut of all that had happened within the period and take a decision. The governorship candidate will also review the situation and take a stand.”

At the time of filing this report INEC was on break to resume Collation by 3pm today Wednesday, April 3.