BY EMMA AMAIZE

DELTA State Commissioner  for Orientation and Communcation, Chief Paulinus Akpeki, last night,  faulted the claim by the campaign outfit of the Democratic Peoples Party, DPP, gubernatorial candidate in the state,  Chief Great Ogboru, that Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan was wrongfully  declared winner of the April 26 gubernatorial election by INEC with 523, 793  votes.

In a statement, Akpeki, who is also the chairman of the  Delta State PDP Campaign Organization, said that Uduaghan scored the  highest number of 525, 793 lawful votes to be declared the winner  of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

He  explained that apart, from scoring the  highest number of votes in the said election, Uduaghan also satisfied the  mandatory votes in at least two third of  the 25 local government areas  as required by the electoral law.

The commissioner dismissed the claim by the DPP, in  its petition to the governorship election petition tribunal, that INEC  wrongfully declared Uduaghan of the PDP as the winner of the poll with 525,793 votes against  what the DPP referred to as his ‘actual votes of 233,953.

He described such claim by the DPP  as reckless, baseless, unfounded and insultive to the sensibilities of  Deltans and  a figment of the imagination of  the Ogboru Campaign Organization, which, according to him, is lacking in merit and can, therefore,  not be substantiated with verifiable facts before the election  tribunal.

According to  Akpeki, “the  logical hinge of the juvenile petition, reads, to wit, Dr. Uduaghan actually  got 233, 953 votes as against the inherent  phantom proposition that Chief  Ogboru obtained 400, 058 votes from the enlightened people of Delta State,” describing it as a farce and wishful conjecture  intended to mislead and misinform.

The commissioner  said, “As if the  fanciful conjuration of election statistics is  the exclusive preserve of the  Ogboru’s Sunshine Organization, the  author of the press statement, Mr.  Efe Duku, went on to manufacture another  piece of condescension, the kind of  self-righteous delirium that afflicts self styled messiahs that the ever  losing DPP rejected INEC’s ‘Greek gift’ of 33, 776 votes purported to have  been unlawfully added to what, the garrulous phantom box conjectured as DPP  candidate’s lawful votes”.

On the alleged allocation  of votes by INEC, he maintained that it is totally condemnable, unacceptable,  and reckless to conclude that the INEC  arbitrarily allocated votes to Uduaghan in the election which has been  adjudged as credible, free and fair by both local observers and international  community.

He likened such reckless  vituperations of Ogboru’s Sunshine Organization to the trait of a  bad loser who will reprobate and approbate at will.

The  Director-General of the PDP Campaign Council picked holes with the notion of  ‘toxic votes’ “which is insulting to the sensibilities of riverine communities  of Delta  and should not be allowed to characterized the lexicon of  competitive democratic politics in the state, but rather, the exclusive DPP  fantasy and should be universally acknowledged as the ritually orchestrated  imprimatur of electoral failure and naivety”.