By David Odama, LAFIA

The Candidate of the opposition People’s Democratic Party PDP in the March 16 Gubernatorial and State Assembly elections in Nasarawa State, Dr David Emmanuel Umbugadu and the Peoples Democratic Party in the State has formally filed a petition at the Election Tribunal challenging the declaration of Engineer Abdullahi Sule of the APC as the winner of the election.

The petition filed on Friday, April 7, is coming barely 3weeks after the electoral umpire INEC had declared the incumbent Governor, Abdullahi Sule as the winner of the election, and returned him as re-elected for the second term in office.

The document submitted to the tribunal is claiming that the declaration of Engineer Abdullahi Sule of the APC as the winner of the governorship election in the state was done in error, accusing State officials of INEC of connivance.

According to the petition, the results announced by the State Returning Office, Professor Ishaya Tanko, from Nasarawa, Awe, Keffi and Lafia are totally at variance with that of the INEC CTC polling units and INEC iRev portal and wondered where the State Returning Officer got his results from

The petitioners went further to allege as follows:

” From the INEC CTC of results given to PDP and iREV portal, APC scored 289,524 votes while PDP scored 293, 653 votes. PDP won with a margin of 4,130 votes over APC”, the candidate and the party declared

The petitioner in his document expressed hope that the judiciary would be fair and just in retrieving what the described as their “stolen mandate” freely given by the people of Nasarawa State.

It would be recalled that since the announcement of the governorship result, the state has been greeted with street protest by group of PDP women supporters, who stripped themselves bare, calling on INEC to redress and restore their “stolen” Mandate