Mercy Gadia
Abuja,FCT—The senator representing Kano North in the 10th senate, Dr. Rufa’i Hanga has said the land-sliding victory of the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) in the just concluded local government elections held in Kano was as expected and couldn’t have happened otherwise.
The lawmaker made this statement during a media chat with journalists at the National Assembly complex in Abuja.
Senator Rufai said it was the plan of the opposition parties to truncate the process by obtaining court judgement few days to the poll which disqualified the chairman of the state electoral commission and five others, but the state government quickly approached a higher court and got a judgement which eventually allowed the elections to go on.
Speaking about the court judgment, he said “APC got a judgement thinking they can stop the election but we too went to court, a higher court and the higher court gave us the go ahead to conduct the election, because, we had so many grounds to do so. The earlier disqualification of the chairman and Secretary of the State Electoral Commission, I believe it does not warrant stopping us from conducting the election, because chairman is only one person. There is a secretary, and there are other commissioners.
It would have been disastrous if the elections were not conducted because the Supreme court had given a deadline for local government elections to be carried out across the country others such states that will fail to do so would not be receiving federal government allocations, but with the elections dully conducted and winners emerged”
Recalled that NNPP won the 44 local government areas’s chairmanship positions. This however, clearly showed the dominance of NNPP in Kano State.
Hanga had earlier statef that Kano State belongs to NNPP that was why the party won two seats in the senate, enough seats at the house of representatives and the state house of assembly during the 2023 general elections, so it wasn’t surprised they won the 44 local government areas in the state.
Meanwhile, he noted that the other party in court, did not submit any evidence, physical evidence to show that the chairman is a card carrying memberNNPP.
He said, “If we had fold our hands to the judgement of the other court, we would have lost the time to do the election and if we have missed the 30th of this month withoutconducting the elections, nobody will give Kano state a kobo, but this time, we are qualified to receive the allocations to local governments, like all other states.”