Ikpeazu also said he reported the returning officer to INEC before election, after finding out she and the LP candidate bore a similar name
By Kehinde Okeowo
The Abia State governor, Okezie Ikpeazu, has denied threatening or pressuring the Abia State Returning Officer of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Nnenna Oti during the just-concluded March 18 governorship election in the state.
He also alleged Prof. Oti had sympathy for the Labour Party (LP) candidate, Alex Otti, claiming she was “unfair” to his party and other parties who participated in the poll.
Ikpeazu made the comments during a recent interview with Channels TV, where he claimed he protested having Oti as the returning officer in the Abia state because of the coincidence in her name and that of the LP candidate.
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Oti, who is the Vice Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, on March 28, while being received by her staff and students, said she was threatened and pressured during the poll but she stood her ground.
“As an electoral officer, I have never in my life participated in any election, but duty came calling, I made my inquiries from Abuja,” she said.
“If I perish, I perish, they came with their threats, they came with their money, they came with their intimidation.”
Reacting to her comment, Ikpeazu during the interview described her allegations as very unfortunate because she lacked the power to manipulate results.
“This is very unfortunate. I have not met that professor and I am shocked because in the first place, if she is a professor, she doesn’t even have the capacity to manipulate results because these are results that emanated from the units, collated at the wards, collated at the local governments and brought for her to just add them up and announce. I’ve not met her before; I’ve not spoken to her. If I have met her, if I have spoken to her, let her come to the public and declare so. So, I am shocked that she is making a big noise out of nothing,” the governor said.
The governor went on to say after he did a little background check on the returning officer, he knew the professor would be “unfair”.
“At some point when I saw the coincidence in name and traced a little bit of her background, I complained to INEC that this lady was not going to be fair but they assured me that they had profiled her. I am still shocked. What she has portrayed in the aftermath of her service or stewardship in Abia indicates the fact that she is visibly happy with what she did. Her level of bias in that regard could be placed in favour of a party. She has portrayed that she had something at the back of her mind before she came,” Ikpeazu added.
On March 22, Oti, who was the Abia State Returning Officer in the gubernatorial election, declared Labour Party’s Alex Otti the winner of the March 18 governorship election in the state.
The declaration followed the resumption of the final collation of governorship election results in Umuahia, the state capital, over 48 hours after INEC suspended the exercise in the state.
