El-Rufai speaks on losing his polling unit to PDP

Governor Nasir El-Rufai lost his polling unit to the Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) in the Kaduna Local Government elections which held last weekend, but he doesn't want folks to read too much into the loss.

At the close of voting at El-Rufai's Unguwar Sarki ward in Kaduna North Local Government, the PDP secured 86 votes, while the governor's APC received 62 votes in the chairmanship election.

For the councillorship election, the PDP polled 100 votes, while the APC scored 53.

Speaking during a ChannelsTV breakfast programme on Monday, El-Rufai said if anything, the fact that he couldn't deliver his polling unit to the APC is proof that the APC hasn't manipulated voting machines in Kaduna.

“Those that reported that the machines were programmed were ashamed when it was reported that APC lost in my polling unit. People were laughing that I lost my polling unit, but it is democracy that won,” he said.

The governor added that: “I’m not on the ballot, so it is not a referendum on me. It is a referendum on the councilor and the performance of the chairman of the local council.

"The loss of my polling unit shows that we did not programme these machines; we did not influence our independent electoral commission, and the whole thing has worked very well.

“The results of the election so far are a unifying moment for our state which is what we have been working on. We want to work against the narrative that the PDP is a party for a part of the state, while the APC is a party for another."

Governor El-Rufai has persisted with electronic voting and electronic transmission of election results through two local government election cycles, at a time Nigeria's federal lawmakers have all but sounded the death knell on electronic voting on a national scale.