Yari summons emergency meeting over supreme court judgement

Abdulaziz Yari, outgoing governor of Zamfara state, has summoned leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state to an emergency meeting.

A source at government house, Gusau, the state capital, disclosed this to TheCable on Saturday.

The source said the meeting is about the supreme court verdict on the 2019 elections in the state.

”His excellency has summoned all the APC leaders in his faction to a meeting at 2pm. The meeting is about the next line of action after the supreme court ruling,” the source said without going into details.

The supreme court had declared that the APC in Zamfara had no candidates in the 2019 elections, and therefore could not claim to have won.

The five-member panel of justices led by Ibrahim Muhammad, acting chief justice of Nigeria, unanimously held that the party with the second highest votes in the election should be declared the winner as long as it fulfilled the constitutional requirement.

The development made the APC lose all the 37 seats it won in the election.

The APC had swept all the three senatorial seats, seven house of reps’, 24 in the state house of assembly in addition to the governorship and deputy governorship seats.

Yari had been declared winner of the senatorial election in Zamfara west but as things stand, Lawani Hassan, who was elected into the house of reps under the APC but defected to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) four months to the election, will take his place.

While Bello Matawalle, a former house of reps member, will take the place of Shehu Idris, Yari’s favourite who was declared winner of the governorship election in Zamfara.

Tijjani Yahaya-Kaura, senator representing Zamfara north, has also lost his seat to Sahabi Ya’u, his PDP rival. (Click here to read on the new winners and losers in Zamfara).

Some political analyst have said PDP candidates lack the requirement to be declared winners of the election, citing for instance, section 179 of the constitution which says “A Candidate for an election to the office of Governor of a State shall be deemed to have been duly elected where, there being two or more candidates – he has not less than one-quarter of all the votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of all the local government areas in the State.”

But analysis by TheCable has shown that PDP’s Matawalle could be the incoming governor since the apex court has voided all the votes of the APC in the election.

The leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) met after the apex court judgement and said it would make public its decision on Zamfara election by Monday.