A former National Chairman of the All Progressive Grand Alliance, APGA, Victor Umeh, has won the Anambra Central Senatorial re-run election held on Saturday. He defeated 13 other challengers to clinch the Senatorial seat.
In an election that witnessed one of the lowest turnouts in history of elections in the country, Umeh garnered 64,879 votes out of about 67000 votes cast in the seven local government areas of the zone, a margin of over 95 percent over his opponents.
The candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Chris Ngige, came a distant second with just 975 votes while the standard-bearer of the Progressive Peoples Alliance, PPA, placed third with 116 votes. Ngige had earlier announced his withdrawal from the election.
Results for other candidates are AA-35, ACD-33, ADC-57, GPN-48, ID-14, KOWA-12, LP-95, MPPP-111, NCP-72, PDP-5, and UPP-55.
Umeh’s victory came almost three years after the 2015 general election in the state in which he lost to the Peoples Democratic Party’s candidate, Uche Ekwunife.
That election was however nullified in November 2015 by the Court of Appeal which also disqualified the PDP from taking part in Saturday’s election.
The election recorded one of the lowest turnout in recent times with over 90 percent of voters boycotting the elections according to results.
Of the registered 745,828 voters in the seven LGAs only a paltry 67,872 voters turned out for the election.
Despite announcing his withdrawal from the race, Nigeria’s Labour Minister, Ngige, was included in the list of candidates by INEC whose officials claimed that it didn’t receive his letter of withdrawal.