Kebbi poll: A litmus test for INEC, PDP.

Saturday’s Kebbi State governorship rerun election will serve as a litmus test for the Independent National Electoral Commission, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party and what is left of the opposition political parties.



The election is significant for many reasons: one, it is taking place in the home state of the INEC chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega.

For the PDP, it is one state it needs to prove to northern critics that it is still the party to beat in the North-West, following its loss of Zamfara State during the April 2011 elections.

The newly–inaugurated national chairman of the party, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, as well as the recently elected state executive council of the party, would want to prove that they are capable of delivering the goods.

Although 15 candidates are vying for the coveted seat, the clear front runner is the PDP and immediate past governor of the state, Usman Dakingari.

The campaigns of his main challenger, the candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change, Abubakar Garin-Mallam, suffered a big blow when one of his chief supporters, himself a former governor of the state, Adamu Aliero, led a large crowd of CPC supporters back into the PDP with less than three weeks to the election.

However, there are no absolutes in politics; a miracle is still a far flung possibility if the opposition can rally itself to beat the odds.

Dakingari’s supporters have so far not left anything to chance as they used the PDP machinery available at home and in Abuja to get leading members of the party, including President Goodluck Jonathan, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo and a host of others, to attend the last campaign rally.

Aliero chose this occasion to defect from the CPC to the PDP, thus ending months of speculations that he and his supporters were staging a comeback.

Civil society groups are also upbeat about the prospects of a free, fair and credible election.

One of such groups, Project Swift Count, had on Wednesday announced that it was deploying 627 observers in the state to monitor the poll.

Addressing newsmen on plans laid out by the group, the body’s first co-chairman, Dafe Akpedeye (SAN), said the observers would be deployed in randomly-selected polling centres across the state.