Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, has said he was optimistic up to three weeks ago that his party, the All Progressives Congress, would win the Edo State Governorship Election.
The governor said, opinion polls conducted had shown that the APC candidate, Osagie Ize-Iyamu, would win the election, adding that he didn’t know what went wrong in the last three weeks of the campaign.
INEC’s Returning Officer, Prof. Akpofure Rim-Rukeh, said Obaseki polled 307,955 votes to defeat his closest rival, Ize-Iyamu, who got 223,619 votes.
Commenting on the development, the Kaduna State governor, who spoke on Monday morning on Channels Television, said the election was “reasonably decent”.
El-Rufai said: “We (APC) would have loved to win and quite frankly, I was optimistic up to three weeks ago; the polls indicated that we were going to win. I don’t know what happened in the last three weeks of the campaign.
“As you know, a large number of voters make up their minds in the last two weeks of the election. Many voters decide no matter what happens, this is how I am voting but most people want to wait and make up their minds in the last two weeks.
“Three weeks ago, the polls clearly showed that APC was going to win but the result came out differently from what we expected.
“Obaseki has won, that’s it. You can’t go into an election without the possibility of losing.”
“The election was reasonably decent. We were all worried about violence but there was very little violence or none at all.”