Amid bickering over the outcome of the Lagos State governorship and state assembly elections, the deputy governor, Dr. Obafemi Hamzat, has said the will of the people prevailed in the gubernatorial polls in the state.
Hamzat stated this when he fielded questions from journalists on Channels Television programme: “Sunrise Daily”.
He said the opposition parties were bad losers.
The deputy governor said of the 13,345 polling units in the state, only about 349 had one form of issue or the other, stressing that number is less than 10 percent of the polling units in the entire state.
Hamzat said due to infrastructural and logistics problems, the Independent national Electoral Commission (INEC) could not be everywhere at the same time but did its best in conducting an election that was better than any other in the history of Nigeria.
He said, “This is a fantastic election and the will of the people prevailed. Governors lost senatorial seats unlike in the days of former President Olusegun Obasanjo when the number of votes counted was more than the number of registered voters.”
Hamzat added that the reason the Labour Party (LP) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are crying foul over the results of the election was that they lost, noting that the loss resulted from the gap created by decamped members of their party very close to the elections.
The deputy governor said the violence witnessed during the elections should not be isolated in context as the polls “reflected the kind of people we are.”
While condemning the ethnic profiling witnessed in some parts of the state in the wake of the elections, he called for the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators.
According to him, some of the people disenfranchised in the elections would have voted for us, saying in the Ago Palace area for instance, he has a lot of friends there who would have voted for the All Progressives Congress (APC).
“It is unfortunate to profile people based on ethnicity and culprits should be arrested and prosecuted. Let us stop diminishing our country. This is a credible election,” Hamzat said.
